Each spring, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation releases its list of fellows—a cross-section of artists, scholars, and scientists selected not for past achievement alone, but for the promise of what comes next. The 2026 class spans 55 disciplines, from choreography to constitutional law, continuing a tradition that has awarded more than $450 million to over 19,000 fellows since 1925.
For the Hudson Valley, the announcement lands a little closer to home. Five of this year’s fellows—Joseph Luzzi (Tivoli), Reid Davenport (Beacon), Jacqueline Goss (Tivoli), Silas Riener (Margaretville), and Adam James Smith (Lake Peekskill)—live and work in the region, underscoring the extent to which the Hudson Valley has become less a retreat from cultural production than a locus of it.
Two of the five are fixtures at Bard College. Luzzi, a scholar of Italian literature, writes with a critic’s precision and a memoirist’s instinct for narrative; his recent book on Botticelli’s drawings, Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance, helped reframe a canonical artist through the lens of loss and rediscovery. (We profiled Luzzi in 2014.) Goss, a filmmaker whose work often interrogates systems—scientific, technological, bureaucratic—plans to use her fellowship on an experimental film rooted in the conceptual art world of 1970s New York.
Film is particularly well represented among this year’s local cohort. Davenport, based in Beacon, has built a body of work attentive to disability and the politics of visibility; his 2022 film I Didn’t See You There won an award at Sundance and announced a voice attuned to both structural critique and personal experience. Smith, who splits time between the Hudson Valley and international projects, is at work on a documentary in Shenzhen about a painter influenced by Edward Hopper—an oblique triangulation of place, influence, and global circulation.
Riener, a choreographer associated with postmodern dance and long a collaborator with the Merce Cunningham Trust, represents a different lineage—one grounded in the body and its systems of movement. His inclusion situates the region not just as a site for visual art and film, but as an ongoing incubator for experimental performance.
The Guggenheim Fellowship comes with few strings attached—no required deliverables, no institutional oversight—which is precisely its point. It is a bet on time: time to think, to make, to follow a line of inquiry wherever it leads. In that sense, it has always functioned as a kind of counterweight to the acceleration of cultural production.
The Hudson Valley’s presence in the 2026 class builds on recent precedent. The Hudson Valley Guggenheim class of 2025 included violinist and composer Gwen Laster, choreographer Jeanine Durning, and photographer Lucas Blalock, part of a steady pattern of growth of institutions, residencies, and informal artistic networks across the region. The result is less a scene than an ecosystem—porous, decentralized, and increasingly visible at a national level.
