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Exceptional individuals: Meet New Mexico's two 2025 Guggenheim recipients
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Among the 198 recipients of prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships this year are two notable New Mexicans: playwright and director Erik Ehn and photographer Shoshannah White.
Now in its 100th year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships since the grant program began in 1925. Past winners have included such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Alice Walker, Allen Ginsberg and Vladimir Nabokov.
Ehn and White spoke to the Journal about their work and what it means to be a Guggenheim Fellow.
Erik Ehn
“I was disquieted, to be honest,” Ehn said of his Guggenheim win. “At first, I felt like the wrong person — that they mistook me for somebody else. So, I went through a round or two of notes, giving them a chance to back out.”
Eventually, the Guggenheim Foundation was able to convince the playwright and director that he was, indeed, the intended recipient of the award.
“Then, the discombobulation was internal. But this moment — in my life, in the swim of the arts — wants forward motion. So, for better or for worse, it’s time to get going and make more work.”
Ehn, who teaches theater at the University of New Mexico, said the fellowship helped him see himself in the context of other contemporary writers and artists he admires.
“The immediate reward of the fellowship is fellowship — the sense that one is part of a small but particular wave — a cohort of really remarkable artists,” he said.
Much of Ehn’s past work has focused on genocide, which he said demands a poetic approach to playwriting.
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“Writing about genocide, deep trauma, the metastasis of disorder wants poetry,” he said. “Especially poetry’s embodiment in time and space… where the inconceivable and unspeakable can somehow vibrate in a space between concepts and words.”
But one of Ehn’s favorite projects was his stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novella, “Ill Seen Ill Said.”
“Like so much of Beckett, the text deals with not quite having enough cognitive material to cover the pain, shame and ridiculousness of life,” Ehn said.
He directed the performer Shannon Hartman, whom he called “an excellent mover,” in an experimental staging of Beckett’s text. He said her physical actions and gestures became “a kind of movement midrash,” or interpretive commentary, on the text.
In light of the recent gutting of federal funding for the arts and humanities, Ehn said the Guggenheim Fellowship will help sustain his ongoing theatrical projects, which may have otherwise been thrown into limbo.
“The field is rocked and wounded by the cuts to the (National Endowment for the Humanities) and the (National Endowment for the Arts),” Ehn said. “These dollars will facilitate ongoing dialogue with the artistic team I’ve been rehearsing with for months. We’re building a dance/theater piece involving flamenco and modern performers.”
“The material is about the precarity of our relationships with the natural world, looking at the world from the point of view of liminal and fictional creatures (such as) zombies, Godzilla (and) angels,” he said. “We’ll be performing it in Albuquerque in June, then taking work to La MaMa (in New York City) in October 2025. Couldn’t do it without the Guggenheim.”
Shoshannah White
Roswell-based photographer Shoshannah White was nearly as stunned by her Guggenheim win as Ehn was.
“It still feels surreal,” she said. “It just still doesn’t feel like it’s quite landed, but I feel incredibly grateful. It’s such an amazing honor.”
White takes an experimental approach to photography, often combining photography with other media, such as painting and sculpture.
“The work usually has an environmental theme, or is informed by science or nature,” White said. “I’m interested in the psychological relationship we have with the natural world — the connection and disconnection.”
Increasingly focused on “radically shifting environments,” White recently traveled to Alaska to make a series of painterly photograms using ice collected from glaciers.
“I put the ice on the photographic paper, making prints directly from the ice,” she explained.
Working at the National Science Foundation, Ice Core facility, sometimes the ice core samples contain volcanic ash and silt from prehistoric times.
“I’m really interested in this natural archive that’s held in place by temperature,” she said. “But I’m even more interested in the interpretations that you can make by looking at these images. They look like doorways or portals into other worlds.”
Some of White’s work has focused on the environment of New Mexico, including a series in which she used magnets to activate sand from the Rio Grande.
White shows her work at the Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque and at art galleries and museums around the world. As is the case for many artists, though, sales have not always been consistent. But she said she considers herself fortunate just to be able to do what she loves.
“I think success can be defined in a lot of different ways, and I’ve been able to continue making my art for a long time, which I feel really lucky about,” she said. “And to work with different institutions and scientists — to be invited to go up to the National Science Foundation and work with scientists like that — just feels like such an incredible honor and a gift.”
Born in New York, White said she lived in Maine for close to three decades before coming to Roswell six years ago.
“I feel like Maine and New Mexico are so different, but maybe they draw a similar personality who’s interested in that kind of wild, rugged environment,” she said.
White’s love of wilderness areas has allowed her to feel at home in remote, glacial environments, too. And while she’s still considering her options for future projects, she said the Guggenheim grant has expanded the scope of possibilities.
“It’s given me a tremendous freedom to be exploratory,” she said. “I think I’ll continue making the work that I’ve been making, but it allows me to push it further … to make work that’s larger, or to travel to different destinations to make work that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to do otherwise. It’s just an incredible gift to have that freedom.”
