Artist and Alum Carolyn Lazard (MFA’19) Awarded MacArthur “Genius Grant”

Artist Carolyn Lazard, a 2019 graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at the Weitzman School of Design at Penn, has received a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship, widely known as a “genius grant.”

The MacArthur Fellowship is a five-year $800,000 grant given to individuals who, according to the MacArthur Foundation, show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future. Past Fellows in the visual arts include Paul Chan, Nicole Eisenman, Kerry James Marshall, and Julie Mehretu.

“The 2023 MacArthur Fellows are applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities,” said MacArthur Fellows Director Marlies Carruth in a statement. “They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good, and deepen understanding of systems shaping our environment.”

Self-identified as living with multiple autoimmune diseases, Lazard uses video, sculpture, text, and performance to explore issues of care and dependency.

“My work begins with the impulse to document my life in biomedical purgatory,” they explained in a 2015 statement for the Wynn Newhouse Awards. “Chronic illness is often seen as a private matter or a hyper-personal misfortune. It is rarely viewed as an experience deeply embedded in structures of power and meaning. As such, documenting chronic illness destabilizes the separation of public and private spheres.”

Lazard has also written about the experience of chronic illness and disability, including the 2019 publication Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice, a guide for nonprofit arts institutions.

The artist first came to prominence in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the much-publicized survey of contemporary American art, as one of just 75 individuals and collectives selected by the exhibition’s curators. Their exhibited work, Extended Stay, featured a bench and wall-mounted monitor tuned to cable television, establishing a connection between the experience of museum visitors and hospital patients.

Lazard’s first US solo exhibition, Long Take, was on view at the ICA at Penn from March 10 to July 9, 2023, following its presentation by the Walker Art Center. In a 2023 interview about their work with artist Ken Lum, Marilyn Jordan Taylor Professor and chair of the Department of Fine Arts, they said, “What I hope I’m able to do in my work is to reveal the structures and infrastructural conditions that we’re all beholden to, basically, and that we all live under.”