Anna Betbeze, Mike Cloud, Nicholas Galanin, Lotus L. Kang, Park McArthur, Lorraine O’Grady and Dyani White Hawk are among the 28 visual artists who have received 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships. Another 17 fellows are practising photographers.
Administered by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the fellowships are intended to support specific projects in 52 different disciplines. This year’s cohort includes 188 fellows from the US and Canada, chosen from among nearly 3,000 applicants. The fellowships come with monetary support that ranges from about $30,000 to $60,000. Since the fellowship’s creation in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded upwards of $400m to more than 19,000 fellows.
The fellowship is “a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so”, Edward Hirsch, the foundation’s president, said in a statement.
Projects supported through this year’s fellowships include the photographer Sara Bennett documenting the lives of women after incarceration and the photographer Ada Trillo chronicling the experiences of LGBTQ+ migrants arriving in the US. For O’Grady, a pioneering performance and conceptual artist, the fellowship will help her revive an old character for a new performance project. Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist based in Alaska, will use the fellowship to support the development of new pieces and workshops expanding the current discourse about Indigenous contemporary art.
One of this year’s cohort is the octogenarian painter Arvie Smith, whose fellowship has been underwritten by the actor Robert De Niro in honour of his father, the late painter Robert De Niro Sr, who was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1968.