Kate Gilmore Honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship

She earned the award in the fine arts category.

Congratulations to Kate Gilmore, associate professor of art+design, on her Guggenheim Fellowship award—one of 25 individuals honored for their work in the fine arts.

Gilmore is among 175 scholars, artists, and scientists selected on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise from a group of almost 3,000 applicants to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 94th competition.  

“We congratulate Kate Gilmore on her selection as a recipient for this prestigious award. We’re proud of her commitment to exploring and challenging social constructs through her art, and grateful for her dedication to inspiring the next generation of socially engaged artists,” says President Thomas J. Schwarz

Describing the focus of her work, Gilmore says, “I will be working on a series of exhibitions and live performances with groups of individuals that address our current state, how we choose to participate in it, and how we as a community can demand it change.  Through expressive resistance, I hope to challenge the ways in which we perceive notions of strength, authority, and control in our social arena.”

Gilmore received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and her BA from Bates College.

She has participated in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, The Moscow Biennial, and PS1 Greater New York, MoMA/PS1, in addition to solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Everson Museum, MoCA Cleveland, Public Art Fund, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

She has been the recipient of awards such as the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Rauschenberg Residency Award, Art Prize Jury Award, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Art Matters Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Award for Artistic Excellence, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, and two fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts.

Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago among others. 

Edward Hirsch, president of the Foundation, is enthusiastic about the Fellows in the class of 2018. “These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best. Each year since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has bet everything on the individual, and we’re thrilled to continue to do so with this wonderfully talented and diverse group. It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do,” he says. 

The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is one of the unique characteristics of the Fellowship program.

In all, forty-nine scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, sixty-nine different academic institutions, thirty-one states, and three Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from twenty-nine to eighty.

Kate Gilmore, Walk the Walk, 2010 (Performance/Installation, Public Art Fund, New York, New York; Women dressed in yellow walking atop a painted yellow structure)