The Guggenheim Names 2024 Fellowship Recipients
By The News Desk
April 11, 2024
The Guggenheim Foundation has announced the 188 recipients of its 2024 fellowships.
Those awarded the prestigious honor this year include artists, scholars, photographers, novelists, essayists, poets, historians, choreographers, environmentalists, and data scientists. Fifty-two disciplines are represented, with recipients ranging in age from twenty-eight to eighty-nine and scattered across thirty-eight states, the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces. Among the projects this year’s fellows are working on are those centering democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change, and community. Each fellowship comes with funds attached: Because the amount awarded varies from recipient to recipient, the foundation does not reveal individual funding, but it typically ranges from about $40,000 to $55,000.
“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Guggenheim Foundation president Edward Hirsch, a 1985 Poetry Fellow, in a statement. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s 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.”
Of the sixty-eight grant winners in the artistic and cultural disciplines, twenty-eight are visual artists. Notable among them are eighty-nine-year-old artist, writer, and critic Lorraine O’Grady, who will revive an old persona for a new performative project. The Boston-born O’Grady, who became an artist in midlife, investigates the concept of Black female subjectivity through a practice comprising performance, writing, and photography. She first became widely known in the 1980s for her portrayal of Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, who confused audiences at art openings by arriving in a dress and cape made from 180 pairs of white gloves and handing out flowers before flagellating herself. Multidisciplinary artist and musician Nicholas Galanin, who is of Tlingit and Unangax̂ descent, is developing workshops and new artworks to foster a broader conversation around Indigenous art. Galanin comments on issues such as global warming, colonial conquest, and cultural theft through such visually arresting works as We Dreamt Deaf, 2015, a taxidermied polar bear whose rear half has been seemingly flattened into a rug from which the beast is trying to emerge, and Things are Looking Native, Native’s Looking Whiter, 2012, which juxtaposes an early-twentieth-century portrait of a Hopi-Tewa girl wearing a traditional squash blossom hairdo with that of the similarly coiffed Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, heroine of the Star Wars franchise.
Claire Bishop and Alexander Nagel, both of whom have written for Artforum, won fellowships in the discipline of artistic research.
A full list of recipients is available on the foundation’s website.