Artist Wu Tsang, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) Faculty Member, Awarded Prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named artist Wu Tsang, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) faculty member, a recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. Tsang, who is cochair of Bard MFA’s Film/Video Program, is one of 25 people to win the prestigious award, known as the “genius” grant, for 2018. Each Fellow receives $625,000 in no-strings attached support over the next five years. Tsang was cited for “creating new conceptual and visual vocabularies for exploring hidden histories and marginalized narratives in works that collapse the boundaries between documentary and fiction.” In addition to Tsang, Bard and its on-campus affiliates boast nine recipients of MacArthur Fellowships: poet Ann Lauterbach; artist Judy Pfaff; photographer An-My Lê; journalist Mark Danner; soprano Dawn Upshaw; pianist Jeremy Denk; filmmaker Charles Burnett; and novelists Norman Manea (emeritus) and Dinaw Mengestu.

Wu Tsang’s artistic practice explores states of connectedness and in-betweenness; often this fluidity manifests as collaboration, or in the merging of disciplines, such as performance, moving image, sculpture, and installation. Coming from a filmic background, her work aims to collapse the boundaries between documentary and fiction, as a way to continually question the relationship between liveness (or ‘sociality’) and images. Her projects have been presented at museums and film festivals internationally, including MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MCA (Chicago), MOCA (Los Angeles), Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Berlinale Film Festival (Berlin), SANFIC (Santiago), Hot Docs Festival (Toronto), and South by Southwest Film Festival (Austin). Her first feature film WILDNESS (2012) premiered at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, and her work was also featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and “The Ungovernables” New Museum Triennial, 2012 Gwangju Biennial, the 9th Berlin Biennial, and Performa 11 Biennial (New York). She has received grants from Creative Capital, Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow (Film/Video) and is currently shortlisted for the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize. Tsang has been a Bard MFA faculty member since 2015.

The MacArthur Fellows Program is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. In keeping with this purpose, the Foundation awards fellowships directly to individuals rather than through institutions. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. They may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential. Indeed, the purpose of the MacArthur Fellows Program is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society. The Foundation does not require or expect specific products or reports from MacArthur Fellows and does not evaluate recipients' creativity during the term of the fellowship. The MacArthur Fellowship is a "no strings attached" award in support of people, not projects. Each fellowship comes with a stipend of $625,000 to the recipient, paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years. For more information, visit macfound.org/programs/fellows.(10/4/18)
 

This event was last updated on 10-05-2018

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