The USA Fellowship was recently awarded to Assistant Professor of Studio Art in the School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, and alumna Tammie Rubin, a 1999 graduate. Each year the USA Fellowship is awarded by United States Artists to recognize the most compelling artists working and living in the United States. They are anonymously nominated to apply “by a geographically diverse and rotating group of artists, scholars, critics, producers, curators, and other arts professionals.” The full list of 2024 Panelists can be found here.
Hultgren is an artist, weaver, and educator. Their research interests include “material and embodied rhetorics, re-storying material culture, and weaving as a performative critique of the visual. Dominguez Hultgren weaves with the material afterlife of a so-called multiracial family: Chicanx-Indigenous-Indian-Hollywood Hawaiian-Brown-Black.”
Rubin was born and raised in Chicago, attended and taught at the U of I, and currently lives in Austin, where she is Associate Professor of Art at St. Edward’s University. She is a “ceramic sculptor and installation artist whose practice considers the intrinsic power of objects and coded symbols as signifiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics. Rubin’s artwork delves into narratives of Black American citizenry, migration, autonomy, longing, and faith.”
