The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago has named the 23 recipients of its annual “genius grants”, an award of $625,000 paid over five years recognising creative individuals in a variety of disciplines.
The 2016 list includes several awardees who are artists or involved in the visual arts: the Olivebridge, New York-based video artist Mary Reid Kelley, whose satirical black and white videos use history, mythology and cultural references to explore women’s roles in society; the San Francisco-based sculptor Vincent Fecteau, who makes small-scale works from everyday materials; the artist and writer Lauren Redniss, who describes her works as “non-fiction books that are also art books”; the New York-based art historian and curator Kellie Jones, who aims to include a more diverse roster of artists in art history; the Baltimore, Maryland-based sculptor and jewelry maker Joyce J. Scott, who brings beadwork out of the realm of craft and makes works that tackle themes of race, gender and sexual violence; and the San Jose, California-based graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang, whose works for young people often draw upon his experiences as a Chinese American.
“When I first got the call from the MacArthur foundation, I was floating, I was in disbelief that the field that I’ve worked in for many, many years was validated in such a major way,” Kellie Jones says in her video on the MacArthur Foundation’s site. “I think it’s really important to the field of art history to finally be able to acknowledge that there are art histories that are global and that art history isn’t just written in Europe.”
For Lauren Redniss, the award is a way to expand her practice. “I have a drawer full of ideas that I write down and I file away usually because they seem too farfetched to pursue,” she says in her video. “Because of the MacArthur [grant], I think I’m going to open that drawer and look back at those ideas with a different sense of what may be possible.”