NEW YORK (AP) — At age 45, Lin-Manuel Miranda already has accomplished enough to receive a lifetime achievement honor.
The celebrated “Hamilton” playwright is among 21 new inductees into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 127-year-old honor society where current members include Robert Caro, Jasper Johns and Meredith Monk. All are to be formally welcomed during a May ceremony at the academy’s beaux arts complex in Upper Manhattan, not far from the setting of Miranda’s musical, “In the Heights.”
Willem De Kooning, Toni Morrison and some key influences on Miranda are among the previous members.
“I am deeply grateful and humbled to be joining this distinguished community, which included Stephen Sondheim, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein and so many other titans of the arts who continue to inspire me,” Miranda said in a statement. “I am excited to visit the Academy in my neighborhood of Washington Heights as a new member to support and celebrate great artists and their work.”
May’s event will include a keynote, the Blashfield Address, from the novelist-playwright Caryl Phillips.
The academy is divided into categories for literature, music, art and architecture. It has a core membership of 300, with new members elected to replace vacancies created after one has died, along with foreign and American honorary members such as Meryl Streep and Martin Scorsese and Nobel laureates J.M. Coetzee and Bob Dylan. This year’s new honorary inductees are the Mexican conceptual artist Francis Alÿs, the Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum and the activist and author Angela Davis.
“Angela Davis’s revolutionary voice, scholarship, and intellectual rigor push the poetic and political imagination to ensure the full measure of equality,” the artist and academy member Mel Chin said in a statement. “Once most wanted by the FBI, she is now most needed, an advocate to sustain hope in the effort to end a divided society.”
Besides Miranda, the academy’s class of 2025 includes such prize-winning authors as Jesmyn Ward, Gish Jen and Elizabeth Alexander, architect Ricardo Scofidio, and visual artists ranging from the installation artist Robert Grosvenor to the sculptor Donna Dennis. Inductee Claire Messud, author of such acclaimed novels as “The Emperor’s Children” and “The Woman Upstairs,” has now joined an organization which in 2003 presented her with its prestigious Strauss Living Award for literary excellence.
“I remember how surreal it felt to shake hands with writers and artists I’d admired from afar for years,” she told the AP, noting that many of them have since died, including Edward Said, Grace Paley, Shirley Hazzard and Francine du Plessix Gray.
Other writers voted in are the author and New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik, novelist Chang-rae Lee, author-translator Daniel Mendelsohn and the author-playwright Darryl Pinckney. Visual artists besides Grosvenor and Dennis to be inducted are artist-curator Coco Fusco, multi-disciplinary artist Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne name: Hock E Aye Vi), weaver-textile artist Sheila Hicks, conceptual artist Rashid Johnson, photographer An-My Lê, abstract painter Charline von Heyl and installation artist Fred Wilson.
Additions to the music category include Miranda and the classical composers-musicians Derek Bermel and Gabriela Lena Frank.
“We’re proud of the incoming class our members elected and delighted by the excellence and range of practices their work embodies,” academy president Kwame Anthony Appiah said in a statement.
