Ahndraya Parlato named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded Senior Lecturer Ahndraya Parlato a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. According to the foundation, this year’s fellowships were granted to a “distinguished and diverse group of culture-creators working across 52 disciplines.”

Parlato, who has taught photography in RIT’s College of Art and Design for 13 years, is one of 188 recipients of Guggenheim fellowships this year. The support of the fellowship will allow her to further pursue her ongoing photography project, TIME TO KILL, which will be released as a book by Mack Books.

“I am incredibly grateful to both the Guggenheim Foundation and RIT for giving me the dedicated time and resources to work on my project,” said Parlato. “I am, of course, honored to be in the company of so many amazing photographers who have received this fellowship before me.”

TIME TO KILL is a body of work that explores ideas around gender, aging, and motherhood using photography and text. The photographs include portraits of women between the ages of 55 and 75, minor visual tricks or illusions, and still lifes of precariously-balanced objects and of flora as they move from nascence into states of decomposition.

“Few women depicted in the history of art are middle-aged, a period when women’s experience is often markedly different than that of men. This is predicated on a patriarchal culture obsessed with youth, which still tends to value women most for their attractiveness,” Parlato explained. “As a woman not quite yet in this stage of life, I believe this work is an exercise in psychological projection. It carves out a space where I can consider both my fears and fantasies around aging, and to think through the scarier elements of possible irrelevancy and unattractiveness as well as the potentially freeing elements that invisibility might allow me.”

Chosen through a rigorous application and peer-review process from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants, the 2024 Guggenheim Fellows were selected on the basis of prior career achievement and exceptional promise, according to the foundation’s website. As established in 1925 by founder Sen. Simon Guggenheim, each Fellow receives a stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”

In all, 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 84 academic institutions, 38 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented by the 2024 Fellows, who range in age from 28 to 89. Many of their projects directly respond to timely issues such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change and community. Since its founding in 1925, the foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 Fellows.

Since its establishment, the foundation has granted over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the fellowship program.

For more information, go to the foundation's website. To view more of Parlato’s work, go to her portfolio website or her Instagram.