Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Jennifer Bonner (MArch ’09) and Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar Walter Hood are among the 60 recipients of the United States Artists (USA) 2021 USA Fellowship. According to USA’s press release, the USA Fellowship is the organization’s flagship program, and is central to USA’s mission of supporting artists and their essential role in society. (Hood presents the GSD’s annual Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture on February 23, 2021.)
The USA Fellowship is awarded to artists and designers at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. The sixty recipients this year are distributed across ten design and creative fields, including dance, film, theater, traditional and visual arts, and writing; Bonner and Hood were recognized within the category of architecture and design.
Each of the 2021 USA Fellows receives an unrestricted $50,000 award to support their ongoing artistic and professional development. Past recipients include painter and visual artist Howardena Pindell (2020), documentary flmmaker Laura Poitras (2010), writer Teju Cole (2015), potter Roberto Lugo (2016), multimedia artist Paul Chan (2007), dancer and choreographer Alice Sheppard (2019), fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte (2009), flmmaker Barry Jenkins (2012), master Mardi Gras suitmaker Darryl Montana (2014), poet Claudia Rankine (2016), and multidisciplinary artist Martha Rosler (2008).
Based in Chicago, USA is a national arts funding organization that raises funds and redistributes them in the form of unrestricted awards to “the country’s most compelling artists and cultural practitioners.” Since 2006, USA has awarded more than 700 individuals with over $33 million of direct support.
Bonner is Associate Professor of Architecture at the GSD. After graduating from the GSD in 2009, she founded her design office MALL, and has since earned a range of awards and honors, including the Architectural League’s Prize for Young Architects + Designers, the AIA Young Architects Forum’s Emerging Voices Award, and Architect magazine’s Progressive Architecture (P/A) and Next Progressives awards. Bonner is the author of A Guide to the Dirty South: Atlanta, faculty editor of Platform: Still Life, and a guest editor for ART PAPERS special issue on architecture and design of Los Angeles. Bonner has exhibited work at the Royal Institute of British Architects, National Building Museum, WUHO gallery, HistoryMIAMI, Yve YANG gallery, pinkcomma gallery, Armstrong Gallery at Kent State), Yale Architecture Gallery, Istanbul Modern Museum, Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, among other engagements.
Recently named the GSD’s Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar, Walter Hood is the David K. Woo Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and was recently the Spring 2020 Diana Balmori Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. He is Creative Director and Founder of the Oakland-based Hood Design Studio, which he established in 1992. Hood recently co-edited Black Landscapes Matter (2020, University of Virginia Press) alongside Grace Mitchell Tada. His Senior Loeb Scholar appointment follows a series of recent honors: He is a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, 2019 Knight Foundation Public Spaces Fellowship, and 2019 MacArthur Fellowship. In December 2020, Hood Design Studio made its debut on the esteemed AD100 list.