Justin Vivian Bond
“The 2024 MacArthur Fellows pursue rigorous inquiry with aspiration and purpose. They expose biases built into emerging technologies and social systems and fill critical gaps in the knowledge of cycles that sustain life on Earth,” said MacArthur Fellows director Marlies Carruth in a statement. “Their work highlights our shared humanity, centering the agency of disabled people, the humor and histories of Indigenous communities, the emotional lives of adolescents, and perspectives of rural Americans.”
The New York–based Bond is known for using performance, particularly cabaret, to investigate politics, culture, and history as they relate to queer and trans communities. A stalwart on the downtown scene for decades, they first gained wide attention in the mid-1990s for their role as Kiki DuRane in the lounge act Kiki and Herb, which responded to the AIDS crisis with inventive and humorous songs and performances. Recent solo outings include Jasmine and Cigarettes: Songs from the Hippy Counterculture and Night Shade, both 2024.
Cokes, who lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, superimposes text phrases over colored backgrounds or images to comment on subjects including racism, pop culture, and violence. Typical of his oeuvre is Evil.16 (Torture.Musik), 2009–11, which lays bare the torture of government prisoners under the administration of George W. Bush. The video features fragments of a text on extreme coercive tactics and is scored by songs by popular artists that were played for detainees at corrosive volume and on repeat by US troops as a method of torture.
