Fellowships in the Creative Arts

"Trolley, New Orleans, 1958" by Robert Frank, 1955 & 1956 Fellow

Robert Frank first applied for a Fellowship to embark on the project that would become “The Americans.” Published initially in France in 1958 and then in the United States in 1959, the book offered an unflinching portrait of mid-century America by the Swiss-born photographer. He took photos of bustling city streets from New York to New Orleans, factory men and cocktail party attendees, wide-open highways and empty storefronts. At first, he was roundly criticized for his technique: Popular Photography magazine described his work as “flawed by meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposure, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” But this was deliberate—Frank took his cues not only from abstract painting but from the complicated country he was intent on capturing. And the artistic community began to recognize its impact. Joel Meyerowitz, 1970 and 1978 Fellow in Photography, said of “The Americans:” “It was the vision that emanated from the book that led not only me but my whole generation of photographers out into the American landscape.” Today, “The Americans” is lauded as the most influential photography book of the 20th century.

Lorraine O'Grady (2024 Fellow)

Lorraine O’Grady became a Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts in 2024. A lifelong student and eager reader and writer (she was a research economist, a translator, and a rock critic in her early professional life), O’Grady didn’t start pursuing art making until 1977, when she was in her mid-40s. Her early works were text-based collages, but in 1980, her work took a turn towards performance, when she staged a show as a beauty queen named Mlle. Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class) at Just Above Midtown, a Black-run gallery in New York City. She debuted one of her most famous works, “Art Is…,” at the Afro-American Day Parade in Harlem in 1983. A crew of performers rode on a float holding empty gilded picture frames and invited spectators to pose within the frames for photos. For her career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021, O’Grady introduced a new series of photographic self-portraits, “Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!).” In many of them, the artist poses in a suit of armor, often accented with tropical vegetation. In an interview with the Brooklyn Rail in 2016, O’Grady said, “I think art’s first goal is to remind us that we are human, whatever that is. I suppose the politics in my art could be to remind us that we are all human.”

Alvin Ailey (1968 Fellow)

Choreographer Alvin Ailey received his Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968. The next year, he established his own dance school with fellow choreographer (and fellow Guggenheim Fellow) Pearl Lang. His company, which had been founded ten years earlier, was created as a haven for Black choreographers and artists to express and celebrate the African-American experience through dance. Ailey said: “I wanted to do the kind of dance that could be done for the man on the streets, the people. I wanted to show Black people that they could come down to these concert halls. That it was part of their culture being done there. And that it was universal.”

An-My Lê (1997 Fellow)

Photographer An-My Lê became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1997, near the start of her prolific career. Lê was born in 1960, and moved from Vietnam to the United States with her family in 1975, after the fall of Saigon. With her Fellowship, she returned to Vietnam to make photographs of her homeland. As a political refugee and a landscape photographer, Lê has intimately explored the impact of violence and warfare on a place in her work, capturing the legacy of combat and diaspora. “Being a landscape photographer means creating a relationship between various categories—the individual within a larger construct such as the military, history, and culture,” she has said.

Julie Dash, 1981 Fellow in Film-Video

Filmmaker Julie Dash Won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 in Film-Video. The work that she did on her Fellowship year—which included time spent researching the Gullah-Geechee culture in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia—eventually culminated in her acclaimed film “Daughters of the Dust.” Inspired by her family’s background and written entirely in the Gullah-Geechee dialect of the islands, “Daughters of the Dust” tells the story of three generations of Gullah women who are the descendants of enslaved people. Released in 1991, the movie went on to be recognized at the Sundance Film Festival and was the first full-length film by an African American woman to have a wide theatrical release. More recently, Beyoncé referenced the movie in her 2016 video album “Lemonade.”

Zora Neale
Hurston

• Field of Study

  General Nonfiction

• Years Awarded

  1936, 1937