Hiroyuki Hamada Wins Guggenheim Fellowship Along along with 36 New York City Talents

The Guggenheim Foundation announced last week that 173 creatives, scholars or scientists were awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2018. Selected among nearly 3,000 applicants, East Hampton artist Hiroyuki Hamada was one of the winners of the 49th annual competition.

Hiroyuki Hamada (b. 1968, Tokyo) moved to the United States when he was 18 years old. Working in sculptor, painting and printmaking, Hamada has exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe. He is represented by Bookstein Projects in New York. He recently had a solo show at Guild Hall Museum that was on view from February 24 to March 25, 2018. His art is also held in Guild Hall's collection. Click here to read a profile on the artist and the exhibited work written for Hamptons Art Hub.

The Guggenheim Fellowship isn't the first fellowship or residency awarded to Hamada. He's also received a Pollock-Kranser Foundation grant, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and residencies at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Edward F. Albee Foundation/William Flanagan Memorial Creative Person’s Center, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the MacDowell Colony. A visit to the artist's website will reveal more as well provide selections of his art.

The grant amount received by each Guggenheim Fellowship winner is not disclosed. The fellowship is a prestigious one with high profile recipients included among their ranks. Choreographer Martha Graham and essayist James Baldwin is among those who have received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the past.

"These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best,” Edward Hirsch, president of the foundation, stated in the announcement. “Each year since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has bet everything on the individual, and we’re thrilled to continue to do so with this wonderfully talented and diverse group. It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do.”

Fellowships for 2018 were awarded to 36 New York City residents or professors in New York-based colleges or universities. Their ranks included composers, filmmakers, poets, fiction writers, choreographers, writers, playwrights, professors and artists.

New York City visual artists receiving awards include Dennis Adams, Janet Biggs, Esperanza Cortes, Amy Feldman, Kate Gilmore, Dave Hardy, Robert L. Lobe, Hank Willis Thomas and Charles Yuen. Artists representing the New York Metropolian area are Hioyuki Hamada from Long Island and Michael Harrison in Westchester County. Further afield in the Hudson Valley,Nadia Sablin, a New Paltz-based photographer and assistant professor of Art at SUNY New Palz, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Professors receiving fellowships teach at Pratt Institute, School of Art at Cooper Union, Tisch Scool of the Arts at New York University, Baruch College and College of Staten Island, both part of CUNY, Columbia University and New York University, which had three faculty awarded Guggenheim Fellowships. To see the complete list of the 2018 winners, click here.

Hamada was both pleased and grateful for being selected as one of this year's Guggenheim fellows.

"I am very much grateful for being recognized by qualified experts in the field," Hamada wrote in an email. "But I also have a mixed feeling about it since the vast majority of the qualifying people do not get it. Many of us in the field feel financial insecurity and lack of recognition after long years of efforts. My wife kept telling me to apply and I finally did. I've learned that it is a team efforts in some ways."

Continue scrolling to see selections of art by Hiroyuki Hamada.