The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named 20 fellows on Tuesday, awarding each $800,000 over five years for work it described as showing “exceptional creativity.” These no-strings-attached grants support artistic or scholarly projects without requiring progress reports or applications. Several recipients use their work to examine American history, identity and cultural memory.
Who Selects the Fellows
The foundation’s 2026 class spans disciplines from the performing arts to the social sciences. Fellows range across four decades in age and live on three continents. An evolving list of outside nominators makes recommendations, then a confidential committee reviews them. Awardees don’t have to provide concrete spending plans.
Kristen Mack, vice president of communications for fellows and partnerships at the MacArthur Foundation, said fellows “explore the depths of our humanity; they reveal untold origins to challenges; they expand the edges of scientific inquiry and life-saving research.” They “show us new ways to understand the world,” she said.
Immanuel Wilkins, a 29-year-old Brooklyn-based saxophonist, bandleader and composer, was riding Amtrak from New York to Philadelphia when the foundation called. He waited until he got off the train to learn he’d been selected. “I was just outside. Which was nice because then I could yell as loud as I wanted to and celebrate,” he said. The youngest fellow, Wilkins said he spent the final 15 minutes of the ride thinking the callers wanted recommendations, not to share the news.
Art, History and Cultural Memory
Wilkins’ 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. He told The Associated Press that music’s abstraction lets him represent the stories without “recreating the violence of them.” He’s also exploring whether jazz swing, which is difficult to represent in written scores, could appear through sculptures or spectrograms rather than eighth notes or triplets.
In “RECESS,” an immersive experience recently presented in his hometown of Philadelphia, Wilkins performed on an industrial jungle gym that served as both bandstand and playground. The performance attempted a “graphic score.” He said the Western notation system “doesn't have the capacity to hold the sound of Black music” and asked what that system can hold when it comes to Black music.
Visual artist Vincent Valdez uses representational paintings recalling murals of the southwestern United States to examine American identity. He said murals gave his Mexican American community an “undeniable presence” for stories absent from dominant culture. His work, he said, aims to counter “social amnesia” and help the public remember “what we are and where we're headed.”
Valdez’s 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. “Dream Baby Dream,” the second part of his trilogy, places Muhammad Ali’s many eulogists in boxes modeled on “The Brady Bunch” title sequence. Valdez is working on the final installment, “The New Americans,” whose colorful portraits highlight people he describes as overlooked pillars of society.
Research, Policy and Public Memory
Ellora Derenoncourt, a New Jersey-based associate professor in Princeton University’s department of economics, studies labor and economic history. She said history can explain the origins of economic inequality and identify “watershed moments” when public policies narrowed disparities. A 2021 paper showed a decline in the Black-white earnings gap after Congress raised the minimum wage and extended protections to industries including agriculture, domestic services and healthcare.
Derenoncourt said the Trump administration’s removal of workforce demographic reporting requirements and limits on other official data sources could leave researchers without information needed 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.
The class 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. Awardees who spoke with the Associated Press had no concrete plans for spending the money. The foundation requires no progress reports and accepts no applications.