Visual Arts Alums Awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships

On April 14, 2026, the Board of the Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced their 101st Class of Fellows. Among the 223 trailblazing artists, scientists, and scholars across 55 fields are two Visual Arts alums: artist, filmmaker, and writer-director Allison Janae Hamilton '17, artist and filmmaker Tenzin Phuntsog '06, and sculptor Michael Ross '81.

Awarded the fellowship for Fine Arts, Hamilton creates a haunting visual language in her art and films, with which she explores “Americana” as genre and landscape. Born in Kentucky and raised in Florida, with her maternal family’s farm and homestead lying in the flatlands of western Tennessee, the rural American South defines her mythic engagement with the people, the natural world, and their ancestral entanglements.

Hamilton’s work has been exhibited widely—including at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), MASS MoCA, Storm King Art Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and MoMA PS1—and is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. Her screenplay Floridaland was accepted into the Sundance Institute's Feature Film Program Development Track and her narrative short Venus of Ossabaw won the VIA Art Fund Production Grant.

Phuntsog, who was awarded the Fellowship in Film/Video, works across deep time through narrative film, moving image installation, and archive. They work across the liminal spaces of surrogate landscapes, language, and the karmic weight of lives unfinished. 

Phuntsog’s debut feature Next Life premiered at FID Marseille 2025, was selected for New Directors/New Films 2026, reviewed in The New Yorker, and is set for theatrical distribution with Lunette Films. Their second feature Sentient Beings is in development with the support of SFFILM FilmHouse Residency, San Francisco. Their moving image installation work is represented by Microscope Gallery, New York, and they have exhibited at Pure Land 2022, Berlinale Forum Expanded 2023, Seoul Media City Biennale 2023, and Gyatso Haus für Medienkunst, Germany 2024. 

Michael Ross '81, a sculptor known largely for his small-scale work, was awarded the Fellowship in Fine Arts. Born in Buffalo, NY and based in Brooklyn, his sculptures, usually no larger than a few inches, repurpose miscellaneous and unidentifiable scraps of hardware and other material, imbuing them with delight and mystery. In a memorable 1999 group exhibition at the SMAK museum in Gent, Belgium, his thimble full of dust (The Smallest Type Of Architecture For The Body Containing The Dust From My Bedroom, My Studio, My Living Room, My Kitchen And My Bathroom, 1991, dust, metal, 2.3 x 2 x 2 cm) faced off against a stack of giant lead books by Anselm Kiefer. "It was a real David and Goliath moment," he recalled in a recent interview for zingmagazine. His solo exhibition, industria crepusculum—or "industry in its twilight"—which closed last month at Galerie Timonier, New York, arrived at the gallery in one neatly packed box. Through miniscule, yet transformative interventions, the show explored the dream worlds of objects: the melody contained in a taut rubber band, or a ruby-studded moon rising from an old pocket watch. 

Ross has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally for over 3 decades, most recently at Galería Mascota, Mexico City (2019, 2020 & 2023); 100 Sculptures, No Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); The OsloBIENNALEN First Edition, Oslo (2019-2024); and Jack Barrett Gallery, New York (2019). His work is held in the public collections of the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent, Belgium; Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain de Bourgogne, Dijon, France; Stad Langenhagen Collection, Langenhagen, Germany; Yakumo Koizumi Memorial Museum, Matsue, Japan; and the Oslo Municipality Art Collection, Oslo, Norway.

Coming up this month, Ross will be participating in the group exhibition, Office, at the Basel Social Club in Basel, Switzerland, in conjunction with Galerie Timonier, New York. The show—which transforms a vacant multi-story office building into a site of artistic encounter and critical reflection—will be on view June 14–20, 2026.

Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted nearly $450 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are Nobel laureates, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award winners.

“As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation. Awarded at the highest level, Fellows receive a monetary stipend to pursue independent work—as founder Senator Simon Guggenheim put it—under the “freest possible conditions.”

See a full list of this year's Guggenheim Fellows here.