‘Genius Grant’ Thrills College Chief Nun To Lift Up Needy With No-Strings Grant Of $335,000

The news that Sister Kathleen Ross had won a $335,000 grant couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time.

Ross, the 56-year-old Holy Names sister who is president of Heritage College in Toppenish, Wash., was at a budget meeting when she received word she was a winner of a no-strings-attached fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

“I knew a little bit about the foundation, but I kept thinking, why on earth did they pick me?” Ross said, laughing.

Ross was one of 23 artists, scientists, educators and scholars named Monday as the most recent winners of the MacArthur fellowships. The largest grant was for $355,000; the smallest was for $190,000.

The goal of Heritage - a private, liberal arts college - is education that leads to a livable wage for its students. Many of them are Indian or Hispanic and come from poor families.

The college got its start in an abandoned elementary school on the Yakama Indian Reservation 15 years ago. The school’s enrollment was 85.

Heritage now boasts nearly 2,000 graduates and serves about 1,100 students per year, about 60 percent of whom live below the poverty line.

“Sister Kathleen had an idea for a college, and she made it work,” said Catharine Stimpson, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program in Chicago.

Ross said she hopes to use the grant as seed money to “continue making opportunity for more people who have not had the opportunity to become self-sufficient.”

The MacArthur awards have been dubbed “genius grants” since they first started in 1981, but Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall said his $260,000 award was tempered with “ambivalence about what it means and whether you deserve it.”

“I don’t see what’s exceptional about what I do,” said Marshall, 41, whose large canvas paintings of middle-class black life are on display in museums across the country.

Marshall prefers the foundation’s explanation for the money: “They’re trying to free you up so you can do what artists really want to do, which is constantly explore.”

Another winner, Seattle-based musician and sculptor Trimpin, agrees.

“All those ideas which I kind of hold back can now be realized,” the West German-born Trimpin, who uses only one name, said from his studio in the city’s Madrona neighborhood. Plus the $280,000 award relieves the monthly pressure of paying bills. “That’s definitely taken care of for the next five years,” he said.

Trimpin, 45, combines computers, junked musical instruments and other materials to make interactive, kinetic sculptural pieces. He shows mostly in Europe, New York and San Francisco - he is setting up a show in Amsterdam next week - though he has lived in Seattle almost since his arrival in the United States in 1979.

“Some of them look like instruments. Some of them there is a more sculptural element,” he said of his works, adding that he uses metal, wood, plastic - “it just depends what kind of a sound I am looking for.”

Some are “played.” Some respond to movement with sound. Some of the pieces “fill a whole gallery space,” Trimpin said. “Some of them are suspended. Some of them are working just with water.”

Curious area residents can view a 60-foot-tall “rainwall” inside Key Arena at the east entry titled “Hydraulis,” a collaborative effort by Trimpin and Clark Weigman, also of Seattle.

Freedom is also what the award means to playwright Lee Breuer, who was so broke that his phone had been disconnected when he learned that he’d been awarded a $355,000 grant.

He said the money will help keep alive the Mabou Mines Theater in New York, which he co-founded in 1970, as well as support him and his five children, ages 6 to 26.

“This will be the first time I’ll be out of debt in my entire life,” said Breuer, who blends techniques from different cultures into several disciplines, including performance art, film, music, literature and opera.

His most recent work, “Peter and Wendy,” combines the story of Peter Pan with Scottish folk music and two forms of puppetry. His “The Gospel at Colonus,” which toured nationally, combines American gospel music and opera.

The Chicago-based foundation, whose founder, John MacArthur, made his fortune in insurance, has awarded more than $158 million to 502 fellows. The recipients are nominated by anonymous talent scouts and chosen on the basis of skill, creativity and dedication. Money from the fellowships is doled out over five years and can be spent as the recipients wish.