Two Chicago-area residents were named 2024 MacArthur “genius grant” recipients on Tuesday.
Ling Ma, a fiction writer, and Ebony G. Patterson, a visual artist, are part of the 22-member class. The fellowship, organized by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, seeks to boost creativity and innovators across the country and support them in their work. Fellows receive a no-strings-attached $800,000 stipend over five years.
Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program, said they select recipients with proven success. “This is an award of enablement,” she said. “We’re looking for people with a track record but could be enabled with the support that we could give them.”
Fiction writer Ling Ma
Ma has been interested in fiction all of her life. She was an avid reader as a child, and her love of fiction continued into her young adulthood where it became an outlet for her to find joy.
“It felt like there was something lacking from my day-to-day life that I could find in reading fiction,” she said, “and after a while, something that I could find in writing fiction.” So when she realized she was about to get laid off as a fact-checker at Playboy magazine in the early 2010s, she decided to dedicate herself entirely to writing the fiction that she had loved for so long.
Ma was shocked when she received the fellowship. “I literally thought it was my bank calling me about something,” she said. “I wasn’t even sure I needed to take the call.”
Born in China, Ma, 41, moved to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago in 2001 and moved around to different cities in the United States before returning here in 2017.
Ma’s work is defined by genre-bending and her blurring of reality with fantasy in her fiction. Her 2018 novel “Severance” tells the story of how a disease has ravaged the world, forcing its sick to enter zombie-like states, all while continuing to perform daily tasks like going to work.
Combining these different themes, from apocalypse to office-based and coming-of-age novels, stems from a playfulness she can have when writing. “When you’re just having fun, playing around and experimenting, the stakes are low,” Ma said.
That strategy of mixing varying themes made Ma stand out, Carruth said. “Her ability to mix the real with the surreal was unusual. … She has a very cinematic eye in her writing.”
Ma is set to return as a creative writing professor at her alma mater in January, where she has taught in the past. She said she hasn’t made a plan for the fellowship money but will use it to facilitate her work in some way.
Visual artist Ebony G. Patterson
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Patterson has split her time between her birthplace and Chicago since 2019. The 43-year-old’s work centers on identity, exploring class, beauty, race and more.
Her interest in those themes developed early in her life at the same when she was learning to draw, she said. She wondered about identity as she saw the differences between time spent with her grandmother in rural Jamaica contrasted with her upbringing in the city, and through a youth group where she worked on social projects in working-class communities.
“I like to think it was a sense of awareness,” she said, “this kind of social engagement.”
While she focuses on these themes, she isn’t looking for answers to them. “My work begins with questions that only garner further questions, and those questions become more questions,” Patterson said.
Patterson tries to force the audience to reengage with their first language: not one that is spoken, but rather what can be understood through sight.
To do this, Patterson mixes different materials. That can include photography, painting, fabrics, textiles or anything in between.
In her 2019 piece that memorialized Black children lost to violence “…when they grow up…,” she used kid’s toys and images of children interacting with each other to evoke the audience’s memories of childhood.
“It reminds us to connect with what’s beautiful and magical and yet very grounded in humanity and connection with place and community,” Carruth said of Patterson’s work. “That’s easy to forget sometimes.”
Patterson said while she has no specific plans for the fellowship money yet, she knows it gives her flexibility.
“What this means is time,” she said. “Time and space to think, and also time and space to do nothing because doing nothing is doing something.”