Three Wesleyan alumni, Mary Halvorson ’02, Saidiya Hartman ’84, and Cameron Rowland ’11 received a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship grant, along with 23 other individuals. 

The grant, which gives each fellow $625,000, is awarded to individuals across scientific and artistic disciplines doing work deemed exceptionally creative or pioneering. There is no application or recommendation process for the grant, and each recipient can use the grant as they see fit. 

One of the most notable features of the MacArthur grant is its commitment to creativity within both academia and art, an aspect exemplified in the three Wesleyan Alumni selected this year to receive the grant.

Mary Halvorson ’02, an experimental guitarist and composer/songwriter, was selected for her contributions to music and her unique style fusing jazz and experimental music. 

“A lot of what I do is loosely rooted in the jazz tradition, although ultimately I try to create music that is not defined or contained by genre,” Halvorson wrote in an email to The Argus. 

When asked about the experience of receiving the grant, Halvorson recounted her surprise upon receiving the call, followed by extreme gratitude. 

“The type of music I play is not easy listening, and when I started out I never really had expectations that too many people would hear it,” she wrote. “I feel so fortunate to have a chance to continue working on what I do, and to have the opportunity to put something into the world that I feel is both meaningful and challenging.” 

Halvorson explained how she wants to use this time to study music and improve but also, most importantly, how this time would let her experiment.

“The most important thing this fellowship will help with is allowing me the time and space to create,” Halvorson wrote. “There is always an infinite number of things to learn…. Ultimately this fellowship will allow me to think bigger, and to put together projects that I would not have had the means to realize before.”

Halvorson recounted one of her musical mentors, John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, Emeritus, Anthony Braxton, as being particularly inspirational for her drive towards exploration.

“Studying with him opened up an entire musical world that I didn’t know existed, and made me realize that there are endless possibilities,” Halvorson wrote. “He encouraged me to take risks, explore, find my own thing. I took as many classes with him as I could; sometimes 3 or 4 a semester.” 

One of the other two alumni to receive the grant, Saidiya Hartman ’84, is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. In a video on the MacArthur website, Hartman describes her writing, which investigates lives that are excluded from historical records. 

“What motivates my work is writing about the lives of those who are unknown, dispossessed, exploited, disposable,” Hartman said in the video. “I guess what motivates me are the surprises in the archive: the complexity and the wonder of these lives that have largely left few traces.”

Hartman uses newspapers and recountings of legal cases, coining the phrase “critical fabulation” to describe her practice of research and historical reconstruction of personal histories.

“Critical fabulation was central to being able to resurrect forgotten history, lost lives, the millions of stories that were lost,” she said.

The third Wesleyan alumni to receive the grant, Cameron Rowland ’11, was awarded his grant for his visual and conceptual art. 

“[Rowland’s use of] physical objects and contractual relations…to make visible the mechanisms through which systemic racism is perpetuated,” the MacArthur website reads. 

Rowland’s work displays items with racial history and context around them in a gallery setting, particularly objects related to American prison and prison labor systems. Rowland’s piece “91020000,” named after the customer number Rowland was given by the state of New York’s Department of Correctional Services, consists of a series of objects he purchased, all made by inmates working from $0.10 to $1.14 an hour. His exhibition includes courtroom benches and manhole cover components. 

Part of Rowland’s exhibition also included the contracts and paperwork created from the act of purchasing the items, placing on display the process of procurement and monetary transaction that Rowland sees as a component of systemic racism.

 

Alex LaFetra Thompson can be reached at alafetrathom@wesleyan.edu.