MacArthur Foundation Makes 2007’s “Genius” Awards

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced this year’s recipients of what the media have dubbed the “Genius Awards.” Formally, these are the MacArthur Fellowships, $500,000 over 5 years, no-strings attached. “The MacArthur Foundation supports highly creative individuals and institutions with the ability and the promise to make a difference in shaping and improving our future,” said MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton. They are an astonishing group, proof that genius is spread rather widely around the world.

This year, there are 13 men and 11 women receiving the prize. They range in age from 33 to 67. Sixteen of them work at academic or other non-profits. Five were born outside of the US. They range from nano-technicians (if that is the proper term), to biologists, to public health officers, to anthropologists, to musicians, writers and dancers. In short, these are global citizens who represent the best of global culture.

Ellen Silbergeld, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who won a grant in 1993, told the Baltimore Sun, “The thing it really did is give you a sense of empowerment and daring. It gives you this sense of freedom.” Talent unfettered by the need to make a living tends to benefit society. The paper also said, “The first thing Silbergeld, a renowned toxicologist, did with the grant - $290,000 her year - was fund her research in mercury exposure among gold miners in Brazil. That, and buy a harpsichord.”

Precisely what this year’s class of Fellows will do with the money is anyone’s guess. Painter Joan Snyder might want to use hers to get her paintings out of museum basements, “At least two major museums in New York own my work, and it sits in the basement,” she told the MI<>New York Sun,the Met and MoMA, “and now the Guggenheim has one, and I hope they hang it.” Playwright Lynn Nottage said, “Hopefully, what the award means is more opportunity for myself and other African American women who are writers. ... I feel we are treated like second class citizens and I hope this shines a light on what I can do.” She’s developing a workshop production at Chicago’s Goodman Theater of “Ruined.”

Perhaps, the most interesting recipient is Deborah Bial, Founder and President of the Posse Foundation. As MSNBC reported

Bial was working with New York City public school students in a leadership program when one of the program’s alumni tried to explain to her why he struggled after high school. “He said, ’I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me,”’ she said. The conversation inspired Bial, then 23, to create the program that identifies promising teenagers from urban environments and gets them pre-collegiate training in small groups with other students — their “posse” — destined for the same school. Since then, the New York-based foundation has placed nearly 2,000 students from six cities at 28 colleges. They graduate at a rate of more than 90 percent.”