Four Artists Win MacArthur “Genius” Grants
Christine Sun Kim, Rodney McMillian, Vincent Valdez, and Chip Thomas are among the 20 recipients of the $800,000 prize.
Visual artists Christine Sun Kim, Rodney McMillian, Vincent Valdez, and Chip Thomas are among the 20 recipients of this year's MacArthur Fellowship, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced today, September 29.
Each fellow receives an unrestricted financial award of $800,000 that is issued in quarterly installments over five years. The MacArthur Foundation describes the program as a no-strings-attached fellowship awarded to those "who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future." Fellows are nominated by external parties and selected by an independent committee.
Since 1981, the foundation has awarded 1,195 MacArthur fellowships in disciplines including art history, visual culture, writing, health policy, anthropological research, musical performance, entrepreneurship, and others.
Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim explores the political dimensions of communication in her billboards, murals, and performances, along with a plethora of other multimedia artworks. As a sound artist who is Deaf, Kim often translates her works between American Sign Language (ASL) and American English, as she did with the video "Palm Reader" (2020), which animates the signs for authoritative words such as "state" and "rule."
Secondhand quilts, thrifted household items, and a cast-iron piggy bank are just some of the materials conjured up by Los Angeles-based artist Rodney McMillian. In his 2026 exhibition A Son of the Soil at the Columbia Museum of Art, McMillian returned to his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, to catalog his aesthetic investigations into the American South and his ongoing quest to engage racial and socioeconomic injustice through artistic expression.
Working out of Houston, Vincent Valdez merges Chicano art traditions with narrative painting techniques. His artworks are often rendered at a large, almost mural-sized scale, creating unavoidable confrontations with the injustice, inequity, and stereotypes faced by his subjects. His eight-foot-tall painting "So Long, Mary Ann" (2019) depicts a tattooed man with his hands clasped, imbuing the portrait with empathy and dignity.
Chip Thomas's artistic practice coincided with his career as a primary care physician for the Navajo Nation, from which he retired in 2023. In collaboration with the Diné People, he has erected murals and integrated black-and-white photography into structures on the Navajo Nation's land, and he founded the Painted Desert Project (2012–22), which connected public artists to local communities through mural contributions.
This year’s winners also include poet Layli Long Soldier, fiction writer Bryan Washington, dancer and choreographer Trajal Harrell, and saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins.
A complete list of 2026 MacArthur Fellows can be found below.
Holly Jean Buck
Felipe De Brigard
Ellora Derenoncourt
Elizabeth Ellis
Kaiyu Guan
Trajal Harrell
Marika Holland
Christine Sun Kim
Song Lin
Layli Long Soldier
Rodney McMillian
Maaza Mengiste
Ariel Ron
Kate Spradley
Chip Thomas
Vincent Valdez
Vincenzo Vitelli
Bryan Washington
Immanuel Wilkins
Liangfang Zhang
