New School Professors and Faculty Member Win Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships
Since 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has been awarding Guggenheim Fellowships to diverse groups of artists, scholars, culture-creators, and more. The award has become one of the most prestigious in the world, and recognizes some of the most forward-thinking people working in their respective fields with an unrestricted gift meant to advance their research and work, and reward their prior career achievements.
This year, The New School was especially well represented among the group of 188 fellowship recipients, which includes Jessica Pisano, NSSR Professor of Politics, Arthur Ou, Associate Professor of Photography in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons, and Ben Thorp Brown, a faculty member in the Fine Arts program at Parsons.
“I’m humbled to share the company of so many creative and dedicated people,” shares Pisano. “I’m also very excited about the opportunities this Fellowship offers to better serve the different communities with which I’m associated, whether my students at The New School, my colleagues at Karazin University in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where I’m a trustee, or my readers interested in global politics.”
“It’s still sinking in! But it’s of course super exciting and I’m so grateful,” shares Ou. “I first found out about this fellowship from Robert Frank’s 1996 retrospective, Moving Out, at the Whitney Museum, where they included his 1954 Guggenheim grant proposal, and it’s been a dream for me ever since. To be in the company of so many of those who I have deeply admired is truly an honor and immensely humbling. My application proposal is to further develop an on-going project that hasn’t been circulated very much yet, so it’s validating that the selection committee recognized its potential and I’m encouraged by the foundation’s willingness to support it through this grant.”
“It’s a huge honor to receive a Guggenheim fellowship, and I’m really grateful for all the people who I’ve had a chance to collaborate with,” shares Brown. “The award will help support my ongoing work as an artist, and allow me to focus on pursuing another large scale installation work. In the short term, I’m working on a publication about Cura’s Garden, and an exhibition for Various Small Fires in Los Angeles.”
For Pisano, the grant will help support the book she’s writing, which tells the story of a single street in Eastern Europe under fascism, state socialism, and neoliberal democracy. The setting is a small space that raises big questions about political and economic change, and how people negotiate the question of “who belongs?”
“I’m so grateful to the Foundation for support to write a book I researched in six countries over a period of twenty years. But a Guggenheim Fellowship is so much more than a financial award. I see my work as intervening in debates in Political Science at the conceptual level. The conversations the Fellowship makes possible will allow me to be a more effective agent of change in how we frame and understand problems we all face.”
Ou is currently at work on Viewfinder, a project he initiated in 2019 as part of a GIDEST fellowship, which contends with vision through technology, and seeks to better understand the forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, the constant desire to improve vision through technology. The project raises questions about the distinctly human urge to see better, closer, farther, and in more detail, and seeks to understand what conditions, natural or artificial, that facilitate the “vision impulse.”
“To address these inquiries, I needed to think broadly on the scope of photography’s development, to track it back to the very inception of light on a cosmic scale, and to consider the complex and intricate interplay between vision and vision technologies, while considering both their historical development and their ongoing entanglement. By asking these questions it also became necessary to look into the scientific aspects of sight and light, and therefore an interdisciplinary approach emerged.”