MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIPS.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named 25 recipients of this year's MacArthur Fellowships. Each will receive $500,000 over five years. "MacArthur Fellows are chosen for their exceptional creativity, record of significant accomplishment and potential for still greater achievement," states Daniel J. Socolow, director of the Fellows Program. Following are the fellows whose work relates to the media arts: David Isay, an independent radio producer from New York City, incorporates impeccable craftsmanship and a strong social conscience into his first-person nonfiction storytelling. He has refined the art of radio documentary, drawing upon raw human responses from a diversity of voices and employing contemporary media to capture ear, heart and mind. He has also experimented with transforming his audio portraits into books, photographs and museum exhibits. Artist Alfredo Jaar of New York City challenges commonly held opinions about the relationship between art and politics. He fuses the aesthetic and the ethical to focus on injustices around the world including poverty, exploitation and genocide. His works are often presented as complex but spare installations comprised of found objects, posters, projected images, reflective surfaces and photo-text pieces showing the tangled effects of international economic and political realities on the lives of individuals. Ben Katchor, a New York City cartoonist, has distilled through the medium of the comic strip an art rich with history, sociology, fiction and poetry. His meditations on urban life represent a sustained effort to reimagine the history of New York, recalling the nineteenth and early twentieth-century city of words, with its placards and signs, inscriptions and sandwich boards, lost places of entertainment and instruction and forgotten forms of craft and industry. Though clearly fictional, his strips convey an ironic, compelling, and bittersweet nostalgia for the detritus of city life. Deborah Willis, curator of exhibitions at the Center for African-American History and Culture and the Anacostia Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., is a photography historian, c urator and photographer. For more than 20 years, she has been a leading scholar in the investigation and recovery of the rich legacy of African American photography.