• Rackstraw Downes, 69, New York. Painter whose minutely landscapes explore the intersection between the built and the natural world.

• Camille Utterback, 39, San Francisco. Artist who uses digital technologies to create works that redefine how viewers experience and interact with art.

Culture Monster‘s Christopher Knight gives the details on LA’s Mark Bradford, also a winner:

L.A. artist Mark Bradford, 47, has won lots of prestigious prizes in the past, including the Bucksbaum Award (2006), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2003) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2002). Tuesday he nabs the Big One: a 2009 MacArthur Fellowship.

Most of Bradford’s work fuses collage, which sticks together fragments of found images and signs scavenged from the street, and decollage — its opposite, which tears images and signs asunder. His subjects are small, like daily life in an urban neighborhood, recorded in hand-bills and homemade fliers posted on fences and telephone poles; and they’re also monumental, like Hurricane Katrina and the trauma of an entire city, evoked in an extraordinary, 64-foot-long ark he built last year in a Leimert Park vacant lot (pictured), then “sailed” off to an exhibition in New Orleans.

LA Artist Mark Bradford Wins MacArthur Fellowship (LA Times)