Houston playwright, visual artist awarded Guggenheim Fellowship for their work in the arts
Two Houstonians were among the 171 people chosen for Guggenheim Fellowships, which are awarded annually to “provide Fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible.” Playwright Celeste Bedford Walker and visual artist Jamal Cyrus were among this year’s Fellows announced Thursday.
A prolific and oftawarded playwright, Walker has enjoyed particular renown recently for her great body of work. Last year she was granted the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Texas Institute of Letters. Earlier this year, Texas A&M University
Press published a collection of her work, “Sassy Mamas and Other Plays.”
Both Walker and Cyrus were awarded in the Creative Arts category by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Walker was one of five people honored in the drama and performance art subcategory.
Cyrus, a Houston native who earned a bachelor’s in fine arts from the University of Houston, was one of 25 Fellows in the Fine Arts category. A Driskill Prize winner, his “The End of My Beginning” exhibition showed at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston as well as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Those who visited the Contemporary Art Museum Houston’s presentation of “The Dirty South” last year will have seen his recent work, as Cyrus has been using old blue jeans as a material for abstract pieces in the “format of the quilt to document aspects of Black political history.”
The Guggenheim Fellowships were created 98 years ago by Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim. Since then, nearly $400 million has been distributed to more than 18,000 fellows to help facilitate their work.