BCAS Images Professor Receives 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship – Barefield School of Arts & Sciences

From Art & Art History | Associate Professor Allison Grant has been awarded a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced Tuesday. Grant was the only UA college member named to the a hundred and first class of Fellows, which incorporates 223 students and artists from 55 disciplines.

Allison Grant is an artist, author, curator, and affiliate professor of images in The University of Alabama’s Department of Art & Art History. Her artworks have been broadly exhibited and are held in collections nationwide, together with on the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, and the DePaul Art Museum. Recently, Grant’s debut photobook Within the Bittersweet (Composit Press, 2025) has been acquired by a number of collections and acquired press in quite a few venues. Grant additionally serves because the division’s Director of Graduate Studies for Studio Art.

Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has honored gifted mid-career students and artists throughout a wide range of fields.  From a highly-competitive pool of practically 5,000 candidates in 2026, the inspiration chosen 223 Fellows based mostly on each “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”

To date, the Foundation has supported 19,000 Fellows with practically $450 million in fellowships.

Grant, certainly one of 19 photographers on this yr’s cohort, will use her fellowship to pursue a images venture titled “Holding Together.” A response to the “grim reality” of the post-Roe period, “Holding Together” is a images sequence that options “women and individuals with uteruses [holding] botanicals historically used in reproductive care.” By centering crops like Queen Anne’s Lace, Rue, Pennyroyal, and Cohosh, Grant’s venture gives, in her phrases, a “counter-narrative to the regressive control enforced by political systems in the Deep South and beyond.”

Grant is the primary college member from the UA Department of Art & Art History to obtain a Guggenheim Fellowship. World-renowned photographer and division alum William Christenberry was named a Fellow in 1984. Department chair Jason Guynes referred to as Grant’s award an “extraordinary and well-deserved honor.”

“The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the most respected recognitions an artist can receive, and it speaks to the strength, seriousness, and national significance of Allison’s work,” Guynes continued. “As a department, we are immensely proud of her.”

Read the full press release from the Guggenheim Foundation here.