United States Artists 2025
160Jan. 31, 2025
Chicago-based nonprofitUnited States Artists(USA) today announced the fifty recipients of its 2025 fellowships. Each will receive an unrestricted cash award of $50,000 as well as access to professional development resources. Among the honorees, who represent twenty-one states, are those working variously in the fields of architecture and design, craft, dance, film, media, music, theater and performance, traditional arts, and writing. Four of this years’ fellows are native Hawaiian artists collectives, while twelve are Indigenous. Nearly one quarter of the class are over fifty, with the youngest recipient being in their twenties.
“We are honored to announce the 2025 USA Fellowship with this wonderfully skilled and multifaceted group of fellows,” said USA president and CEO Judilee Reed in a statement. “Much like this cohort, our support through the USA Fellowship is enduring and manifold, extending beyond a momentary and monetary contribution to establish a durable and sustainable relationship that artists may draw on at each stage of their careers.” USA has awarded more than $40 million in support to more than one thousand artists since its founding twenty years ago.
This year, six fellowships went to visual artists. These were conceptual artist Sadie Barnette, of Oakland, California, who centers archives and family histories; St. Louis–based sculptor Kahlil Robert Irving, who investigates themes of modern Black life in the United States; painter Caroline Kent, who lives and works in Chicago, and who aims to connect modernist abstraction with forms such as film and performance; Philadelphia-based sculptor Karyn Olivier, who is at work on a memorial honoring the thousands of African Americans buried at Bethel Burying Ground; Bogotá–born interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim, of Los Angeles, who examines issues of power and control; and Durham, North Carolina–based multidisciplinary artist Sherrill Roland, who gained acclaim for his ongoing Jumpsuit Project, which brings attention to the prejudice experienced by incarcerated people. A full list of recipients is available here.