ewsba.se
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced the 20 recipients of its annual MacArthur Fellowships, colloquially called “Genius Grants,” which comes with $800,000 in unrestricted funds.
This year’s cohort includes four artists: Christine Sun Kim (based in Berlin), Rodney McMillian (Los Angeles), Vincent Valdez (Houston and San Antonio), and Chip Thomas (Flagstaff, Arizona).
The subject of a recent Whitney Museum survey, Kim is known for her works that challenge institutions and audiences to confront their own ableism, particularly as it relates to Deafness. One of her best-known series is “Degrees of Deaf Rage” (2018–19), drawings in charcoal and oil pastel that which humorously and bitingly recounts some of these moments in which hearing privilege does not account for the lived realities of Deaf people. In 2020, she memorably performed the national anthem in American Sign Language at the Super Bowl, an experience she wrote about in the New York Times. In the video announcement for the fellowship, Kim signs her introduction, saying, “I am an artist illuminating cultural dimensions of sound and hearing.”
Spanning painting, sculpture, video, performance, and installation, McMillian’s art looks how history, socioeconomic conditions, and public policy determine the quality of life that people have and how it might “perpetuate economic marginalization,” particularly for Black Americans living in the US South, according to the MacArthur website. His works range from an 88-foot-long abstract painting In This Land (2019) to a large-scale installation, From Asterisks in Dockery (2012), inspired by a chapel formerly on the Dockery Plantation in Mississippi.
Valdez is primarily a painter whose works looks at both history and the present to think through the most-pressing issues of our time, with a focus on the ever-presence of racism, particularly as it relates to the Latinx experience in the US. His best-known works range from the more expressionist Kill the Pachuco Bastard! (2001), which presents a violent scene from the Zoot Suit riots during World War II Los Angeles, to the hyperrealist The Beginning is Near, An American Trilogy, Ch. 1: The City (2016), a 30-foot painting showing hooded KKK members. The breadth of his practice was the subject of a traveling survey in 2024–25.
Thomas makes public art that explores “overlooked and neglected spaces into powerful public works grounded in community histories and present-day experiences,” per the MacArthur website. His work is often centered on Navajo Nation, ranging from installation large-scale photographs in abandoned sites there to forming the Painted Desert Project, which brought graffiti artists to make new work there.
Poet Layli Long Soldier, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, is also among this year’s cohort of fellows. Her work has been influential on the work of generations of Native artists, including Jeffrey Gibson. For his 2024 US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Gibson borrowed his presentation’s title “the space in which to place me,” from Long Soldier’s 2017 concrete poem “He Sápa.”
“For 45 years, MacArthur Fellows have defied boundaries, by questioning conventions, crossing disciplines, and driving collective progress,” Kristen Mack, the foundation’s vice president for communications, MacArthur Fellows, and partnerships, said in a statement. “The 2026 Fellows continue that creative tradition—they explore the depths of our humanity; they reveal untold origins to modern challenges; they expand the edges of scientific inquiry and life-saving research. They show us new ways to understand the world.”