We are excited to announce the first ever Office Hours: Portfolio Review with a focus on performance-based work and practices! This October session will feature three incredible practitioners with extensive experience in creating, presenting, and documenting performance work.

This month’s guest consultants are:

Felicia Holman, freelance cultural producer/programmer/writer, and co-founding member of Honey Pot Performance
Joseph Ravens, founder and director of Defibrillator Gallery and co-founder and director of Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival
Roberto Sifuentes, co-founder of La Pocha Nostra and Professor of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Find out more about each of our guests below!

This Office Hours will be an opportunity for artists to meet with one of these consultants during one-on-one review sessions. Each meeting lasts 35 minutes and provides a platform to discuss a range of issues of interest to performance practices, including:

• Feedback on artwork
• Insights on documentation strategies
• Preparing for and thinking about presenting work in public programs or exhibitions
• Pursuing professional opportunities
• And more!

Please note: space is limited and advance registration is required. Office Hours appointments are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. You will be able to indicate your reviewer preference following the registration process. Participants are asked to arrive 10 minutes prior to their scheduled appointment.

Tuition
$30 General Public, CAC Artist Members, and current BOLT, FIELD/WORK, HATCH, and LAUNCH Residents

About our Guests

Lifelong Chicagoan/artist and Prince "fam" Felicia Holman is a freelance cultural producer/programmer/writer, as well as a co-founding member of Honey Pot Performance ('HPP'). Felicia creates, presents, and supports innovative interdisciplinary performance that engages audience and inspires community. Recently, Felicia was cast as a featured artist in the 10th edition of The Fly Honey Show and in Jenn Freeman's The People's Church of the G.H.E.T.T.O., selected as a featured presenter for the 2019 Annual Convening of the Arts Administrators of Color Network-DMV, and was invited to be the City Bureau's Fall 2019 Public Newsroom Curator. Throughout 2019 she served as a guest facilitator/panelist at organizations across Chicago including: Chicago Artists Coalition, Red Clay Dance's La Femme Dance Festival, the inaugural Envisioning Equity Conference, ACRE, and Candor Arts Publishing. Felicia is currently developing professional development curriculum for emerging artists, and mentoring a cadre of young ALAANA artists and creatives via personal and professional networks. She relishes her dynamic artrepreneurial life and sums it up in 3 words—Creator, Connector, Conduit.

Joseph Ravens studied audiovisuals at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam, Netherlands) before earning his Masters of Fine Art in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A two-time recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship along with other grants and awards have allowed Ravens to build an international reputation. He has presented work in Tempting Failure (London, UK 2018); 7a*11d (Toronto, Canada 2016); Bienal DEFORMES (Santiago, Chile 2016); Live Biennale Vancouver (Canada 2015); 20th Bienal Internacional de Curitiba (Brazil 2013); Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy 2012); and Intrude: Art and Life 366 at Zendai Museum Shanghai (China 200)]; among others. Ravens is founder and director of Defibrillator Gallery and co-founder and director of Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival. Visit josephravens.com or DFBRL8R.org for more information.

Roberto Sifuentes is an interdisciplinary performance artist. His work fuses highly charged cultural issues with a wild pop culture aesthetic. From homeland security to extreme reality television – from video games to military training – from fetishism to evangelism – Sifuentes creates interactive performance installations where personas wind their way through psycho/sexual/political/universes. The result is a cinematic style that uses satire, humor, and spectacle to peel away the viewer’s protective layers and reveal society’s desires, fears, and obsessions. Recent projects include: #exsanguination, a collaboration with new media artist jonCates and Aram Han Sifuentes (2016-2019), and Reculmulations: Digital Avatars and Performance Objects, a collaboration with digital artist Claudia Hart and composer Edmund Campion (Black and White Gallery NYC). As a co-founder of the San Francisco based performance troupe La Pocha Nostra, Sifuentes has collaborated, performed, and conducted workshops with La Pocha at over 800 venues throughout the US, Europe, and Latin America. Sifuentes has co-authored two books with Guilermo Gomez-Peña; most recently Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy (Routledge 2011). From 2001-2006, Sifuentes was in residence at LaMaMa ETC in New York as Artistic Director of The Trinity College/La MaMa Performing Arts Program NYC, and was the 2008 Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Eminent Scholar in Latin American Studies at Columbus State University, Georgia. Sifuentes is currently a tenured full Professor of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.