Gericault De La Rose is a queer Filipinx, multidisciplinary artist, and educator. Through performance and video work, they use their brown body as an amulet against the plague of forgetting within a postcolonial world that reinforces collective amnesia. After graduating with a BFA with an emphasis in Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they formed an artist collective, Export Quality, together with other Queer Filipinx alumni. As an emerging artist, De La Rose has had the opportunity to showcase their work in group shows in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Johnson City, New York, and Toronto. In collaboration with AFIRE Chicago, Export Quality, was awarded the Crossroads Youth Fund for Cultural Change to support their documentary series Nakikita. De La Rose recently attended the ACRE residency in Steuben, Wisconsin having received the Brenda Green Gender Inclusivity Scholarship. 

Image: Gericault De La Rose, Initiation, 2016, 10 mins, Gold cloth, water, skin

Naomi Elson was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her MFA from Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, Illinois. Following graduation, Naomi moved to Chicago, where she has shown at several galleries, including GIFC at Western Exhibitions, Nightlight Gallery and Studios, ARC Gallery, Rubberneck Gallery, Bucktown Gallery, and Zhou B Art Center.

Image: Naomi Elson, Curb Alert, 2018, carpet backing, fabric, yarn, and latex paint, 70 x 30 ft. space.

Using photography, video, and written language, Jazmine Harris deconstructs and reconstructs narratives about city people and places. Emphasizing both the beauty and failure of metropolises, Harris explores the binal relationship between the divestment of communities and the forming of third spaces.

Jazmine Harris, Some Thingz Never Change: Monologues From A Stoop In Bronzeville, 2019, 1-channel HD video (b/w), 11:31 min. (Photo: Robert Chase Heishman).

Ellen Holtzblatt creates paintings and drawings to explore connections between the physical and the spiritual—the memories of the body that reside in the soul. Her work becomes an allegory for psyche and emotion, evolution and decay. The artist residencies that Holtzblatt has attended in the U.S. and Iceland have inspired the emotive qualities of her recent landscape paintings. Holtzblatt, a Chicago-based artist, exhibits nationally and internationally, with recent solo shows at Fermilab Art Gallery, Chicago Cultural Center, and Josef Glimer Gallery. Her group exhibits include the Jerusalem Biennale, Museum of Biblical Art in New York, and Inselgalerie in Berlin. Holtzblatt earned degrees in visual art and art therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Image: Ellen Holtzblatt, Like a Lily Among Thorns, 2019, oil on linen, 60" x 30"

Julia Klein is a sculptor who has exhibited her work both nationally and in and around Chicago. Klein has participated in a number of fellowships and residencies, including, most recently, the 2018-19 Chicago Jewish Artists Fellowship. She received a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from Bard College. Since 2009, she has run Soberscove Press, which produces books about art. 

Image: Julia Klein, Thomas Nozkowski, 2019, Stockings, wire, paper, resin, clay, rope, 15 x 18 x 6 in. 

Bryan A. LeBeuf is a new media artist working with simulation, sound and game design. His recent work examines community through collective memory, using overlapping memories as a tool to rebuild, and reimagine his neighborhoods in Detroit, MI. The landscapes and design draw inspiration from the defined environments of early role-playing games and dating simulators, while weaving together imagery of post-industrialized neighborhoods. Bryan holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, upon graduation he was awarded the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship  as well as attending the Mana Contemporary New Media Residency program. Currently, Bryan works as a designer and composer at the University of Chicago.

Image: Bryan A. LeBeuf, Grand Blvd., 2018, Real-time installation, 40’ x 30’

Juan Molina Hernández, born in Guanajuato, México, is a Chicago-based visual artist. Molina Hernández's art practice primarily uses photography and more recently writing, video, and artist books to create narratives that address the complexities of the hybrid immigrant identity. By appropriating symbols from the environment, culture, and personal memory they construct stories in relation to place, family, and a culture that never speaks one language.

Molina Hernández graduated from Northern Illinois University in 2016 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in photography. In the past, they have exhibited at ACRE Projects, Aurora Public Art Commission, Evanston Art Center, Elmhurst Art Museum, Gallery 214, Jack Olson Gallery, North Branch Arts Center, Roman Susan, as well as White Ripple Gallery & Co. 

Image: Juan Molina Hernández, autoretrato o piel vieja y lo que sobra de una manda cumplida (self-portrait or old skin and remnants of a prayer answered), archival inkjet print, dimensions vary, 2017

Solomon Moore is a visual artist whose work primarily focuses on the different ways fantasy becomes reality. Moore interprets English ballads, folktales, and myths through the act of placing himself, his friends, and others in these stories. Currently he makes prints, drawings, and paintings.

Image: Swans at Dusk, 2019, watercolor on paper, 5" x 6”

José Santiago Pérez is a Salvadoran-American artist from Los Angeles currently based in Chicago. He weaves disposable plastics into markers of time and materials of intimacy and is currently a 2019-2020 HATCH artist resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition.

His 2020 solo show at Roman Susan Art Foundation was reviewed in Artforum. Solo exhibitions of his craft based sculptures and wall hangings have been presented at Ignition Project Space and Wedge Projects, and his curatorial projects have been exhibited at the Leather Archive & Museum. José has participated in group shows in San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Reviews and interviews about his work have been featured in OthePeoplesPixels, Archives + Futures Podcast, Sixty, Newcity, and Art Intercepts.

José has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches in the Fiber and Material Studies department.

Image: José Santiago Pérez "Palacio, 12" (2020), coiled plastic, 3 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 61 inches.

Joshi Radin investigates questions concerning nature, cosmology and expanded landscape. Drawing on childhood experiences living within a utopian back to the land community, she traces historical and genealogical roots of utopianism and nature through imagery and processes as spaces of knowledge production. She has published essays and presented work in the US and internationally and received her MFA (2016) and MA (2018) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a merit scholar.

Image: Joshi Radin, Bent (Tangent), 2019, screen print, acrylic, recycled paper, 20h x 26w. 

Unyimeabasi Udoh is an artist, graphic designer, and co-founder of Plates: An experimental journal of art and culture. Their practice centers on legibility, meaning, and how systems of communication and knowledge are built and maintained. Udoh holds an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Architecture from Columbia University. They have been a fellow and artist in residence at the Driehaus Museum, Chicago Artists Coalition, and ACRE. In 2021, they were named one of Newcity's Breakout Artists.

Image: Unyimeabasi Udoh, Idle Hands (Grace Rose) (2021). Mirror privacy film and inkjet print on transparency. Dimensions 24” diameter (25.25” framed).