Our latest roundup of Pew Fellows news highlights artists who are working together across disciplines, adapting their work for major national exhibitions, and receiving recognition from other respected fellowships.
Pew Fellows Honored
The 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, announced this spring, includes choreographer Jaamil Olawale Kosoko (2020) and composer David Serkin Ludwig (2018). Chosen from nearly 5,000 applicants, they joined a cohort of 223 mid-career practitioners who are “representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” according to the Guggenheim Foundation’s president, Edward Hirsch.
Additionally, Maia Chao (2022) is among the 50 artists to receive a Fellowship from United States Artists. Chao will receive $50,000 in unrestricted funding, as well as access to tailored services such as financial planning, career consulting, legal advice, and personal care.
Pew Fellows Teaming Up
Documentary filmmaker Jos Duncan-Asé (2025) tapped poets Ursula Rucker (2018) and Yolanda Wisher (2015) to serve as editorial leadership for a digital relaunch of The Poet’s Press. A journalism initiative by Duncan-Asé’s Love Now Media that commissions and publishes new poetry, The Poet’s Press originally existed from 2021 through 2025. Rucker and Wisher laud “its power to shape new opportunities for contemporary poets” and build “an infrastructure for poets to be featured, paid, and part of a storytelling ecosystem that [goes] beyond performance.” Submissions are open now, and weekly publication of new work begins in September.
Rucker also plays a prominent role in Generate Music, the newest release by PRISM Quartet (August 14, XAS Records). The album documents a live recording of a Center-supported world premiere performance, exploring the ties between Jewish and Black Americans. In addition to appearing as a vocalist on the album, Rucker is one of nine artists commissioned to create new work for the project, a list that also includes Pew Fellows Tyshawn Sorey (2024), Susan Watts (2014), Diane Monroe (2018), as well as PRISM founder and co-artistic director Matthew Levy (2016).
DJ, composer, and scholar King Britt (2007) brought his ongoing Blacktronika project home to Philadelphia during ArtPhilly’s What Now: 2026 festival in June, staging reunions and tributes to iconic Philadelphia club nights (including Black Lily, Back To Basics, and ROCKERS) over the course of a week; these events included performances by drummer Chuck Treece (2010), as well as Rucker. Britt spoke with the Philadelphia Inquirer about why a history of Black electronic music can’t exist without Philly. Next year, he’ll curate the African American Museum in Philadelphia’s Center-supported exhibition Tangible : Blacktronika Artifacts and Archives.
Performance artist Rose Jarboe (2025) and costume designer Rebecca Kanach (2025) are two central players in Priority Hoarding: A Retrospectacle. Opening in September, the interactive experience surveys 15 years of Bearded Ladies Cabaret and contemplates the future of queer art through set pieces, costumes, and performances. Supported by a Center grant, Priority Hoarding is part of the 2026 Philadelphia Fringe Festival’s curated slate of programming and takes place at a pop-up Northern Liberties space dubbed The Hairport through December 20.
Pew Fellows At Work
Playwright James Ijames (2015) is expanding his creative practice into opera through an adaptation of his play Good Bones, which interrogates redevelopment and changing communities through the lens of a young Black couple renovating their home. Ijames is at work on the libretto, with music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Michael Abels. The production receives its world premiere in 2028 at the Cincinnati Opera.
Musician and poet Camae Ayewa, who performs as Moor Mother (2017), and her free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements released their fifth studio album, Future Present Past, in April on Impulse! Records. Jazz Times critic Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer called it a record “shaped by memory, resistance and the unfinished work of survival.” Ayewa also releases a limited-run a cappella project Hundred And One For Trane, a series of poems released to mark John Coltrane’s 100th birthday, in September.
Filmmaker Tshay (2024) premiered her first animated short, Tell Me When You Get Home, at the 2026 SXSW film festival in Austin, Texas. It tells the story of an encounter between a 15-year-old girl and the spirit of her late mother, exploring grief, healing, and the power of family; it also screened as part of the 2026 Black Star Film Festival, where it won a jury award special mention. Read more about Tshay in this interview for our Questions of Practice series.
Architect Brian Philips (2011) activated vacant storefronts on Philadelphia’s Market Street retail corridor this summer, enlisting what Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron called “quirky local businesses that have strong community and social media followings” to set up pop-up retail businesses for the summer months.
Pew Fellows Curating
Writer Carmen Maria Machado (2023) curated The Object of Power is Power, an exhibition of contemporary Cuban artist Rocío García’s work, on view at New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art through September 20. In an interview with Vogue, Machado said “It’s not me coming at it from the perspective of an art historian or something, it’s more me asking: What is my creative response to this work?”
Filmmaker Mark Kendall (2016) reflected on the 250th Anniversary of America’s founding through American Chimera, a multimedia exploration of the iconography of the bald eagle. The exhibition, which closed on August 1, was the first at the Center for Decelerated Practice, a new arts incubator in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood that Kendall purchased with funds from his Fellowship.
Pew Fellows Exhibiting
The Whitney Biennial, which opened in March and remains on partial view through October 12, features the work of three Pew Fellows: Jonathan González (2025), Michelle Lopez (2024), and Maia Chao (2022). González staged a dance piece in May on the Whitney’s eighth floor terrace and exhibited photographs in its gallery throughout the show; Lopez installed her Center-supported multimedia work Pandemonium in the exhibition; and Chao staged interactive performances in the gallery on select dates of the Biennial, with instructional text displayed on gallery walls throughout the run.
Additionally, Chao’s performance piece American Idle will be restaged in Times Square on August 14, accompanied by a month-long installation of her photography. Lopez’s exhibition Shadow of a Doubt was on view this spring at Tufts University Art Galleries, and she is scheduled to exhibit at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles in November of 2026. And ARTnews' Alex Greenberger just called González “the performance artist of the moment” in an in-depth feature article.
Odili Donald Odita (2022) is one of “18 Artists Having the Biggest Moment at U.S. Museums Right Now,” according to Artnet. His large-scale installation Songs From Life is on view in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through Spring of 2027; Odita’s work was also recently part of America Today, a Center-supported exhibition at The Print Center in Philadelphia.
Visual artist Roberto Lugo (2019) had three major showings of his work this year. His solo exhibition American Crib ran at Philadelphia’s The Clay Studio from April 9 to July 9 and situated his ceramic vessels and wall hangings in a living room-style sitting. In New York, Lugo unveiled two monumental pieces in Madison Square Park for Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter), the largest public exhibition of his work to date. It paid tribute to his Puerto Rican heritage and Philadelphia roots through portraits of family members and cultural heroes, as well as hip-hop and graffiti iconography. Lugo was also commissioned to create a four-foot ceramic jar depicting the Michener Art Museum's past transformation from the Bucks County Jail to an arts institution.
A new piece by interdisciplinary artist Michelle Angela Ortiz (2018), Carriers of Light and Labor, was created for the New Jersey Monuments to Migration and Labor Project. Unveiled July 17 at City Hall in Patterson, the five-monument installation is inspired by the industrial and labor history and the interwoven stories of migration that link communities across North Jersey.
The life and work of printmaker AP Gorny (1994) is the subject of the exhibition Different from the Rest, on view at the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library through October. The exhibition highlights the breadth of Gorny’s career through oral histories, digitized archival materials, and examples of his printmaking work.
