1431 W. Hubbard St., Ste. 201, Chicago, IL 60642
By advance appointment only. Please email contact@chicagoartistscoalition.org
10.16
Resident Exhibition: 2025 Cohort 2 of 5
Van Payne Rob Croll Nick D’Alessandro Sebastian Bruno-Harris
Taj Richardson
About Curators
Taj Richardson (b. The Bronx, NY, 1999) is an artist, designer, and curator currently based in Chicago with an interest in rendering and analyzing imaginative spaces through multiple mediums. Influenced by his relationship with escapism and memories, Taj combines analog/traditional methods with digital programs to create intimate moments between people and spaces. Taj is also one of the co-founders and editors of Write That Down!, a seasonal zine based collection of artifacts, art, and stories that captures the current moment in Chicago from a radical, queer, and experimental perspective.
Taj’s curatorial and editorial practice uses analysis to construct narratives through conceptual and spatial interventions. Art and design can redefine a space by providing unique points of interaction and usher people to new experiences. Working through this lens draws attention to spaces, artworks, identities, and experiences at the corners and thresholds of society–places we pass by or avoid. His interdisciplinary methods are fueled by varying mediums and processes that come together to make an engaging and thoughtful presentation where the architecture becomes the framework and physical frame for viewers to interpret their realities.
He earned a BFA and a B.Arch from Rhode Island School of Design where he studied architecture and printmaking in 2022 and was an Urban Ecology Fellow at Sweet Water Foundation in 2022.
Image: Exhibition curated by Richardson titled Reflections, 2024
About Artists
Van Payne (b. 2001) is a black-filipino american artist working between painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture. She received her BFA from the School of the Art institute Chicago and is the recipient of the Magdalena Abakanowicz Fellowship and Buonanno-Smith Scholarship. Payne assembles objects to navigate the interstice of mixed-race identity, patriotism and the contradictions birthed by their union. “The American conception of Blackness is to exist in a state of calculation, seeking ways to pacify the past within oneself. I reckon with a chasm that lies between our collective understanding of visibility against representation.” Reckon: to calculate or settle accounts. In her practice, Payne considers the many divisions she inhabits and works to produce images that reflect her experience of the visual narrative. Here, she settles on how objects, materials and assembled contexts can re-member the history that lives within her. Payne currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Image: Van Payne, Nap, 2024, cotton, hair, enamel, bed spring
Headshot: dani case
Rob Croll (b. 1993; Asheville, NC) is a multimedia artist, writer, and educator living in Chicago. His work moves between photography, sculpture, and performance to examine the politics of space and the unstable relationships between landscape, body, architecture, and image. Drawing from a background in improvised music, he applies the idea of extended technique to the camera, often purposefully misusing the technologies and materials of photography in search of novel ways to represent a subject.
Croll holds a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the 2023–2024 James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship for photography. He has exhibited and performed both locally and internationally and has recently attended residencies in Italy, Germany, and the United States.
Alongside his artistic practice, Croll has worked extensively as a translator and editor, with a focus on contemporary Latin American literature. His translations have been featured in such places as Latin American Literature Today, Asymptote, The Paris Review, Circumference Magazine, Literary Hub, and Granta; his books have been reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, NPR.org, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus, among others.
Image: Rob Croll, Echo (echo), 2024, C-type prints and paper, 9 x 9 inches
Nick D’Alessandro (b. 2000) is a Chicago-based artist focusing on industry and subsequent disposal practices. His work draws from the events of planned obsolescence, collecting the objects of its disregard. In approaching a fiber context, the materiality of the objects studied becomes centered and honored in light of their exhausted utility. Investigating extraction systems as a catalyst for land destruction, digital colonialism, and material reuse within the textile industries, he asks what the aesthetics of these essential materials offer a throwaway society, and looks for the point at which an object becomes waste.
His work explores group identities, signaling through dress, and a garment’s associative flux. Often dependent on the site, the work is informed by sifting through thrift stores, alleys, and curbsides, looking for objects with visible use, and synthesizing these materializations. Questioning how material origin, permanence, and external forces affect an object’s value, Nick’s work explores the connection between maker, user, and re-user. Intercepting material to assign new context reintegrates them into discussions of class, longevity, and labor.
D'Alessandro received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus on Sculpture, Fiber and Material Studies, and Fashion. He is the director of the fashion brand WWWYRED. His work has been exhibited in Chicago at; LVL3, Sawhorse, EXPO, and in NYC at NADA and Gern En Regalia. His work has been published in Document Journal, Graphite, and Like a Field.
Image: Nick D’Alessandro, Jasper, 2025, lint + aluminum zip ties, 40" x 43" x 33"
Sebastian Bruno-Harris (b. Puerto Rico, 1991) is a visual artist who makes mixed-media sculptures and assemblages out of everyday objects and materials. At the core of his practice is a desire to harness the feeling you get when you look at something ordinary and it strikes you as new and strange. In pursuing that desire Sebastian make assemblages using materials such as plants, found objects, photographs, videos, and miniatures to create abstract, whimsical scenes. Interested in the potential stored in everyday things as a network of transfers and relays, he works with objects and images that resonate with each other at different speeds, scales, amplitudes, distances, and durations, giving the ordinary the charge of an unfolding. Sebastian aims to make work that helps ground people into appreciating their surroundings by providing methods for noticing and contemplating the endless, kaleidoscopic ways in which things are connected – be they objects, thoughts, feelings, impressions, or dreams.
Born in Puerto Rico and raised between Buenos Aires and South Florida, Sebastian studied sculpture at Florida Atlantic University earning his BFA in 2016 and then his MFA in 2023 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department. Sebastian’s work has been exhibited nationally at Cultural Council of Palm Beach County, Lake Worth, FL; Fritz Gallery, West Palm Beach; Leidy Gallery at Fred Lazarus IV Center, Baltimore; Chicago Art Department, Chicago; Co-Prosperity, Chicago; and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Sebastian was a year-long artist-in-residence at Chicago Art Department from 2020 to 2021. He is currently based in Chicago.
Image: Sebastian Bruno-Harris, Station Continuum, 2023, Mixed-media installation with photos and videos, 8’ x 12’ x 5’, Image credit: Jonas Mikosh
Headshot: Maria Burundarena
