See what our esteemed Pew Fellows have been up to, from new records and films to major awards.
Awards & Recognition
Poet Sonia Sanchez (1993) is being celebrated on the occasion of her 90th birthday with a month of festivities in her honor. Every Monday in September, the Healing Verse Poetry Line (1-855-POEM-RX2) offers new poetry inspired by Sanchez. On September 24, Mural Arts hosts a rededication of a mural in Vernon Park in Germantown, Peace is a Haiku Song, which features a haiku written by Sanchez. On September 26, Temple Libraries hosts a conversation with the artist as part of its Chat in the Stacks series. The Barnes Foundation hosted readings, screenings, and other programming on September 1.
Watch Sonia Sanchez discuss her creative life and legacy with poet and Pew Fellow Major Jackson.
Two Pew Fellows, photographer Ada Trillo (2022) and poet Airea D. Matthews (2020), have been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for 2024. Trillo and Matthews are among 188 artists across 52 disciplines to receive awards this year. Each Guggenheim Fellow receives a stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions,” according to the Guggenheim Foundation. Matthews also earned a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for her Bread and Circus: Poems.
Visual artist Pepón Osorio (2006) received a Latinx Artist Fellowship from the US Latinx Art Forum, along with fourteen other US-based artists of Latin American or Caribbean descent. Each artist receives $50,000. USLAF notes, “Osorio’s work emphasizes the exhibition space as an intermediary between the social architecture of communities and the mainstream art world.” Osorio also created an immersive installation at Thomas Jefferson University’s health sciences campus exploring community-based care and the artist’s personal experience as a cancer survivor. On view through November 1, Convalescence includes materials from Osorio’s journey and stories from others who have experienced life-threatening illnesses.
Writer and director Tina Satter’s (2019) film Reality won a Peabody Award, which honors “excellence in storytelling that reflects the social issues and the emerging voices of our day.” Adapted from Satter’s play Is This a Room, Reality tells the story of NSA contractor Reality Winner (played by Sydney Sweeney) and is based on the transcript of the FBI’s interrogation of her.
Musician and poet Camae Ayewa (2017), known professionally as Moor Mother, has been awarded the second Chanel Next Prize. Launched in 2021, the Chanel Next Prize biennially awards ten contemporary artists who are innovators in their disciplines. Each recipient receives €100,000, two years of mentorship, and access to an international networking program formed in collaboration with Chanel's partners. In recent months, Moor Mother also released an album, The Great Bailout, and a book of poetry, American Equations in Black Classical Music: Counting the Beat, Blues Time, & Temporal Alchemy, available through Hat & Beard Press.
Interdisciplinary artist Adebunmi Gbadebo (2022) is now represented by Nicola Vassell Gallery in New York. In an announcement, the gallery describes the artist’s work: “Rooted in experimentation, the artist's practice reimagines native crafts to uncover ancient narratives embodied in object-making practices.”
Composer Robert Maggio (1999) has been awarded the 2024 Richard Rodgers Studio Production Award for his musical Far From the Tree. Presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, this award is given to emerging composers and writers to support them in New York City productions. Far From the Tree is inspired by Andrew Solomon’s nonfiction book of the same name and follows three sets of parents raising children who are incredibly different from themselves.
New Works
Visual artist Alex Da Corte (2012) collaborated with Philadelphia musician Tierra Whack on the visual elements for her newest album, World Wide Whack, along with three music videos. Da Corte directed videos for “27 Club,” “Shower Song,” and “Two Night.” In an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Whack says that when she visited Alex Da Corte’s studio, she “felt like a kid in a candy store.” Da Corte has also recently collaborated with St. Vincent to direct the video for her song “Broken Man.”
Writer Rasheedah Phillips’ (2017) new book, Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time, will be published in January 2025 and is available for preorder now. Phillips—Camae Ayewa’s Black Quantum Futurism collaborator—draws on “philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and [the writer’s] own art practice and work on housing policy…to expand the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved,” according to the publisher, AK Press.
Harpist and composer Mary Lattimore (2014) collaborated with accordionist Walt McClements on the album Rain On The Road, which explores the life of musicians both on the road and in the studio. In an interview with Broadway World, Lattimore said, “I can hear both the road-selves and the home-selves in these recordings, the two sides that don't always get to meet.”
Glenn Holsten’s (1997) documentary Jamie Wyeth and the Unflinching Eye, released by Juno Films at the Quad Cinema in April, is the filmmaker’s seventh feature-length film. It follows Jamie Wyeth’s journey to find his own artistic voice as the son and grandson of two iconic American painters.
Filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford (2020) premiered their latest feature, Dreams in Nightmares, at the BlackStar Film Festival. In a statement, festival director Nehad Khader said, “It’s hard to imagine a more exciting film for the opening night of the 2024 festival. Imbued with a sense of radical possibility, Dreams in Nightmares is the kind of genre-defying work that our audience has long embraced, reflecting a collective vision of a more liberatory world.”
Writer and director Tayarisha Poe’s (2017) film The Young Wife, starring Kiersey Clemons and Leon Bridges, is now streaming. In a Variety review of the film, Lisa Kennedy observed, “If Poe’s 2019 debut Selah and the Spades—set amid the cliques at an East Coast prep school—tossed and teased the high-school meanies genre, this film plies the fairytale quandaries of a female protagonist with creative jukes toward Black futurism. The look is sumptuous, stylized: honoring the natural world of the location (it was shot in Savannah, Georgia) while resisting any realism.”
Musician Bill Nace (2020) and Body/Head bandmate Kim Gordon performed an improvised electric guitar piece at Gagosian in Los Angeles in the gallery of the Jim Shaw: Thinking the Unthinkable exhibition on view at the museum. Available to stream online now, the piece was created in response to the exhibition and “explores the unexpected found in Shaw’s paintings, juxtaposing repetitive chords and note patterns with lengthy passages of evolving distortion,” according to the museum website.
