Four artists are among this year’s winners of the MacArthur “genius” fellowships, a vaunted group of awards that each come with $800,000 to be paid out over the course of five years: María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Raven Chacon, Carolyn Lazard, and Dyani White Hawk.
The four artists include alumni of last year’s Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial, as well as a winner of a 2022 Pulitzer Prize and a subject of a New York survey that will next year travel the nation.
While the MacArthur “genius” fellowships do not only go to those in the art world, they are among the biggest awards that artists in the US can receive. No dedicated art award in this country has such a large cash purse.
White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota) is known for beaded paintings that draw equally on the look of Western abstract painting and Native American craft. In so doing, White Hawk asserts that abstraction’s originators were not the white men often credited with inventing the tradition in history books. Some of her works appeared alongside Chacon’s in both the 2022 Whitney Biennial and “Indian Theater.”
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