The United States Artists Fellowship Award is an annual grant that recognizes the "most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career". Every year, individual artists are anonymously nominated to apply by a diverse group of scholars, critics, producers, and other arts professionals. Among the 63 recipients of 2022, 5 were selected from the fields of architecture and design with the aim of strengthening and enriching the industry and their communities.
Since 2006, the USA Fellowship has provided winning artists from across the country with an unrestricted $50,000 grant, which they can spend however they please, and an optional year of financial planning services. To be able to fund the program, the organization puts together a fundraiser each year with the support of philanthropic foundations, companies, and individuals "committed to cultivating contemporary culture across the country".
Read on to discover the five winning architecture and design practitioners.
Architect and public artist Nina Cooke John is the founding principal of Studio Cooke John, a multidisciplinary architecture and design studio that focuses on transforming the relationship between people and the built environment. The architect responds to the crisis of identity by moving from one world into another, as seen in her studio’s installation Point of Action, which was on display at the Flatiron Public Plazas last winter, and her award-winning design of the Harriet Tubman monument in Newark, New Jersey.
Installation artists and architects Tom Carruthers and Jennifer Newsom of Dream the Combine create site-specific installations that explore imaginary environments and "perceptual uncertainties" that challenge their knowledge and understanding of the world. The duo were awarded with the 2021 McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists, the 2020-2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize, the 2018 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the 2018 Art Omi Architecture Residency, and the 2017 FSP/Jerome Foundation Fellowship.
Architect Germane Barnes investigates the connection between architecture and identity by examining how the built environment influences black domesticity. He is winner of the 2021 Wheelwright Prize from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, winner of the 2022 Rome Prize, and a 2021 recipient of the Architectural League Prize. His research has been published in several international publications, such as The New York Times, Architect Magazine, and PIN-UP Magazine, and his designs were on display at the Museum of Modern Art, the Graham Foundation, Design Miami/Basel, and the Swiss Institute, to name a few.
Architects Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy founded Design Earth as a research practice that "engages the medium of the speculative architectural project to make public the climate crisis". They have been awarded the League Prize for young architects and designers from the Architectural League of New York in 2016, along with two ACSA Faculty Design Awards in 2014 and 2017. Their work has been displayed in international exhibitions and museums such as the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016, 2018, and 2021, and the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in 2017.
Founded by by Jing Liu and Florian Idenburg in 2008, SO – IL is a New York-based architectural design firm that engages in the sociopolitical issues of contemporary cities through buildings and interdisciplinary research projects. Its cofounder Florian Idenburg is an internationally renowned architect with more than two decades of professional experience. He has a strong background in institutional spaces, which led the office to work on projects like the Kukje Gallery in Seoul, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, and the Amant art campus in Brooklyn.
The United States Artists is a Chicago-based arts funding organization that has granted artists from all over the country with over $36 million since 2006. This year's selection hails from 23 states and Puerto Rico, and works across diverse disciplines, such as craft, dance, film, media, music, architecture, design, and writing, to name a few.
