1431 W. Hubbard St., Ste. 201, Chicago, IL 60642
By advance appointment only. Please email contact@chicagoartistscoalition.org
09.20
Preview 9: A Boldness to Dare and Try
Friday, Sep 6, 2019 / 5-8PM
Latham Zearfoss Tamara Becerra Valdez Flor Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero Leticia Bernaus Karen Dana Cohen
Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Preview 9: A Boldness to Dare and Try, featuring works of art by Leticia Bernaus, Karen Dana Cohen, Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, Alejandro Jiménez-Flores, Tamara Becerra Valdez, and Latham Zearfoss.
The six dynamic visual artists in the exhibition demonstrate a mastery of the formal and conceptual, as tools to advance their creativity and confront social challenges. They are dedicated to their respective crafts and have triumphed in unexpected artistic environments, despite opposition that may stifle their creative expression or personal identity. In various assertions, this group of artists redefines and claims culture and space as her/his/their own, without apology.
Preview 9: A Boldness to Dare and Try is curated by Asha Iman Veal.
The exhibition runs from September 6-20, 2019, with an opening reception on Friday, September 6, from 5-8PM. A closing reception and breakfast will occur on Friday, September 20, from 9-11AM, in conjunction with EXPO ART WEEK.
BOLT solo exhibitions 2020
January 3 - February 13, 2020 | Latham Zearfoss
February 21 - April 2, 2020 | Tamara Becerra Valdez
April 10 - May 21, 2020 | Alejandro Jiménez-Flores
May 29 - July 9, 2020 | Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero
July 17 - August 27, 2020 | Leticia Bernaus
October 2 - November 12, 2020 | Karen Dana
About the curator
Asha Iman Veal is an arts organizer, dedicated to the possibilities of redirected routes of dialogues across global space. Her affiliation includes the Exhibitions and Residency Team at Hyde Park Art Center, the Faculty of Arts Administration & Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and recent Development strategy for Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. Her previous roles at arts and advocacy organizations include playwright Eve Ensler’s V-Day global movement to end violence against women and girls, and she has worked on research and arts-based projects in Vietnam, Tokyo, Scotland, Canada, and Cuba. In 2019 she was curator for The Tokyo Show: Black & Brown Are Beautiful, Hyde Park. In 2018 she juried for Arts + Public Life/The University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics, & Culture; Ox-Bow; and ACRE.
image: Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, MYTH OF CQQCHIFRUIT, 2015, video, 10 min.
About Artists
Latham Zearfoss produces time-based images and objects about selfhood and otherness. Often collaborative, these works ask: how do we come to know ourselves as social human subjects? Across media, the work is anchored in the belief that identity is a cumulative, political effect, inherited through a kind of collective bargaining. These themes find evocative, sensual resonances through dramatic shifts in color and light, reverberating soundscapes populated by disembodied voices, queerly uncanny iterations of the not-noticed and everyday, and “soft borders” - spatial markings of undetermined significance that invite participation, transgression, even penetration.
Latham Zearfoss works in Chicago, where they produce time-based images, objects and experiences about selfhood and otherness. Outside of the studio, they contribute to collective motions toward joy and reflection through social projects such as a queer dance party (Chances Dances), a critical space for white allyship (Make Yourself Useful), and an itinerant conference on socially-engaged art (Open Engagement). Latham graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 2008 and the University of Illinois at Chicago with an MFA in 2011. They have exhibited their work, screened their videos, and DJed internationally and all over the U.S.
Artist photo: Harry Culy
Image: Latham Zearfoss, Moving, Even Still; 2019, Cardboard, spray paint, tape, wheat-paste installation from ships in the night at the Engine Room in Wellington, New Zealand; 32 x 7 x 3 ft
Tamara Valdez is a visual artist, writer, and researcher focused on craft traditions, legacy stories, and the landscapes that sustain them. She is drawn to fragile and endangered forms of knowledge and how they persist despite erasure. Her work considers how the histories and ecologies of place shape the stories we tell and the objects we make. She is a 2025–2026 U.S. Fulbright Fellow and holds an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago.
Image: Handmade sheets from invasive seaweed species, hanging in the dry room at Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades, Spain, 2024.
(updated 2025)
Flor* (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: Flor, una noche maravillosa —a fantastic night, 2019, Soft-pastels, flower petals, plaster; 8 x 10.5 in.
*previously known as Alejandro Jiménez-Flores
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”
