1431 W. Hubbard St., Ste. 201, Chicago, IL 60642
By advance appointment only. Please email contact@chicagoartistscoalition.org
02.22
Alumni Showcase
Friday, January 19, 2024 from 5-8pm
alejandro t. acierto [jef]Frey Michael Austin Colleen Keihm Nicole Mauser Joshi Radin
Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to announce our first Alumni Showcase exhibition of 2024.
The show features work by alejandro t. acierto (HATCH 2014-15), Frey (BOLT 2016-17), Colleen Keihm (HATCH 2017-18), Nicole Mauser (HATCH 2016-17), and Joshi Radin (HATCH 2019-20).
The opening reception will be on January 19 from 5-8pm.
Image: Frey, [everything here will be a memory], enamel, acrylic, and resin on copper-tinted glass mirror, 36” x 36’’
About Artists
alejandro t. acierto produces creative projects, exhibitions, and performances highlighting the impact of colonial legacies across technologies, material culture, and the environment. Working within and across expanded forms of documentary, new media, creative scholarship, and sound, he has presented projects and screenings for the 2019 Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Issue Project Room (NYC), MCA Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Echo Park Film Center (LA), Stove Works (Chattanooga) and Eastside Projects (Birmingham, UK), among others. He has presented multimedia performance works for the Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival (Chicago), High Zero Festival (Baltimore), the KANEKO (Omaha), and The Quarantine Concerts for ESS Chicago. Additionally, his curatorial projects have been mounted at Stove Works (Chattanooga), Tipton Gallery at East Tennessee State University (Johnson City), Vanderbilt University’s Space 204 and Coop (both Nashville), as well as online for the Wrong Biennial.
acierto has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, LATITUDE, Chicago Artists' Coalition, and Digital Artist Residency. A 3Arts Awardee, he was an inaugural Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University, a Digital Humanities Faculty Fellow at the Center for Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt University, and currently holds an Ansel Adams Research Fellowship at the Center for Creative Photography. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Art at Wayne State University located in Waawiyaataanong on the ceded lands of the Three Fires Confederacy, including the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot peoples.
Headshot: Colleen Keihm
Image: installation image of the exhibition Uninvited guests, Arizona State University's ArtSpace West, 2023. Image courtesy of alejandro t. acierto.
(updated 2025)
Frey Michael Austin [they/she/free] is a queer interdisciplinary artist, musician, maker, performer + gardener obsessively flirting with the divine. Their visual artworks and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally and they have performed in such venues as The Park Avenue Armory (NYC), The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, The Art Institute of Chicago, Green Line Performing Arts Center, Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago Cultural Center, Arts Incubator and The Smart Museum of Art. They design and build unique altarpieces for both private and public spaces of worship – most recently completing a new central bimah for the historic KAM Isaiah Reform synagogue of Hyde Park-Kenwood – as well as artful, custom home furniture pieces. They compose and produce music for film and for collaborative, multidisciplinary performance projects GABE, Growing Concerns Poetry Collective and Daisy Days.
Headshot: Amanda Thomas
Image: Frey Michael Austin ; Some Kind of Invitation (Another World Is Possible) ; 2024 ; Photographic document of land-based ritual spell ; Variable dimensions ; Artist's image
(updated 2025)
Colleen Keihm is a Chicago-based artist whose photographic practice utilizes color, form, and perception through analog and digital processes. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BS in Photography from Drexel University in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited at Co-Prosperity Sphere, Flatland, Roman Susan, Filter Photo, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. Colleen has participated in residencies at Hatch Projects through the Chicago Artists Coalition, Institut für Alles Mögliche in Berlin, and Studio 3325 in Chicago. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and she is a member of the Midwest Photographers Project. In addition to her studio practice, Colleen is currently a Visiting Instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she teaches photography with an emphasis on accessibility, experimentation, and critical engagement.
Image: By the Window, 2025, Photogram on Color Enlarger Paper, 8x10 inches
(updated 2025)
Nicole Mauser’s works have been featured in exhibitions at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; High Concept Labs, Chicago; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago; Reynolds Gallery, Richmond; Fort Gondo, St. Louis; and is in permanent collections of The Alexander, Indianapolis; The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park. Select works have been featured in New American Paintings, Newcity Magazine and The Kansas City Star. She contributes writing and reviews to Newcity, Art Practical, 8½ x 11, Bad at Sports Blog and The Journal for Humanistic Psychiatry. Mauser was a co-founder of the artist-run gallery PLUG Projects as well as a co-founder of KCPAC (Kansas City Plein Air Coterie). Currently, she is a Lecturer at the University of Chicago and Adjunct Assistant Professor at UIC. Nicole Mauser received an MFA from the University of Chicago and a BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design. Learn more about Nicole Mauser’s HATCH exhibitions Superficial Paradise and Rites.
Joshi Radin investigates questions concerning nature, cosmology and expanded landscape. Drawing on childhood experiences living within a utopian back to the land community, she traces historical and genealogical roots of utopianism and nature through imagery and processes as spaces of knowledge production. She has published essays and presented work in the US and internationally and received her MFA (2016) and MA (2018) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a merit scholar.
Image: Joshi Radin, Bent (Tangent), 2019, screen print, acrylic, recycled paper, 20h x 26w.
