On Tuesday, April 14, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced its 2026 class of Guggenheim Fellows, recognizing 223 artists, scholars, and scientists working across 55 fields. Selected from nearly 5,000 applicants, the fellows were chosen for both prior achievement and exceptional promise.
Among this year’s honorees are four CalArts alums recognized in Creative Arts categories.
In Fine Arts, Marina Rosenfeld (Music-Art MFA 94) is celebrated for a practice that moves fluidly across music, performance, and visual art. An inventive interdisciplinary artist, Rosenfeld first emerged with works that challenged conventions around sound, gender, and authorship. Her Sheer Frost Orchestra, first performed at CalArts in 1993, was a temporary orchestra of all-female electric guitarists. Instead of holding the guitars, the musicians left the instruments on the ground and played them with bottles of nail polish, creating a work that challenges ideas about power and the female body. Rosenfeld has noted that the questions at the center of Sheer Frost Orchestra continue to resonate through her work today, and the piece continues to be performed, including at a 30th anniversary event in 2024. Rosenfeld has presented solo works at venues including Park Avenue Armory, the Museum of Modern Art, and Portikus (Frankfurt, Germany), and received the 2024 Alpert Award in Visual Art.
Conceptual artist John Miller (Art MFA 79) was also recognized in the Fine Arts category. Across painting, sculpture, writing, and installation, Miller’s practice is marked by skepticism, irony, and sharp sociopolitical observation. He was at CalArts during a formative moment in contemporary art, when questions of culture, authorship, and mass media were being re-examined. Solo exhibitions include The Ruin of Exchange at Kunsthaus Glarus (Switzerland) in 2024, and in 2011, he received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize, accompanied by a solo exhibition at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.
Artist Fariba Hajamadi (Art MFA 82) was likewise selected in the Fine Arts category. Working across photography, printing, painting, and installation, Hajamadi creates large-scale works on fabric, canvas, and wood panels that examine cultural and gender identity, as well as histories of migration and displacement. Her recent solo exhibition, History is in the Caption, (which just closed in March) at the California Museum of Photography at UCR Arts in Riverside was accompanied by a published conversation with Judith Rodenbeck. In that exchange, Hajamadi discusses her newer bodies of work, her experiences during the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s, and her immigration to the United States in the 1980s. She has also presented solo exhibitions at Christine Burgin in New York, Galerie Laage-Salomon in Paris, and Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie in France.
Jazz composer and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis (Music MFA 10) was recognized in the Music Composition category. The acclaimed artist recently released his 16th album, Apple Cores, and is touring this year. Rooted in jazz, the album is also informed by the rhythms and textures of hip-hop and funk. It was created by the James Brandon Lewis Trio, with Lewis, Chad Taylor on drums and mbira, and Josh Werner on bass and guitar. The record took shape through a collective compositional process over two intense, entirely improvised sessions. Lewis is also a MacDowell Fellow in Music and has been recognized by NPR, the ASCAP Foundation, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
In the Guggenheim Foundation’s official announcement, President Edward Hirsch said, “Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship.” He added that the foundation is honored to support the fellows’ “visionary contributions.”
Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals.
