Two members of the Carnegie Mellon University community — Associate Professor Katherine Hubbard(opens in new window) and alumna Carrie Schneider(opens in new window) — have been announced as 2024 Guggenheim Fellows(opens in new window). The fellowship is awarded to scholars and creators in the social sciences, the natural sciences, the humanities and creative arts.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded fellowships this year to 188 American and Canadian scientists, scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and writers and artists of all kinds. Since its establishment in 1925, the foundation has granted over $400 million in fellowships to over 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and other internationally recognized honors.

A Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography

The Guggenheim Fellowship provides generous funding for ambitious projects. Among the recipients of the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships, Hubbard will receive support for her current project, “One Fifty One,” a series of photographs she’s creating with her mother in her mother’s home, as well as a series of darkroom contact prints.

Hubbard’s art practice encompasses photography, writing and performance. She plumbs analog photography’s continuing significance in an image-saturated and digital world. Working with photography as a physical medium — using large-format cameras and cameraless darkroom techniques — Hubbard links the process of analog photography with the human body. Considering this unique relationship, Hubbard’s photographs become a generative space to reexamine sociopolitical histories and narratives.

In 2022, Hubbard’s mother was diagnosed with dementia and LATE, a brain disease that mimics the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Hubbard became her primary caretaker.

It was shortly before this diagnosis that Hubbard began creating photographs with her mother. Rather than using photography to capture a representation of a moment in time, Hubbard considers the medium as a form of sociality, creating a way to spend time with her mom apart from the difficult daily tasks of caring for her. As her mother’s disease progresses, Hubbard’s work probes the space between a surface physical appearance captured by the camera and the interior person, questioning how an image can create a deeper sense of recognition.

“One Fifty One” also uses a cameraless darkroom technique of contact printing. This method, in which Hubbard uses Vaseline applied to the skin and then pressed on photographic paper, records the movement, texture and other qualities of her and her mother’s skin surface. This physical process, far from the detached, mechanical shutter typically equated with photography, is another means of understanding the medium’s relationship to the human body. Rather than recording a conventional image of Hubbard and her mother, the process captures a different intimacy through the physicality of the photographic paper on their bodies.

Photographs from “One Fifty One” were the subject of a solo exhibition at Company in May 2023. Hubbard’s photography and performances have also appeared at the Brooklyn Museum; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; MoMA PS1; The Kitchen; and The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas; among many others. In 2021, the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased 14 of Hubbard’s works.

“In our image-saturated era, Katherine Hubbard’s slow and deliberate work takes a different approach to photography, demonstrating incredible care and connection,” said Charlie White, head of CMU’s school of art. “Her work in ‘One Fifty One’ develops beyond the surface image to examine physical and emotional intimacy and the complexity of human relationships. I’m thrilled she will be able to continue to develop this important body of work thanks to this well-deserved Guggenheim Fellowship.”

BXA Alumna Receives Guggenheim

Schneider, who earned a BHA (Bachelor of Humanities and Arts(opens in new window)) from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, was named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in the Fine Arts category. Schneider, who studied fine art and psychology(opens in new window) at CMU, works as an artist(opens in new window) in Brooklyn and Hudson, New York.

Schneider has presented her photographs and videos at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Galería Alberto Sendros, Buenos Aires; santralistanbul, Istanbul; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Pérez Art Museum Miami; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Art Institute of Chicago; and The Kitchen, New York. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times ArtForum, VICE, Modern Painters, and The New Yorker. 

In addition to her Guggenheim Fellowship, Schneider has received a Creative Capital Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.

“I feel so fortunate to be included among the Guggenheim Foundation's 2024 Fellows,” Schneider said. “I'm thrilled and humbled, and I'm looking forward to spending a lot of time in the studio this year.”