The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation will give 20 selected artists and scholars $800,000 each over the next five years. Among them are a labor economist who studies racial earnings inequality and a saxophonist whose work links lynching with police violence. The foundation announced its 2026 fellows class on Tuesday. The no-strings-attached grants require no progress reports, and recipients don't have to explain how they'll spend the money.
Who Gets the Grant
Ellora Derenoncourt, an associate professor in Princeton University’s economics department who lives in New Jersey, studies labor and economic history. She said she wants to use the award’s platform to explain economic justice to the public and policymakers. Her research looks at how policy and public spending have shaped racial inequality.
In a 2021 paper, Derenoncourt found that the Black-white earnings gap narrowed after Congress raised the minimum wage and extended its protections to workers in agriculture, domestic services and healthcare. Another project found that northern cities spent less on education and recreation in communities where millions of Black Americans arrived during the Great Migration, fleeing low wages and racial barriers in the South.
Derenoncourt said the Trump administration’s removal of workforce demographic reporting requirements and limits on other official data sources could leave researchers without the information they need to measure current racial inequality. Universities and researchers, she said, must find ways to maintain robust data sets. “I hope that I can take this responsibility seriously to highlight these issues,” she said. “And maybe also make some more people into history nerds.”
History, Work and Representation
Immanuel Wilkins, a 29-year-old saxophonist, bandleader and composer based in Brooklyn, was riding Amtrak from New York to Philadelphia when the foundation called. He waited until he got off the train to hear the news, then celebrated outside. Wilkins is the youngest fellow.
His debut album, “Omega,” links the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, a pregnant Black woman, with the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, a Black teenager. Wilkins told The Associated Press that music’s abstraction lets him represent those stories without “recreating the violence of them.”
Wilkins is also exploring whether jazz swing, which is difficult to represent in written scores, could be shown through sculptures or spectrograms instead of eighth notes or triplets. In “RECESS,” an immersive experience recently presented in Philadelphia, he performed on an industrial jungle gym that served as both bandstand and playground. He said Western notation “doesn't have the capacity to hold the sound of Black music.”
Visual artist Vincent Valdez said murals gave his Mexican American community an “undeniable presence” for stories missing from dominant culture. His paintings examine American identity and what he called “social amnesia.” His 30-foot-wide painting “The City I” depicts a modern Ku Klux Klan, with hooded figures holding a smartphone, a beer and a Pikachu-toting baby.
Valdez’s work also addresses the eviction of a mostly Mexican American community to build Dodger Stadium. He recalled watching fans at San Antonio Spurs games perform a unified version of “the wave,” moving 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,” he said.
How the Program Operates
The fellows’ work explores “the depths of our humanity” and expands scientific inquiry and life-saving research, said Kristen Mack, vice president of communications for fellows and partnerships at the MacArthur Foundation. The class spans four decades in age and three continents.
The program accepts no applications. An evolving list of outside nominators recommends candidates for review by a confidential committee, and the foundation requires no progress reports. Awardees who spoke with The Associated Press had no concrete plans for spending the grant.
The cohort also includes a philosopher applying cognitive science to memory and forgiveness, a poet reworking historical texts to examine colonial violence and Native American resilience, and a choreographer breaking down barriers between dance styles across time and place.