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

Miguel Limón (b. Chicago, Illinois) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker whose practice spans printmaking, photography, installation, and socially engaged pedagogy. Informed by a lineage of Mexican migrant labor and shaped by their background in museum studies and education, Limón explores the ways images, objects, and materials function as carriers of memory and spirit. Their work approaches the print as both artifact and animate form—an object that not only documents but intervenes, activating personal and collective histories.

Through an animist and pedagogical lens, Limón engages print media as civic infrastructure: a tool for storytelling, resistance, and cultural transmission. Their process often merges archival research, material experimentation, and community engagement, investigating how labor, displacement, and place shape our visual and embodied languages.

Limón holds a BS in Education from DePaul University and an MA in Museum and Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. They have received support from 3Arts, the Puffin Foundation, and the Aperture Foundation, with work presented at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Design Museum of Chicago. They live and work in Chicago.

Image: Miguel Limón, Hogares Perdidos, 2016-2019, Silver Gelatin Prints, Instant Film Prints, 10” x 30”

Headshot: Daniel Delgado

Mauricio López F. is a Chilean artist currently based in Chicago. From a young age, he became deeply connected to the local experimental scene, performing with different sound acts. He studied Musical Composition at the Escuela Moderna de Música y Danza, guided by renowned composer Javier Farías. He was also selected by composer Luca Belcastro to participate in Copiú: Improvement Course in Composition and Interpretation of Contemporary Music. Later, he pursued a Bachelor's Degree in Aesthetics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he focused on avant-garde movements in the context of Chilean popular music, particularly the disruptive work of the Productora Mutante. He is a recent graduate of the MFA in Sound program at SAIC, where he received the New Artist Society Scholarship.

Currently, his practice explores the entanglement between visuality, sound, and motion by carefully tensioning them into unexpected social synchronizations. With a foundation in music, he has expanded into a broader territory of materials, which he navigates while dodging their expected roles. This seemingly unattached praxis distills his Chilean heritage, where discomfort finds refuge in sardonicism.

López F. often positions himself in complex terrains where confusion intensifies—and instead of leaving, he remains. Themes such as translation, miscommunication, labor, and cultural friction surface as he engages with the social layers embedded in the spaces he inhabits. Through a combination of sculpture, installation, performance, drawing, and photography, he seeks to challenge sensory expectations, creating encounters that unfold through shifting and layered codes.

His work has been featured in Peru, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, and the United States, with recent highlights including the 30th anniversary exhibition of SITE Gallery and Expo Chicago 2025.

Image: Mauricio López F., Wind reenactment: Fig 1, 2025, Handrail, mechanism, miniature flag, and toggle switch, 45.67" × 3.54" × 48.82"

Headshot: Sage (Shu Tzu) Lin

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

Skyler Simpson (b. Omaha, NE 1995) is a visual artist working between painting and drawing. Her work explores personal mythology and the home as a fraught refuge. The narrative pulls from Simpson’s Midwestern upbringing and confronts socialized domestic ideals. Through detailed mark-making, Simpson reveals her ongoing negotiation with beauty standards, materialism, and the allure of ornamentation. The paintings flit between familiarity and fantasy, connecting mundane rituals to a cosmic psychodrama. In these mystical subplots, the artist wrestles with hope and spirituality amidst current power structures.

Skyler received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison (2024) and a BFA from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (2018). In 2023, Simpson was the recipient of the University of Wisconsin Foundation Graduate Fellowship. During the summer of 2019, she worked as a Painting and Drawing intern at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Simpson was selected as a finalist for the AXA Art Prize Exhibition at the New York Academy of Art three years in a row, in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Booooooom, and she has exhibited in shows throughout the United States. Skyler is currently based in Chicago, IL.

Image: Skyler Simpson, Behind the Scenes, 2025, Colored pencil and acrylic on panel, 30" x 24"