Every landscape is frequented by past ways of life. How to address a way of being in the world asks us to be attuned to place, time, and intent. Through an interdisciplinary art practice, Tamara Becerra Valdez observes the meaning and function of discarded and abandoned materials to consider how historical topographies arise through traces in the urban social landscape. The ephemeral nature of human behavior leaves an impression in her work. 

Her work has been exhibited at Mexic-Arte Museum, Gallery 400, Comfort Station, and Sector 2337 as part of the 2018 Lit & Luz Festival. She has held positions in programming and special collections at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, and the Harry Ransom Center. She has been an artist-in-residence at ACRE Projects and Human Sciences. From 2017-2019, Valdez served as a Graduate Research Fellow supervising the artistic and creative direction in the collaborative, multi-disciplinary project, “Political Ecology: Platform Chicago,” supported by the Institute for the Humanities (UIC) Humanities Without Walls consortium and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Tamara received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Image:  Tamara Becerra Valdez, NENO at Cullerton and Throop St. (Second Geographies), 2018, Video still 

Alejandro Jiménez-Flores (b. 1989) is a process-based conceptual artist making gestures that occupy the space of painting, writing, and performance. Their practice is concerned with how the language we have or lack, subordinates our subjectivities, identity formations, and the space we are allowed to occupy. They have had recent solo exhibitions at BAR4000 (Chicago, IL), Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL), and Efrain Lopez Gallery (Chicago, IL), as well as a two-person exhibition at Apparatus Projects (Chicago, IL) and performances at Gallery 400 (Chicago, IL) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. They have been featured in reviews and publications such as New American Paintings, Chicago Artist Writers, and Newcity Art. They attained a BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2012.

Artist Photo: Autumn Elizabeth Clark

Image: Alejandro Jiménez-Flores, una noche maravillosa —a fantastic night, 2019, Soft-pastels, flower petals, plaster; 8 x 10.5 in.

Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero is a multi-disciplinary artist uncovering the complexities of Caribbean heritage and queer identity through ornate visual art and captivating musical performance. Also known as CQQCHiFRUIT, Guerrero has DJed, performed, and exhibited across Chicago, the US, and internationally. Guerrero is Miami-born and Chicago-based, is a cofounder of TRQPITECA, and Registrar at Hyde Park Art Center.

Artist Photo: Glitter Guts

Image: Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, Cqqchifruit Dentata, 2019, Live musical performance, 40 min. Photo: Colectivo Multipolar

The work of Leticia Bernaus (b. Argentina) displays an intriguing take on the conflicting contemporary link between nature and culture. Bernaus is a photographer and experimental filmmaker exploring contemporary issues of diversity, displacement and belonging and forms of colonialism. She superimposes materials and formats, blurring the borders between animal and mineral, immaterial and physical, documentary and fiction. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Argentina, Brazil, United States, Spain, England and Italy. She lives and works in Chicago, USA.

Image: Leticia Bernaus, Agnosis, 2019, 16mm film sculpture, silent, 03:19 min

Karen Dana Cohen was born in 1982 in Mexico City and lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received a BFA from The National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City (2005) and earned her MFA degree at Hunter College, New York (2011), where she based her art studio up until 2017. Her early work consists of scenes where family dynamics evoked visual tension in a composition. By experiencing her own family from abroad and beginning to grow into a family of her own she began exploring her painting practice as a more process-based research. The paintings of her recent work are often part of a specific arrangement based in gestures that she discovered inherited from women in her past as a mandate of femininity. The paintings offer an intimate narrative of the role immigrant women need to reinvent their whole self in order to survive, while at the same time defend their own identity through generations.  

Image: Karen Dana, There is a transplanted gathering in between my steps, 2018, Oil on canvas, 72” x 60”