Mariana Ramos
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation just announced its 2017 class of MacArthur Fellows—popularly (though unofficially) known as “genius grants.”
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The MacArthur Foundation pointedly avoids the g-word. Work in any field except elected office is eligible. Writers, mathematicians, voting rights activists, poets, archaeologists, healthcare administrators, geophysicists, human rights attorneys, astronomers—that’s just a narrow slice of the wide variety of careers that have produced geniuses since 1981.
We’re always curious each year to see who makes the cut to receive the MacArthur Foundation’s prestigious “genius” grant—a no-strings-attached grant of $625,000, allocated over five years. The fellowships are awarded to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”
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But there’s a theme running through this year’s class, it’s full of people working in fields directly or closely related to urbanism. In fact, they cleaned up: By our count, more than one-third of the genius grantees received honors for work that affects the changing shape of cities today. It’s a sign that the issues deemed worthy of genius-level attention, from climate change to human rights, are increasingly urban ones.
Two of this year’s 24 recipients are based in Chicago, both of whom certainly fulfill that criteria: photographer Dawoud Bey and Muslim community leader Rami Nashashibi.
A city-fied MacArthur focus isn’t exactly a new thing, as seen by the dominance of New York on these two cool interactive maps showing where grantees were born and where they lived when the award was given.
Bey, who at 63 is the oldest of this year’s awardees, has long been hailed in Chicago and beyond. Here’s how the MacArthur Foundation, which is also Chicago-based, describes his approach:
“Using an expansive approach to photography that creates new spaces of engagement within cultural institutions, making them more meaningful to and representative of the communities in which they are situated.”
“Communities,” particularly underrepresented ones, are definitely a key focus for Bey’s large-scale portraits and landscapes, as seen in series like Harlem Redux, a three-year photographic chronicle of neighborhood gentrification.
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Nashashibi, 45, serves as the executive director of the Marquette Park-based Inner-City Muslim Action Network, which provides health care, job training and other services for the uninsured, formerly incarcerated and others. Nashashibi, who initiated the Muslim Run Corner Store Campaign and helped launch the Takin’ It to the Streets festival, confronts “the challenges of poverty and disinvestment in urban communities through a Muslim-led civic engagement effort that bridges race, class, and religion,” the foundation wrote.
Others announced Wednesday were writer and cultural critic Viet Thanh Nguyen — whose novel, “The Sympathizer,” about a communist double agent, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction — and Derek Peterson, a historian of East Africa and professor at the University of Michigan.
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