The MacArthur Foundation named 20 fellows on Tuesday, awarding each $800,000 over five years to pursue work that confronts America's racial and economic reckoning through art, music, and scholarship. The no-strings-attached grants recognized creators and thinkers who aren't waiting for institutional permission to ask hard questions about who gets remembered, who gets heard, and who bears the cost of historical silence.
Immanuel Wilkins, a 29-year-old Brooklyn-based saxophonist, learned the news riding Amtrak from New York to Philadelphia. He waited until he stepped off the train to absorb it, then said: "I was just outside. Which was nice because then I could yell as loud as I wanted to and celebrate." The youngest fellow spent the final 15 minutes of his ride convinced the callers wanted recommendations, not a life-changing phone call.
Wilkins' work bridges a void in American consciousness. His debut album, "Omega," connects the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, a pregnant Black woman, with the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teenager—108 years and 12 years of accumulated trauma bound together by sound. He told The Associated Press that music's abstraction lets him represent these stories without "recreating the violence of them."
But Wilkins is doing something more radical still. He's questioning whether Western notation itself can hold Black music. "The system of Western notation, as we know it, doesn't have the capacity to hold the sound of Black music," he said. "Like, a lot of what makes Black music maybe sound 'Black' is these quantum entanglements with the time. I'm kind of trying to radically debate: what actually is this Western system of notation holding when it comes to Black music?" In an immersive experience called "RECESS" presented in Philadelphia, he performed on an industrial jungle gym as both bandstand and playground, attempting a "graphic score" that Western musicology never imagined.
The Economics of Historical Memory
Ellora Derenoncourt, an associate professor of economics at Princeton University, brings different tools to the same urgent question: why do some Americans remain trapped in economic precarity while others build generational wealth? She's a labor economist and economic historian who wants to use the award's platform to explain economic justice to policymakers and the public.
History, she argues, reveals not just how inequality happened but when we knew how to stop it. A 2021 paper she produced showed that the Black-white earnings gap declined after Congress raised the minimum wage and extended its protections to agriculture, domestic services, and healthcare. Another project mapped how northern cities spent less on education and recreation in neighborhoods where the Great Migration brought millions of Black Americans fleeing the South's low wages and racial violence.
Derenoncourt faces an immediate threat to her work. The Trump administration removed workforce demographic reporting requirements and limited official data sources. Without those numbers, measuring current racial inequality becomes nearly impossible. "Universities and researchers, she said, must find ways to maintain robust data sets," according to her statement. "I hope that I can take this responsibility seriously to highlight these issues. And maybe also make some more people into history nerds. Because I think, really, we need to turn back the clock to figure out sometimes either what works or what has made things the way they are today."
She isn't asking for theory. She's asking for access to the facts that prove we've done better before.
Art as Refusal to Forget
Visual artist Vincent Valdez was drawing in his studio when the foundation called. He went "deathly silent." Most artists know what the MacArthur award means—45 years of recognizing people "pushing boundaries," as he put it—but knowing and experiencing are different things.
Valdez uses large representational paintings modeled on the murals of the southwestern United States to examine American identity and confront what he calls "social amnesia." His Mexican American community, he explained, found "undeniable presence" in murals—stories that dominant culture wouldn't tell. His work aims to help the public remember "what we are and where we're headed."
His 30-foot-wide painting "The City I" depicts a modern Ku Klux Klan with hooded figures holding smartphones and beer cans, with a child clutching a Pikachu toy. "Dream Baby Dream," the second part of a trilogy, places Muhammad Ali's many eulogists in boxes modeled on "The Brady Bunch" title sequence. The final installment, "The New Americans," features colorful portraits standing vertically, highlighting what Valdez calls overlooked "pillars" of society—"fighting the good fight," or as he put it, "the stubborn pulses in a dying heartbeat."
Valdez has also examined how American leisure masks American violence. He's painted Michael Jordan, but also the eviction of a mostly Mexican American community to build Dodger Stadium. He recalls attending San Antonio Spurs games with his father, where he watched fans perform a unified vertical "wave" from courtside to the last-row dollar seats. "If we can do it for sports on any given Saturday and Sunday in this country, then we can do this as a collective people for the things that truly matter and affect our daily lives and the lives of our neighbors," he said.
The MacArthur Foundation doesn't require its fellows to explain how they'll spend the award. No progress reports. No applications. An evolving list of outside nominators makes recommendations for a confidential review committee. That's the opposite of how most funding works—it trusts that creative people already know what matters.
Why This Matters:
These fellows represent a recognition that art and scholarship aren't luxuries in a functioning democracy—they're essential infrastructure for collective memory and public understanding. When Immanuel Wilkins questions whether Western notation can hold Black music, he's not being academic. He's asking whether the tools we've inherited were designed to exclude certain voices. When Ellora Derenoncourt warns that losing demographic data makes measuring inequality impossible, she's describing how power operates: not through violence alone, but through silence about violence. When Vincent Valdez paints historical moments absent from dominant culture, he's insisting that we can't solve problems we refuse to see. These aren't sideline activities. They're the work of a society asking itself hard questions about equity, representation, and whether we're willing to change the systems that perpetuate historical injustice. Without people like these fellows, institutions and policymakers operate in darkness—protected by the fiction that inequality is natural rather than chosen.