Sanford Biggers, Zoe Leonard, and Dozens of Other Artists Are Among the Winners of the Prestigious 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has named the 2020
recipients of its prestigious fellowship.

Among the 175 winners, which includes literary critics, scholars
of religion, filmmakers, poets, and researchers and artists in
various fields, are dozens of visual artists, including the
interdisciplinary artist Sanford Biggers, the photographer Zoe
Leonard, the video artist Steffani Jemison, the performance
artist Clifford Owens, and Ellen Lesperance, who worked primarily
with knitting.

Other winners include the filmmaker Blitz Bazawule, who was
included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial; A.L. Steiner, the cofounder
of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (WAGE); and Chris
E. Vargas, the founder of the fictional Museum of Transgender
Hirstory and Art and a participant in the New Museum’s
“Consciousness Razing: The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project,”
which marked the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

This year’s winners represent more than 50 disciplines and
artistic fields, nearly 80 academic institutions, more than 30
states, and two Canadian provinces.

The fellowship is awarded annually to mid-career professionals
who have “already demonstrated exceptional capacity for
productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the
arts.”

About 3,000 applications are reviewed each year, and more than
18,000 winners have been named since 1925. To date, the foundation
has awarded more than $375 million to fellows.

The post Sanford Biggers, Zoe Leonard, and Dozens of Other
Artists Are Among the Winners of the Prestigious 2020 Guggenheim
Fellowship appeared first on artnet News.