Seven Artists, Writers, and Musicians Among 2014 MacArthur Fellows
Of this year's 21 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, better known as the 'genius grant,' seven come from the arts.
Of this year’s 21 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, better known as the ‘genius grant,’ seven come from the arts. Rick Lowe, who abandoned his training as a painter to found Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas, was one of the artists profiled in Tom Finkelpearl’s book on socially engaged art, What We Made, reviewed by Hyperallergic here (incidentally, Finkelpearl now heads New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs). The MacArthur Foundation describes Project Row Houses, which consists of 22 small houses in a historically African-American neighborhood restored in 1993 with a group of fellow artists, as “a vital anchor for what had been a fast-eroding neighborhood.” Lowe is presently in residence at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
Cartoonist and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel received the award for her rendering of “familial relationships in multilayered works that use the interplay of word and image to weave sophisticated narratives,” a style she pioneered with her Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008) strip and developed in several book-length efforts. In addition to her work as an artist, she is well-known for the Bechdel test, which comes from one of her Dykes strips and quantifies gender bias in Hollywood films. Hyperallergic previously reported on the Bechdel test’s adoption in Sweden, and the South Carolina state legislature’s budgetary penalization of colleges for teaching her LGBT-themed books (Bechdel’s Fun Home is a commonly banned book, according to the American Library Association).
Documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer is cited for his “unique mode of filmmaking that mixes the real and the invented,” exemplified in a diverse body of work covering subjects from the Louisiana Purchase to labor conditions on plantations in Sumatra, Indonesia. In 2012 he released the widely acclaimed The Act of Killing, reviewed by Hyperallergic here; his most recent documentary, The Look of Silence, was produced by Werner Herzog.
Across the arts, other winners of the prize — which consists of an unrestricted grant of $625,000 — were poets Terrance Hayes and Khaled Mattawa, playwright Samuel D. Hunter, and musician Steve Coleman.
