HATCH Projects 2011-2012 JURY & CURATORIAL CONSULTANTS

Tempestt Hazel is a curator, writer, overall art supporter and co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center: The Chicago Arts Archive and Collective Project.  She received her BA in Art History and Visual Arts Management from Columbia College Chicago. Over the years she has worked in various positions with Chicago arts organizations and galleries including the South Side Community Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Murphy-Rabb Art Consultants, Inc., G.R. N’Namdi Gallery, and Columbia College’s Art History Council. Hazel is currently the outreach coordinator for Chicago Artists Resource, coordinator of the Creative Chicago Expo and on the team for Chicago Artists Month, the city-wide celebration of visual arts in Chicago.  She also serves on the Hyde Park Art Center’s Creative Events Committee.

Anna Kunz is an artist who makes paintings, sculptures, installations and projects that seep out of the rectangle. Her paintings, sculptures, work on paper and site specific installations have been included in numerous national and international collections. Quarterly, Kunz presents curated group exhibitions in the social space that she co- runs with Niels Vis in Amsterdam. The space, KUNZ, VIS, GONZALEZ features new contemporary work from around the globe, where events and discussions are facilitated via telecommunications. Kunz has been nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, Richard H. Driehaus Award, and an Emerging Artist award from the National Museum of Women in the Arts in WA, D.C, and the Rena Hort Mann Foundation’s individual artists grant in NYC. She has recently worked collaboratively with Paige Cunningham, Dancer/Choreographer, and has created the décor for a memorial performance, EVENT Chicago, for the Merce Cunningham Dance Co in New York City. Recent exhibitions include at LVL3, in Chicago, curated by Andrew Blackley, White Box Ai Wei Wei exhibition/fundraiser, Portable Caves by HKJB NYC, Chain Letter at Samson Projects, MA, and an outdoor banner project for the Smart Museum on the University of Chicago’s campus. Since September 2010, Anna has been a resident artist in the prestigious Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program in NYC.  Anna lives and works in New York City and Chicago, and is an instructor of Color and Painting at Columbia College in Chicago.

Jamilee Polson is an artist, curator and writer living and working in Chicago. Polson founded and currently directs the Twelve Galleries Project, a transitory, collaborative exhibition experiment. Additionally, she investigates the analogous qualities of literature and visual art in her curatorial and studio practice. Polson’s exhibition and writing projects focus on histories and ideas that have been shared between authors and artists, while her artwork is focused on what is lost and gained between text, image and object. She has engaged in collaborative projects with numerous Chicago creatives and institutions, including Black Visual Archive, Chicago Art Review, Columbia College Chicago A+D Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Quite Strong and Swimming Pool Project Space, among others. Polson is a current Masters of Comparative Literature candidate at Northwestern University.

Jeff M. Ward has worked in as a curator and critic in Chicago since 2002, participating in the organization of numerous shows, including exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center; threewalls, of which he was a co-founder; and the Pond, a no longer extant artist-run space of which he was also a co-founder. He was a critic-in-residence at the Core Program of the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and he has written for New Art Examiner and ArtLies magazines. He is currently Assistant to the Provost at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.