Mark Thomas Gibson was recently announced as a recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. The artist’s grant was endowed by the actor Robert De Niro. Thomas Gibson creates figurative artworks that mull over various facets of the Black experience in the U.S., including violence brought on by the Ku Klux Klan and monuments with racist histories.
About the fellowship:
Created and initially funded in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought since its inception to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”
Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The great range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program.
The Foundation centers the talents and instincts of the Fellows, whose passions often have broad and immediate impact. For example, Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1936 with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and dedicated it to the Foundation’s first president, Henry Allen Moe. Photographer Robert Frank’s seminal book, The Americans, was the product of a cross-country tour supported by two Guggenheim Fellowships. The accomplishments of other early Fellows like Jacob Lawrence, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Martha Graham, and Linus Pauling also demonstrate the strength of the Foundation’s core values and the power and impact of its approach.
To read the official press release click here.
