Four visual artists — Justin Vivian Bond, Tony Cokes, Ebony G. Patterson, and Wendy Red Star — are among the 22 recipients of this year’s MacArthur Fellowship, announced today, Tuesday, October 1. Anonymously nominated and selected for their creativity and potential, the 2024 fellows will receive a no-strings-attached cash prize of $800,000 administered over five years.
Trans artist and cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond, often known as Viv, grew up amid the trials and tribulations of small-town life in Maryland, finding solace in both performance and activism to carve out spaces for freedom of expression.
“My strategy, for the most part, has always been to put my body where it needs to be; whether it be on the street, whether it be at a protest, whether it be at a meeting or whether it be on the stage or sometimes on the screen,” Bond said of their practice in an interview with Cultural Attaché after winning the first “Judy Icon Award” during the Night of a Thousand Judys Pride benefit concert at Joe’s Pub this summer.
Based in Providence, Rhode Island, artist and Brown University professor Tony Cokes has a longstanding time-based media practice that juxtaposes fragments of existing text, sounds, and footage to form new modes for social critique. Cokes’s immersive art examines structural racism and the Black American experience as well as United States politics and global militarism, among other topics. Interpolating documentary footage with decade-defining music and pop-culture references, Cokes’s media interventions are an urgent reminder that things are not always as they seem.
“Receiving a MacArthur award is something I didn’t know would happen for me at my advanced level and age,” Cokes, 68, said in an interview with Brown University. He intends to utilize some of the funding for a long-term project about the impact of Factory Records, which produced albums by the bands Joy Division and New Order.
Jamaican-born multidisciplinary artist Ebony G. Patterson, based in Chicago, can add the MacArthur Fellowship to her list of career-defining accolades of recent years. The artist’s practice is rooted in postcolonial spaces, with the idea of the garden taking center stage over the last decade. Spanning video and photography, tapestry and installations, drawing and sculpture, and various other media, Patterson’s work is meticulous, layered, and rife with embellishments in accordance with her fixation on pageantry and beauty.
Last year, the artist took over the New York Botanical Gardens with massive installations that simultaneously examined the intersections of race and gender in colonialism and contemplated humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
Apsáalooke/Crow contemporary visual artist Wendy Red Star examines identity, tradition, and stereotypes in her multifaceted practice. She rose to prominence early in her career with her self-portrait photo series Four Seasons (2006), which satirized colonial perceptions of Native Americans, and has continued to unpack prejudice, misinformation, and obscured histories through humor, overzealous annotations, and focused attention to Apsáalooke/Crow artistry.
Seminole filmmaker Sterlin Harjo was also tapped for the award. Harjo is best known for the award-winning Indigenous television comedy series Reservation Dogs, which ran three seasons between 2021 through 2023, as well as his independent feature films that turn the lens on contemporary Indigeneity in Oklahoma.
A complete list of 2024 MacArthur Fellows can be found below.
Loka Ashwood
Ruha Benjamin
Justin Vivian Bond
Jericho Brown
Tony Cokes
Nicola Dell
Johnny Gandelsman
Sterlin Harjo
Juan Felipe Herrera
Ling Ma
Jennifer L. Morgan
Martha Muñoz
Shailaja Paik
Joseph Parker
Ebony G. Patterson
Shamel Pitts
Wendy Red Star
Jason Reynolds
Dorothy Roberts
Keivan G. Stassun
Benjamin Van Mooy
Alice Wong
