The Guggenheim Fellowship At 100 To Be Celebrated In Special Exhibit At The New York Historical

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation will mark its centennial with The Guggenheim Fellowship at 100, a special exhibit opening August 29, 2025, at The New York Historical. The presentation will explore the legacy of over 19,000 Guggenheim Fellows, showcasing rarely seen archival materials and spotlighting cultural icons such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Rachel Carson, and Thelonious Monk. The exhibit will remain on view through November 30.

Located in the Leah & Michael Weisberg Monumental Treasures Wall in the main lobby of The New York Historical, the exhibit is included with general museum admission. Additional information is available at nyhistory.org.

Curated by Hanna Pennington (Guggenheim Foundation) and Saray Vazquez (The New York Historical), The Guggenheim Fellowship at 100 features more than 70 letters, photos, books, and application materials from an extraordinary range of artists, writers, scholars, and scientists. Visitors can view artifacts from Fellows including Alvin Ailey, Aaron Copland, Maya Deren, Edward Weston, Oliver Sacks, Hannah Arendt, and many others.

Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded over $400 million in Fellowships to individuals across a wide spectrum of disciplines. The Foundation’s support has fueled landmark works such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Robert Frank’s The Americans, alongside pioneering research by Linus Pauling, Rachel Carson, and Barbara McClintock.

Exhibition Highlights Include:

• Letters between Foundation leaders and Fellows such as Rachel Carson, Martha Graham, Isaac Fisher, and Edward Weston

• Original applications and materials from figures including James Baldwin, John Cage, Vladimir Nabokov, and Dorothea Lange

• Iconic photography by Ansel Adams and Robert Frank

• First-edition books by Louise Erdrich, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ada Louise Huxtable