Christine Sun Kim, Rodney McMillian, and Vincent Valdez Win MacArthur 'Genius' Grants

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named 20 recipients of its annual MacArthur Fellowships, the so-called "Genius Grants," each carrying $800,000 in unrestricted funds. Four visual artists made this year's cohort: Christine Sun Kim (Berlin), Rodney McMillian (Los Angeles), Vincent Valdez (Houston and San Antonio), and Chip Thomas (Flagstaff, Arizona).

Kim, the subject of a recent Whitney Museum survey, makes work that challenges institutions and audiences to confront their own ableism, particularly as it relates to Deafness. Her best-known series, "Degrees of Deaf Rage" (2018–19), consists of charcoal and oil pastel drawings that humorously and bitingly recount moments in which hearing privilege ignores the lived realities of Deaf people. In 2020, she performed the national anthem in American Sign Language at the Super Bowl and wrote about the experience in the New York Times. In the fellowship's video announcement, Kim signs her introduction: "I am an artist illuminating cultural dimensions of sound and hearing."

McMillian works across painting, sculpture, video, performance, and installation. According to the MacArthur website, his art examines how history, socioeconomic conditions, and public policy determine quality of life and can "perpetuate economic marginalization," particularly for Black Americans living in the US South. His works range from the 88-foot-long abstract painting In This Land (2019) to the large-scale installation From Asterisks in Dockery (2012), inspired by a chapel formerly located on the Dockery Plantation in Mississippi.

Valdez is primarily a painter whose work looks at both history and the present to think through the most pressing issues of the day, with a focus on the persistence of racism, particularly as it relates to the Latinx experience in the US. His best-known pieces span the expressionist Kill the Pachuco Bastard! (2001), which depicts a violent scene from the Zoot Suit riots in World War II Los Angeles, to the hyperrealist The Beginning is Near, An American Trilogy, Ch. 1: The City (2016), a 30-foot painting of hooded KKK members. A traveling survey of his work ran in 2024–25.

Thomas makes public art that transforms "overlooked and neglected spaces into powerful public works grounded in community histories and present-day experiences," per the MacArthur website. His practice centers on the Navajo Nation, from large-scale photographic installations in abandoned sites to the Painted Desert Project, which brought graffiti artists to make new work there.

Poet Layli Long Soldier, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, also joins this year's cohort. Her writing has influenced generations of Native artists, including Jeffrey Gibson, who borrowed the title of his 2024 US Pavilion presentation at the Venice Biennale — "the space in which to place me" — from Long Soldier's 2017 concrete poem "He Sápa."

"For 45 years, MacArthur Fellows have defied boundaries, by questioning conventions, crossing disciplines, and driving collective progress," Kristen Mack, the foundation's vice president for communications, MacArthur Fellows, and partnerships, said in a statement. "The 2026 Fellows continue that creative tradition—they explore the depths of our humanity; they reveal untold origins to modern challenges; they expand the edges of scientific inquiry and life-saving research. They show us new ways to understand the world."

The $800,000 stipends arrive with no strings attached, giving each fellow five years of financial freedom to pursue work that, in this cohort's case, ranges from Deaf advocacy to reexaminations of American racial history.