The artists Gala Porras-Kim, Jeremy Frey, Matt Black, Garrett Bradley, Tonika Lewis Johnson and Tuan Andrew Nguyen are among this year’s cohort of MacArthur Fellows, the coveted fellowships awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to practitioners in the arts, humanities and sciences. Each of the 27 recipients of the so-called “genius grants” will receive $800,000 over the next five years.
The fellowship comes amid a string of honours and exhibitions for Porras-Kim, an American conceptual artist best known for articulating institutional critiques through labour-intensive, process-driven projects highlighting issues of conservation and provenance. Last year she won the coveted Heinz Awards for the Arts (which comes with an unrestricted $250,000) and earlier this year she was awarded a $50,000 United States Artists fellowship. She currently has solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, as well as at Kukje Gallery in Seoul.
Nguyen, meanwhile, is known for sculptures, videos and performances that examine the legacies of colonialism and war in his native Vietnam. His work was recently featured in the sixth edition of the Prospect New Orleans triennial and will be included in the upcoming 24th edition of the Paiz Art Biennial in Guatemala. The Vietnamese American artist is also a co-founder of the art collective The Propeller Group and a co-founder of Sàn Art, an art space in Ho Chi Minh City.
Frey is a seventh-generation Wabanaki basket-maker, whose melding of traditional processes and materials with contemporary formal languages results in daring baskets and wall hangings. Last year the Maine-based artist was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art, which subsequently traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Based in California, Black is known for creating arresting black-and-white photographs of marginalised communities across the US. Bradley, who is based in New Orleans, creates films, videos and moving-image installations, often in collaboration with her subjects, that foreground issues of oppression and tension. Johnson is a Chicago-based photographer and social justice artist whose projects chronicle histories of divestment in Chicago and attempt to address them by restoring abandoned homes and reclaiming vacant lots.
In addition to practicing artists this year’s MacArthur Fellows include Kristina Douglass, an archaeologist focused on climate change and adaptability; Margaret Wickens Pearce, a cartographer developing maps based on Indigenous knowledge and Ieva Jusionyte, a cultural anthropologist specialising in border regions.
Last year’s MacArthur fellows included the visual artists Tony Cokes, Ebony G. Patterson and Wendy Red Star, as well as the performing artists Justin Vivian Bond. In 2023, the fellows included María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Raven Chacon, Carolyn Lazard and Dyani White Hawk. Earlier artist fellows have included Mark Bradford, Jordan Casteel, Paul Chan, Nicole Eisenman, Jeffrey Gibson, Titus Kaphar, Kerry James Marshall, Shahzia Sikander, Julie Mehretu and Kara Walker, among others.