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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