Artist Trevor Paglen awarded MacArthur Genius Grant

Artist Trevor Paglen, whose work appears on the cover of Hito Steyerl’s forthcoming Duty Free Art, received the MacArthur Genius Grant this week.

The MacArthur Fellowship is a $625,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.

From the MacArthur Foundation website:

Trevor Paglen is a conceptual artist and geographer making the invisible operations of military and corporate power visible to everyday citizens.

He draws on his training as a geographer and utilizes the tools of image-making, coupled with painstaking review of public records and declassified documents, to explore infrastructures of warfare, surveillance, and social control that are generally hidden from the general public. The resulting images, sculptural works, and writings he produces examine the ways that human rights are threatened in an era of mass surveillance and data collection. 

More on Paglen’s work:

“Art for a Post-Surveillance Age,” New York Times Style Magazine.

“Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You),” The New Inquiry.

“Trevor Paglen with Hunter Braithwaite,” Interview in the Brooklyn Rail.

“Prying Eyes,” New Yorker.