The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the newest class of 25 fellows to be awarded the MacArthur “Genius” grant, one of America’s most coveted accolades which comes with an unrestricted gift of $625,000.
Among the 2021 winners are painter Jordan Casteel—who at age 32 is the youngest fellow on the list—sculptor and painter Daniel Lind-Ramos, art historian and curator Nicole Fleetwood, and filmmaker and media artist Alex Rivera. Outside of the visual arts, digital media scholar Safiya Noble, cinema studies scholar and curator Jacqueline Stewart, who is the chief artistic and programming officer of the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and author of the 2020 book How to Be an Antiracist Ibram X. Kendi were also named winners.
After graduating from Yale’s prestigious art school, Casteel began exhibiting intimate portraits of Black men from her neighborhood based on snapshots. Artnet News’s Taylor Dafoe has described them as “the offspring of Alice Neel and Kerry James Marshall.”
“I was really interested in humanizing a history that is often criticized and sexualized,” Casteel told Art21 in 2019, of her focus on male subjects. “I didn’t want the Black male body to be taken advantage of any more than it historically has been.”
Casteel was the subject of a solo show at the New Museum in 2020, and her work has been slated to appear in 13 group shows in 2021.