Three Black innovators in Chicago have each been awarded $800,000 in prestigious MacArthur Foundation grants for using their talents to serve their community and mankind.
Sociologist Reuben Jonathan Miller; jazz cellist and composer Tomeka Reid; and artist and architect Amanda Williams are among 25 recipients across the country to receive the “Genius Grant” from the 41-year-old MacArthur Foundation, which announced the recipients on October 12.
Of the 25 MacArthur Fellows, nine are Black, residing in cities across the country. This year, with its trio of talent, Chicago produced more Black recipients than any city in the country.
Founded in 1981, the MacArthur Fellows Grant is a renowned prize that has grown in prestige over the years. Recipients can use the “No strings attached” $800,000 prize in any way they wish. 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. Each fellowship comes with a stipend of $800,000 to the recipient, paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years.
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.
Individuals are nominated anonymously for the prestigious honor. Nominees are brought to the program’s attention through a constantly changing pool of invited external nominators chosen from a broad range of fields and areas of interest. They are encouraged to draw on their expertise, accomplishments, and breadth of experience to nominate the most creative people they know within their field and beyond.
The Fellows Program does not accept applications or unsolicited nominations. Those who nominate individuals for the prestigious prize remain anonymous along with evaluators and selectors. Foundation officials say this policy enables participants to provide their honest impressions independent of outside influence.
Candidates or nominees for the prize are determined based on three criteria. This includes:
Exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments and,
The potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.
Nominations are evaluated by an independent Selection Committee comprised of about a dozen leaders in the arts, sciences, humanities professions, and for-profit and non-profit communities. Each nomination is considered with respect to the program’s selection criteria, based on the nomination letter along with original works of the nominee and evaluations from other experts collected by the program staff.
After a thorough, multi-step review, the Selection Committee makes its recommendations to the President and Board of Directors of the MacArthur Foundation. Announcement of the annual list is usually made in September. While there are no quotas or limits, typically 20 to 30 Fellows are selected each year. Since the Grants Program began, 1,061 people have been named MacArthur Fellows.
“The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are architects of new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science,” said Marlies Carruth, Director of MacArthur Fellows. “They are excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood. They are archivists reminding us of what should survive.”
The three Black Chicagoans have established distinguished careers in their professions.
Reuben Jonathan Miller is a sociologist, criminologist, and social worker examining the long-term consequences of incarceration on the lives of individuals and their families, with a focus on communities of color and those living in poverty. His scholarship addresses many aspects of life in the age of mass incarceration and supervision, spanning policing, trauma, and prisoner re-entry programs. He explores the aftermath of imprisonment in particular depth and writes about this subject from a place of proximity.
In other work, Miller and a co-author argue that formerly incarcerated people are forced into a diminished form of “carceral citizenship” governed by myriad laws, restrictions, and obstacles.
Miller broadens his focus and intended audience with his 2021 book, “Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration” (2021). In addition to historical and theoretical research and 15 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, Detroit, and other cities, Miller draws on his time as a volunteer chaplain at Chicago’s Cook County Jail. The experience gives the book valuable insight from his subjects’ everyday encounters with conflicting probation bureaucracies, as well as barriers to housing and employment that make rehabilitation goals extremely difficult to achieve.
Miller in 2006 received a bachelor’s degree from Chicago State University before he earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and a doctorate from Loyola University Chicago.
From 2013 to 2017, he served as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan prior to joining the faculty of the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago in 2017. He holds affiliate positions in the University of Chicago’s Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, Department of Sociology, and Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. He is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation.
Tomeka Reid is a jazz cellist, composer, and improviser forging a unique jazz sound that draws from a range of musical traditions. Trained in the Western classical tradition, Reid is also fluent in musical modes rooted in the African Diaspora and avant-garde minimalism. She employs extended techniques in her practice—attaching pencils or clips to the strings or making use of the percussive qualities of the body of the cello—to produce a rich and textured palette of sounds.
A versatile player, collaborator, and improviser, Reid participates in several musical groups as a member or bandleader. She also composes and arranges works for small and large ensembles with varied instrument combinations.
Old New (2019), the Tomeka Reid Quartet’s second album, includes a mix of original compositions and standards filtered through a post-bop, free jazz, minimalist lens.
For the commissioned piece Tokens, she interviewed residents of Dorchester Projects, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, for inspiration. Reid has performed as a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a decades-old musical collective that emerged from the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).
In 2013, Reid founded the Chicago Jazz String Summit, an annual, three-day event that celebrates stringed instruments’ unique contributions to the improvisational jazz sphere.
In 2000, Tomeka Reid received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland at College Park. She received a master’s degree from DePaul University, and a doctorate in musical arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Reid is the 2022 Improviser in Residence at the Moers Festival in Moers, Germany. Reid has performed at festivals including the Chicago Jazz Festival, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, and the Big Ears Festival and at such venues as the Pritzker Pavilion, Symphony Center, and Constellation, all in Chicago.
Amanda Williams is an artist and Ivy League-trained architect who uses ideas around color and architecture to explore the intersection of race and the environment. Her works visualize the ways urban planning, zoning, development, and disinvestment impact the lives of everyday residents, particularly in African American communities.
Williams’ series “Color(ed) Theory” (2014–2015) exemplifies an artmaking practice that is both personal and responsive to the current moment. Williams, along with family and friends, covertly painted empty houses slated for demolition in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. They painted each structure in one vibrant color with cultural associations immediately apparent to the neighborhood’s predominantly Black residents: Harold’s Chicken Shack red, Ultra sheen conditioner blue and Safe Passage yellow.
The series also poses questions about how economic, cultural, and aesthetic value of an object or community is determined. Williams’ investigation of color continued in a project she initiated in 2020 entitled “What Black Is This, You Say?” It began as a series of Instagram posts of different hues of black accompanied by text that humorously comments on the variedness of Black culture.
For the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Williams created “Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line)” in collaboration with two other artists. Thousands of feet of braided cord are supported by and woven around a steel frame form, creating an enclosure large enough to accommodate several people. The work evokes themes of shelter and placemaking as they pertain to Black women living in the African Diaspora.
With “Embodied Sensations (2021),” Williams explores the use of space in a museum lobby setting. This participatory artwork occupied the main atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 1997, Williams received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Cornell University.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; and the Venice Architecture Biennale.
