Three CUNY Educators Win 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships

Three women from CUNY's faculty have won prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships in recognition of their groundbreaking contributions to the arts and humanities. This year's CUNY Guggenheim fellows are interdisciplinary artist Bang-Guel Han and philosophy scholar Barbara Montero, both of the College of Staten Island, and art historian Claire Bishop, of the CUNY Graduate Center.

"We congratulate Professors Han, Bishop and Montero for their selection as recipients of the highly coveted Guggenheim Fellowship," said CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. "Not only are they dynamic changemakers producing innovative, influential work in their respective fields, they are also devoted faculty members who educate and inspire the next generation of scholars."

Now in its 99th year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation this year selected 188 fellows in 52 disciplines from nearly 3,000 applicants. Scholars are honored for work in the social and natural sciences, the humanities and the creative arts, and each recipient receives a stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under "the freest possible conditions." Prior recipients include James Baldwin, Rachel Carson and Martha Graham. See the full list of 2024 Fellows.

Examining Politics, Social Constructs

Han, an associate professor at the College of Staten Island, is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, performance and code. Through her work, she examines the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of body and language in relation to social structures, representational systems and understandings of self.

"The list of recipients contains so many amazing people - I feel humbled to be in the same company," Han said, adding that she feels "elated and honored."

As a Guggenheim Fellow, Han will be working on a new interdisciplinary art project consisting of an experimental tapestry, electronic sculpture and live events in the form of public panel discussions.

Han was born and raised in Seoul and has been based in the United States since 2003. Her work has been shown in The Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Queens Museum, DOOSAN Gallery New York, SangSangMadang in Seoul and Centro Internazionale per l'Arte Contemporanea in Rome.

In her artist statement, Han said that her art practice "critically engages with manifestations of activities often associated with the feminine: talking about emotions, confessions, eavesdropping and gossiping. I'm interested in text as sites of disclosure and declaration that blur and complicate the distinction between public and private."

Exploring the Mind-Body Problem

Montero is a philosophy professor at the College of Staten Island and the University of Notre Dame. Her experience as a former professional ballet dancer helps inform her research, which is focused on two very different notions of the body: as the physical or material basis of everything, and as the moving, breathing, flesh and blood instrument that we use when we run, walk or dance.

"I feel ecstatic that my work was recognized as worthy of support," Montero said.

Her Guggenheim project will involve writing a draft of a book to be titled "Things That Matter: Actual-World Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem," which is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. The book will explore what philosophy can teach readers about both themselves and the world they inhabit. "My goal is to methodically complete a full draft. After that's done, it's pure pleasure for me," Montero said.

Montero has won fellowships and awards including the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship and the American Council of Learned Societies Charles Ryskamp Research Fellowship. She was nominated by Oxford University Press for the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, an award for which publishers are permitted to submit only one book per round.

Critic and Contrarian

Bishop, a prolific scholar and contemporary art critic, is known for her original and sometimes contrarian views and interpretations. Her book "Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship," for which she won the 2013 Frank Jewett Mather award, calls for art that engages and challenges its audience in a more intentionally assertive manner.

"So many great scholars have been Guggenheim Fellows, and there are so many I admire on the list of fellows this year. It's terrific to be in that company," Bishop said. "It's also public recognition of a more contemporary and interdisciplinary way of writing."

Her forthcoming book, "Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today," due in June from Verso Books, includes four essays about changing patterns of attention in contemporary art and performance since the early 1990s. Her essays and books have been translated into 20 languages. A professor at the CUNY Graduate Center since 2008, she has taught courses on a variety of topics, such as exhibition history, museums of contemporary art, dance and performance, histories of art education and attention and technology.

"Art history can be a very niche bubble, while the media oversimplifies," she said, speaking of her plans for the Guggenheim. "I'd like to help bring some accessibility to the former and some complexity to the latter."

Read the full announcement from the CUNY Graduate Center.

The City University of New York is the nation's largest urban public university, a transformative engine of social mobility that is a critical component of the lifeblood of New York City. Founded in 1847 as the nation's first free public institution of higher education, CUNY today has seven community colleges, 11 senior colleges and seven graduate or professional institutions spread across New York City's five boroughs, serving more than 225,000 undergraduate and graduate students and awarding 50,000 degrees each year. CUNY's mix of quality and affordability propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all the Ivy League colleges combined. More than 80 percent of the University's graduates stay in New York, contributing to all aspects of the city's economic, civic and cultural life and diversifying the city's workforce in every sector. CUNY's graduates and faculty have received many prestigious honors, including 13 Nobel Prizes and 26 MacArthur "Genius" Grants. The University's historic mission continues to this day: provide a first-rate public education to all students, regardless of means or background. To learn more about CUNY, visit https://www.cuny.edu.

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