MacArthur seeds change with `genius grants' -- Sept. 30, 2021 column

By MARSHA MERCER

An acid attack when he was just 4 years old disfigured and blinded Joshua A. Miele for life.

A deranged neighbor came to the Miele family’s door in Brooklyn, N.Y., and threw sulfuric acid in the child’s face.

Miele, 52, didn’t let the tragedy stop him. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley and became a designer of adaptive technology. He currently works at Amazon, helping blind and visually impaired people use everyday technologies.

“I want to be famous for the right reasons, for the work I’ve done, and not for some stupid thing that happened to me 40 years ago,” Miele told The New York Times in 2013. And now he is.

Miele is one of the 25 exceptionally creative people the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced would receive $625,000, no strings attached, paid out in quarterly installments over five years.

The awards are popularly known as “genius grants,” but the foundation does not use the term as it connotes intelligence, but not creativity or originality. The foundation calls the winners fellows.

“As we emerge from the shadows of the past two years, this class of 25 Fellows helps us reimagine what’s possible,” Cecilia Conrad, managing director of the fellows program, said in a statement on macfound.org.

This year’s group includes historians, scientists, economists, artists, poets, performers, filmmakers and activists. Many have devoted their careers to raising consciousness about systemic racism, inequality and social injustice, and almost all challenge the existing state of affairs in one way or another.

Proving there are second acts in life, two recipients are former prison inmates.

Reginald Dwayne Betts, 40, is a poet and lawyer at Yale Law School who served nearly nine years in prison for carjacking when he was 16. He turned his life around with books, reading and writing in his cell every day.

A practicing lawyer, he represents incarcerated clients on issues of clemency, cash bail and lengthy prison terms and recently started building libraries in prisons.

Desmond Meade, 54, a civil rights activist, triumphed over addiction, homelessness and a 15-year prison sentence for possession of a firearm as a felon. He is executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, working to restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated persons.

Historian and writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton, writes extensively about race issues and has argued that Black elected officials are often complicit in perpetuating systemic racism by supporting policies that maintain the status quo.

Among the better-known winners is Ibram X. Kendi, author of the 2019 bestseller book “How to be an Antiracist,” which sold 2 million copies.

Safiya Noble, an internet studies and digital media scholar at UCLA, is author of “Algorithms of Oppression,” which contends search engines are biased, not neutral, and magnify racism, sexism and harmful stereotypes.

Monica Munoz Martinez, a public historian, studies and writes about cases of racial violence along the Texas-Mexico border in the 20^th century.

Filmmakers Cristine Ibarra and her partner Alex Rivera each won grants for their work exploring the immigrant experience. Ibarra describes herself as coming from “a long line of border crossers,” and Rivera has long been interested in “society that needs work but rejects workers.”

No one can apply for a MacArthur grant, and winners are nominated and chosen in a confidential process that can take years. Recipients must either live in the United States or be U.S. citizens. Elected officials or anyone who holds a high government office are ineligible.

The grants are designed to liberate recipients to pursue their creative instincts “for the benefit of human society.”

An additional benefit is that the grants program resonates with the rest of us. A 2012 study found it “inspires members of the general public to pursue their own personal creative activities and to think about how they can use their own skills and ideas to make the world a better place.”

Now more than ever, we need our best minds to tackle the persistent problems facing our country and the world. Although popular culture encourages and rewards the lowest common denominator, the MacArthur grants remind each of us to use our talents to challenge the status quo.

©2021 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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When geniuses walked the Earth -- now! -- Oct. 3, 2019 column

By MARSHA MERCER         

Imagine you receive $625,000 out of the blue with no strings attached.

What would you do? Quit your job, pack your bags and take an extended vacation?

Ah, that’s what separates most of us from MacArthur fellows. The winners of what are commonly known as “genius grants” choose to keep working. For that, we can be grateful.  

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation yearly awards fellowships to residents or citizens of the United States who exhibit extraordinary creativity. Each receives $625,000 in quarterly installments over five years.  

With the bitter fight over presidential impeachment dominating the news 24/7, it was easy to miss the foundation’s Sept. 25 quiet and purely positive announcement.

The diverse group of 26 fellows ranges in age from 30 to 67, and includes scientists, historians, professors, writers and artists.

The foundation takes a wide view of artistic and intellectual creativity, theoretical and practical. The grants give promising thinkers and doers the freedom and flexibility to pursue their work wherever it leads.

In several ways, the genius grants seem distinctly not of our time, when outrageous remarks and behavior command far more attention than being smart and working hard.

The foundation doesn’t even use the word genius. A reporter called the first fellowships genius grants in 1981, and the term stuck.

Ours is an age of relentless self-promotion, but no one can apply for a grant. You must be nominated by authorities in your field, and the selection process is private. Anyone who holds elective office or an advanced government post is automatically ineligible.

Recipients are called with the good news and allowed to tell only one person until the big announcement a couple of weeks later.

Most grantees have never gone viral and, thus, are largely unknown to the public. The 2019 class includes several fellows tackling seemingly intractable scientific and social problems.

Four are working on climate change and its effects. Three are scientists: Andrea Dutton, 46, at the University of Wisconsin, who studies melting ice sheets; Stacy Jupiter, 43, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, who works in Fiji on conservation efforts, and Jerry Mitrovica, 58, of Harvard University, who studies rising sea levels. Artist Mel Chin, 67, lives in Egypt, N.C.

Jenny Tung, 37, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke, studies how social experiences affect rates of disease and longevity in baboons in Kenya, work that could apply to humans.

Attorney Sujartha Baliga, 48, practices restorative justice, survivor-centered alternatives to the traditional legal system. Legal scholar Danielle Citron, 50, studies the effects of cyber harassment and hate crimes. Lisa Daugaard, 53, director of the Public Defender Association in Washington state, is a criminal justice reformer.

Urban designer Emmanuel Pratt, 42, revitalizes abandoned buildings and communities on Chicago’s South Side with agriculture and new construction.

Literary scholar Jeffrey Alan Miller, 35, discovered the earliest known draft of the King James Bible. Classicist Emily Wilson, 47, was the first woman to translate “The Odyssey” into English.

Ocean Vuong, 30, who came to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam at the age of 2, is a poet and fiction writer. Lynda Barry, 63, is a graphic novelist, Mary Halvorson, 38, a guitarist and composer, and Sarah Michelson, 55, a choreographer.

No one looks over fellows’ shoulders or reports on how they use the money. 

“If every fellow hit only home runs, we would worry that we were not taking enough risks or that we’d chosen the wrong people,” Cecilia A. Conrad, the program’s director, wrote in a 2013 op-ed in The Washington Post.

Among fellows who have hit home runs: surgeon and writer Atul Gawande and writers Cormac McCarthy and Te-Nehisi Coates.

Even today, most of the 1,040 MacArthur grantees aren’t famous, even if they have made significant contributions to a better world.

Few know the name Joel Schwartz, the first government worker to win a genius grant. But, as a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator once said, we should think of Schwartz every time we fill up our car with gas.

An epidemiologist toiling at EPA in the 1980s, Schwartz did the research into the health effects of lead exposure that resulted in the phaseout of lead in gasoline. 

Schwartz won in 1991, when the grant was $275,000. He continues his research at Harvard.

These dark and turbulent times in Washington challenge our sense of optimism about the American future. To stay positive, we’ll need to focus on what’s going right in the country.

The MacArthur genius grants give us hope.   

©2019 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Genius, Nobel prizes shine light, dispel gloom -- Oct. 12, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

For anyone who needed a shot of optimism, this was a good week.

Don’t get me wrong. The news – an acclaimed Hollywood mogul allegedly molested women for years, raging wildfires devastate California, the White House limps from tweet to tweet – has been depressing.

But there were bright spots in the gloom.  

The first encouraging words came from Sweden with the announcement of the 2017 Nobel prizes. The highly prestigious awards recognize often obscure scholars and others whose work has been of “the greatest benefit to mankind.”

The Nobel prizes also pull us back from our obsession with the day’s outrages to consider what’s going right in our world.

Eight Americans won solo or shared the prizes in chemistry, medicine, physics and economics. Each prize comes with a $1.1 million check. We lost out on peace and literature, but President Barack Obama won the peace prize in 2009 and Bob Dylan for literature last year.

Then came the MacArthur fellowships, commonly known as “genius grants.” The awards from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recognize residents or citizens of the United States with exceptional creativity.

Two dozen lucky souls won this merit lottery this year, and each will receive a $625,000 grant over five years with no strings attached.

Genius grants are meant to give promising thinkers and doers in a wide range of fields the freedom to pursue their work.

No one can apply for a grant; you must be nominated – and anyone who holds elective office or an advanced government post is automatically ineligible. Nominations and the selection process are hush-hush.

At a time when being smart seems less important than having a smart mouth, the Nobel prizes and the MacArthur awards are a gift. They remind us of the power of education, hard work and perseverance and of the vitality and rich experiences immigrants bring to America.

Two of the American Nobel winners immigrated from Germany decades ago. Joachim Frank, 77, a professor at Columbia University, shared the chemistry prize with scientists in Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Rainer Weiss, 85, who is affiliated with MIT, was one of three American winners of the physics prize. 

Last year, all six of the Americans who won the Nobel prizes in economics or the sciences were immigrants, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research group. Of the 85 Nobel prizes Americans have won in chemistry, medicine or physics since 2000, 33 have gone to immigrants, the group reported.

Among this year’s 24 genius grant winners were Gabriel Victora, 40, a Brazilian-born immunologist with a Ph.D. from New York University who studies how antibodies fight infection. 

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, 34, is a Nigerian-born painter who graduated from Swarthmore and Yale, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, 46, is a Vietnamese-American novelist with a Ph.D. from Berkeley. He also won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. 

One theme of the genius grants this year was social change, and several winners work to help improve immigrants’ lives directly or by telling their stories.

Cristina Jimenez Moreta, 33, a social organizer, is a former undocumented immigrant who came to the United States from Ecuador as a child with her family. She is co-founder and executive director of United We Dream, which advocates for immigrant youth.

“For me, this recognition is a recognition of the lives of undocumented people, of the work that we have been doing to advocate and create change,” she told The Washington Post.

Greg Asbed, 54, a Baltimore native with degrees from Brown and Johns Hopkins, is a human rights strategist who founded the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida.

Rami Nashashibi, 44, of Chicago, a community organizer with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, founded the Inner-City Muslim Action Network. It helps immigrants and people of color with housing, health and other necessities.

Anthropologist Jason De Leon, 40, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, founded the Undocumented Migration Project, which researches clandestine traffic along the border and collects artifacts, such as clothing and backpacks, left in the desert.

Describing this year’s crop of MacArthur fellows, Cecilia Conrad, managing director of the program, said in a statement: “Their work gives us reason for optimism and inspires us all.”

Yes, it does. And these awards also remind us why America’s role as a beacon of hope for the world still matters.

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The end of American genius? Say it isn't so -- July 17, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

To modern ears, the phrase “American genius” may drip with irony or smack of clever marketing. 

Apple stores have Genius Bars to help technological dunces. Towns in Missouri branded Highway 36 a “Way of American Genius.” Sliced Bread Saturday in Chillicothe, Mo., is Aug. 2, if you’re hungry for a morsel of genius.

Even the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation does not call the 20 to 30 people a year who get $625,000 grants over five years “geniuses” or the awards “genius grants.” Those were media labels that stuck. Officially, the winners are MacArthur fellows.

We weren’t always so skeptical about the prospect of cultivating American genius. Long before there was a National Gallery of Art or a Phillips Collection, there was the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the first art museum in Washington, D.C., and one of the first in the United States.  

When art collector William W. Corcoran opened his gallery in 1869, he stated the mission clearly: The Corcoran Gallery was to be “used solely for the purpose of encouraging American genius.”

Students congregated in the new museum, sketching and painting the works of art. Delighted, Corcoran donated money in 1878 to start an art school. The Corcoran School of Art opened in 1890, two years after his death. 

The art collection outgrew the first Corcoran Gallery, located at the corner of 17^th Street NW and Pennsylvania Avenue, in the building that now houses the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. The Corcoran trustees bought a lot nearby and built a new building at 17^th and New York Avenue, across from the White House. The opening in 1897 drew President Grover Cleveland and his cabinet.

After encouraging American genius for 145 years, the Corcoran has fallen on hard times. It’s facing what Philip Kennicott, art critic for The Washington Post, called “cultural euthanasia.” The museum has gone to court to get permission essentially to break its historic charter.

“It is impracticable or impossible for the operations of the Corcoran to continue in their current form,” the museum says in documents filed with the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

As a private museum that charges admission, the Corcoran competes with the Smithsonian empire and National Gallery, all of which are free.

After suffering financial problems for more than a decade, the Corcoran has agreed to give its more than 17,000 art works to the National Gallery and its Beaux Arts-style building to George Washington University. GW will operate the Corcoran College of Art + Design and take care of needed electrical, heating and ventilation and plumbing repairs estimated to cost $70 million to $100 million.

A Save the Corcoran group alleges that “egregious mismanagement” led to the gallery’s downfall and is fighting the mergers. The gallery insists this course is the best way to honor Corcoran’s wishes, given the financial constraints. The Corcoran Gallery is scheduled to close Oct. 1.

The National Gallery will incorporate the art it wants into its collection and will send the art it doesn’t want to other museums, with preference to museums in the Washington area.

The plan is that after some renovations, the Corcoran will reopen as “Corcoran Contemporary, NGA,” with contemporary and modern art from the Corcoran and National Gallery collections. As part of the National Gallery, the new Corcoran will be open to the public for free.

A small “Legacy Gallery” of paintings -- as well as the Salon Doré, an 18^th century French period room; the French mantle, and the Canova Lions -- will be kept on site, reminders of Corcoran’s dream of encouraging American genius.

If you want a lasting memento of the glory that once was the Corcoran, its beautiful catalogue, “Corcoran Gallery of Art American Paintings to 1945,” has been marked down in the final days of the Corcoran Museum Shop.

The 336-page, hardcover volume with full-color prints, explanations and copious footnotes went for $60 when it was published in 2012. The other day, I bought a copy for $7.97. Sadly, genius never came so cheap.

©2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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