Genius x 2: Alumni Juan Felipe Herrera and Wendy Red Star win MacArthur Fellowships

Two UCLA alumni, viual artist Wendy Red Star and poet and educator Juan Felipe Herrera, have been awarded 2024 MacArthur Fellowships by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The new class of fellows announced Oct. 1.

The fellowships, often referred to as "genius grants," are awarded annually to individuals in a variety of fields who demonstrate exceptional creativity and dedication in their pursuits and the prospect of innovative advances in the future. The honor comes with an $800,000, five-year stipend to be used at the recipient's discretion.

Red Star and Herrera join 20 other artists, writers, scientists, historians, activists and educators as new MacAurthur Fellows this year.

"The 2024 MacArthur Fellows pursue rigorous inquiry with aspiration and purpose," said Marlies Carruth, director of the fellows program. "Their work highlights our shared humanity, centering the agency of disabled people, the humor and histories of Indigenous communities, the emotional lives of adolescents and the perspectives of rural Americans."

To date, two dozen UCLA alumni have received MacArthur Fellowships, the most recent being Martha Gonzalez in 2022, along with 16 faculty members, including last year's fellows, E. Tendayi Achiume and Park Williams.

Juan Felipe Herrera: 'I write for all'

Ever playful, ever wise, UCLA alumnus Juan Felipe Herrera - poet, educator, writer - spoke about what has driven his work.

"Fifty years now of exploring and experimenting and speaking and performing and writing and presenting to all communities," he said. "My true goal is to be kind and to write for the benefit of others and to end violence."

In addition to serving as California's poet laureate from 2012 to 2015, Herrera was poet laureate of the United States from 2015 to 2017 - the first Latino to hold that position - and is the author of more than 30 books, including "Rebozos of Love: Floricanto 1970-1974," "Every Day We Get More Illegal," "Notes on the Assemblage," "Jabberwalking" and "Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream."

The MacArthur Foundation praised Herrera for "uplifting Chicanx culture and amplifying shared experiences of solidarity and empowerment through poetry and prose for adults and children. Herrera's literary output, in both English and Spanish, crosses genres ... united by deep empathy and joy for all groups in the act of artistic creation."

Herrera, who was born in Fowler, California, and grew up in migrant worker campus, has long drawn artistic and personal inspiration from his own experiences. He credits his mother for sparking his love of language; his third-grade teacher in San Diego, Lelya Sampson, for helping him find and use his voice in a public setting; and his community for helping foster the deep empathy that is his hallmark.

"Poetry is a way of offering kindness, compassion, unity and humanity," he said in an interview with the MacArthur Foundation. "I write for the lost, the injured, deported, poor, massacred, abandoned and ostracized. My mother, teachers and hard-working father gave me this gift. I write for all."

Attending UCLA on a scholarship, Herrera earned his bachelor's degree in anthropology in 1972, then went on to receive a master's in social anthropology from Stanford University and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before joining the faculty of California State University, Fresno. Today, he is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Riverside.

In 2017, he received the UCLA Medal, the university's highest honor.

Herrera is also the namesake of the bilingual Juan Felipe Herrera Elementary School, which opened in Fresno in 2022, and his poem "Sunriders" was engraved on a plaque that was sent into space as part of NASA's 2021 Lucy mission in 2021.

"If we want joy in our lives, a poem can bring that about - and not only our lives, but in the lives of others," Herrera said. "Let's live in a world of poetry: Billions of words, all yours. So grab some, sprinkle them on a paper, throw some colors in there, and welcome poetry to your life."

Wendy Red Star: Art that challenges and sparks curiosity

Visual artist Wendy Red Star's multidisciplinary work challenges colonial historical narratives. The Portland-based visual artist, who earned her M.F.A. from UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture in 2006, is recognized for the ways in which she highlights the resilience and strength of her Apsáalooke/Crow heritage, offering a grounded perspective that confronts misconceptions and oversimplified portrayals.

Red Star's imaginative work "Stirs Up the Dust" is currently featured as part of the nation's largest art event, Getty's PST Art: Art & Science Collide, and can be seen at the Autry Museum of the American West's exhibition Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology. Taking the traditional regalia associated with powwow, a dance celebration found throughout Indigenous Plains cultures, including her own Crow Nation, Red Star reimagines it in both feminist and futuristic terms.

"I'm really interested in introducing the art world to all the important aesthetic values of my community that are often ignored," Red Star said. "So I spend a lot of time looking at different cultural items and make art based on those findings."

Known for photographing herself within elaborately constructed scenes, Red Star often foregrounds her presence within narratives of her own design. In a series of self-portraits titled "Four Seasons" (2006), for instance, she staged elaborate tableaux satirizing the dioramas typical of natural history museums. In front of backdrops filled with plastic flowers, inflatable animals and Styrofoam packing material, Red Star wears a traditional Apsáalooke elk-tooth dress and gazes directly at the camera, reminding viewers that Native Americans do not only exist in the past.

Her 2021 installation "Indian Congress" focused on the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, an event celebrating America's westward expansion that, ironically, also featured an Indian Congress attended by more than 30 tribes meant to highlight the daily lives of Native Americans. Red Star created a replica of one of the exposition booths for displaying fruits and vegetables but instead arranged hundreds of cutouts of historical photographs of Native Americans who attended the congress. The work put present-day viewers in the position of exposition visitors who viewed attendees to the congress as mere objects on display, while at the same time reasserting the dignity of the Native participants.

Through her witty and subversive use of photography and installation, Red Star exposes audiences to materials typically only available to researchers and recovers details of histories that archives either cannot or purposefully do not convey.

"I'm dealing with some very heavy, traumatic topics," she said. "I think humor is healing, and I'm utilizing that humor to break through all the heavy, devastating history."

Archival photographs also figured prominently in her 2014 "1880 Crow Peace Delegation" series, which featured digitally manipulated portraits of Apsáalooke leaders originally taken by the Bureau of American Ethnology for an anthropological study. Red Star annotated the original images with red pen, outlining meaningful elements in the leaders' attire and adding explanatory text. In this way, she unpacked for a contemporary audience the rich symbolism and expressions of the leaders' agency.

Red Star, who received her bachelor's degree from Montana State University before attending UCLA, has been a visiting lecturer at Yale University, the Banff Center, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the California Institute of the Arts.

Her work has been exhibited at such venues as the Brooklyn Museum, the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris, the Portland Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MASS MoCA and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

"One of the things that I hope people get from my work," Red Star said, "is that they actually have more questions when they leave. It leaves an impression on them so much so that it sparks their curiosity to continue learning."

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.