Alejandro Figueredo Diaz-Perera is an emerging artist from Havana, Cuba. Working across the mediums of video, photography, painting, installation and text, Diaz-Perera presents metaphors to illustrate how relationships are established among social individuals. Through his practice, he seeks to make connections between the quotidian and the universal. Recent exhibitions include the Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival at Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago; solo exhibition at Garcia Squared Contemporary, Kansas City; solo exhibition at the Chicago Artists Coalition; collaborative action at Aspect/Ratio, Chicago; group exhibition at Freeark Gallery, Riverside, IL; collaborative exhibiton at the SUB-MISSION, Chicago; and participation in festivals and exhibitions in Cuba including the International Festival of Video Art, the 10th and 11th Havana Biennials, and group gallery exhibitions. Learn more about Alejandro Figueredo Diaz-Perera’s solo BOLT exhibition A Home Coming (revisited).

Hương Ngô (Huong Ngo, Ngô Ngọc Hương, 吳玉香) is an interdisciplinary artist whose conceptual practice connects the personal and the political, giving material form to histories which have been rendered invisible and interrogating the ideological origins of their erasure.  Having grown up as a refugee in the American South, Ngô creates work that reframes the hybrid, the imperfect, and the non-fluent as sites of survival and knowledge. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (BFA Fine Arts, 2001), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA Art & Technology, 2004), and was a studio fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program (2012). She was recently awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016) for her research, begun at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in France and recently presented at DePaul Art Museum (2017), that examines the colonial history of surveillance in Vietnam and the anti-colonial strategies of resistance vis-à-vis the activities of female organizers and liaisons. Her work, which has been described as “deftly and defiantly decolonial” by New City and “what intersectional feminist art looks like” by the Chicago Tribune, has been exhibited at the MoMA (2018), MCA Chicago (2004, 2016, 2017), Para Site HK (2017), Nhà Sàn Collective (2016), the Queens Museum (2014), The Kitchen (2011, 2014), and the New Museum (2012) among others. She has been awarded the DCASE Individual Artist Program Grant (2017, 2018), the Illinois Arts Council (2018), Chicago Artists Coalition BOLT residency (2016-17), Rhizome Commission (2011), and has been in residency through the Camargo Foundation Core Program (2018), LATITUDE Chicago (2015), and SOMA Mexico (2014). She has taught at the MoMA, Pratt Institute, and Parsons The New School for Design and is currently Assistant Professor in Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Hương will be a guest speaker for Artist Case Studies: Project Development on December 4, 2018. 

Edra Soto (b. Puerto Rico) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and co-director of the outdoor project space THE FRANKLIN. She is invested in creating and providing visual and educational models propelled by empathy and generosity. Her recent projects are motivated by civic and social actions focus on fostering relationships with a wide range of communities. Recent venues presenting Soto’s work include the Pérez Art Museum Miami (FL), Hunter East Harlem Gallery (NY), UIC Gallery 400 (IL), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (NE), and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (IL) amongst others. Soto has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME), Beta-Local (PR), the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (FL), Arts/Industry at the Kohler Foundation (WI), Headlands Center for the Arts (CA) and Project Row Houses (TX) amongst others. In 2017 Soto was awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts for installation artists. Her co-curation for the exhibition Present Standard at the Chicago Cultural Center was praised with overwhelmingly positive reviews from the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, PBS The Art Assignment and Artforum. Soto was recently featured in Newcity’s annual Art 50 issue Chicago’s Artists’ Artists and at VAM Studio 2017 Influencers. Soto is a lecturer for the Contemporary Practices Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from where she holds an MFA , and a BFA degree from Escuela de Artes Plastics de Puerto Rico. Edra will be a guest speaker for Artist Case Studies: Business Models on October 16, 2018.

Jean Alexander Frater received her MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago, and a BS in Philosophy, from the University of Dayton, OH. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, the Images Festival in Toronto, Possible Project Space in Brooklyn, the Big Screen Project in New York, the Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, THE MISSION Gallery in Chicago, Transmitter Gallery in Brooklyn and Guest Spot @ The Reinstitute in Baltimore. Alexander Frater is represented by THE MISSION Gallery, Chicago, IL. Learn more about Jean Alexander Frater’s solo BOLT exhibition Buoyant Surface.

Derrick Woods-Morrow’s work is a meditation on deviation and disruption. Currently based in Chicago his artistic practice deploys a wide variety of media – photographic transfers, digital video collage, ceramics, and narrative performance. Exploring modes of representation, he salvages, displaces, and removes raw material from sites of historical significance and trauma, reimagines their future purpose and denies their perceived function, as he actively interrogates the correlation between labor & play.

Woods-Morrow is an emerging artist & adjunct assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, who has had film screenings at the Art Institute of Chicago & the Chicago Cultural Center. Recently he has exhibited work in the Ground Floor Biennial exhibition at the Hyde Park Arts Center, The BGSQD in New York, as a 2018 Chicago Artadia Awardee, exhibited during the EXPO Chicago Art Fair and will debut a new performance at the MCA Chicago in April 2019. He was a participant in the 2016 Fire Island Artist Residency, and concluded his residency with the Chicago Artist Coalition in 2018, culminating in his first solo exhibition in Chicago. In 2019 his work will be included in the Whitney Biennial as a collaborative effort with the Artist, Paul Sepuya studios.

Image: Film Still from the short film, The Roach is Coming (2018) - First debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago & The Chicago Cultural center & released on Aymar Jean Christian's OTV platform, this short film explores themes central to labor, play & sexuality. Visual components, juxtapose audio components as Woods-Morrow connects his own childhood narratives from the American South to present-day manifestations of trauma created during an interaction with a police officer named Adam.

(updated 2019)