FOUR ARTISTS WIN 2023 MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIPS
Multidisciplinary artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons; composer and visual artist Raven Chacon; sculptor and video artist Carolyn Lazard; and multidisciplinary artist Dyani White Hawk have been announced as among the 2023 class of MacArthur Fellows by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The four join sixteen other recipients of the so-called genius grants issued this year by the foundation and recognizing individuals in fields including environmental science, anthropology, law, and molecular biology. Each fellow receives an $800,000 stipend, with no strings attached.
“The 2023 MacArthur Fellows are applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities,” said MacArthur Fellows director Marlies Carruth in a statement. “They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good, and deepen understanding of systems shaping our environment.”
Born in Cuba, Campos-Pons lives and works in Nashville. Through her practice, which centers on multimedia installations and additionally embraces photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting, and video, she investigates the roles played by memory, spirituality, and identity in personal and collective histories. Other themes include issues of displacement and inequality. A retrospective of her work is on view through January 14, 2024 at the Brooklyn Museum.
Chacon, who is of Diné-American heritage, is a composer and a visual artist additionally working in performance. Often deploying unusual “instruments” such as rifles, foghorns, and whistles, and presenting written scores as visual art forms, his oeuvre examines and reimagines the history of US colonization. In 2022, he became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for music; that same year, he participated in the Whitney Biennial. His work is on view through November 26 as part of the group show “Indian Theater” at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
Lazard lives and works in Philadelphia, where they repurpose everyday objects such as HEPA air purifiers and power-lift recliners in her exploration of intimacy and labor in relation to chronic illness. Through their practice, which encompasses performance, sculpture, installation, and video, Lazard places Minimalist and Conceptual tropes in the service of a subject—ableism—that has until recently been scarcely examined in the arts. In 2020, they were one of the inaugural recipients of the Ford Foundation’s Disability Futures Fellows awards; in 2022, their work was included in the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale.
White Hawk, who is of Welsh, German, and Sicangu Lakota heritage, brings attention to the influence of Indigenous aesthetics on modern and contemporary art. Spanning painting, sculpture, and video, and incorporating materials such as porcupine quills and beads, her practice draws intergenerational connections between individuals, families, and communities, and between craft and fine art. White Hawk saw her work presented in the 2022 Whitney Biennial; she is currently exhibiting alongside Chacon in the Hessel Museum’s exhibition “Indian Theater.”
