Hopinka named 2022 MacArthur Fellow

Artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka has been named one of 25 recipients of the 2022 MacArthur fellowship, an annual prize that recognizes individuals across disciplines for “exceptional creativity [and] promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments,” and who show “potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.” The fellowship comes with an unrestricted stipend of $800,000, paid out over five years.

ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger writes:

Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, has been crafting a rich body of experimental films, installations, and photographs over the past decade. Many of these works are focused on cultural memory, Indigenous history, and the secrets contained within landscapes, with works such as I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become (2016), an ode to the late Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi poet Diane Burns that moves in and out of abstraction, receiving prominent placement in museum shows. Films such as that one, the MacArthur Foundation said, offer “new strategies of representation for the expression of Indigenous worldviews.”

Sky Hopinka, These are their ribbons, 2020
The Land Describes Itself series 3
ink jet print, etching
13 x 13 inches

Other honorees this year include artist Paul Chan, bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi), writer Kiese Laymon, and musician Martha Gonzalez.