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Meet Artist Mentors
Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber, social practice, and performance artist who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion and protest. Her work has been exhibited at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO), Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (Chicago, IL), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia, PA), Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum (Seoul, South Korea), and the Design Museum (London, UK).
Aram is a 2016 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, 2016 3Arts Awardee, and 2017 Sustainable Arts Foundation Awardee. She earned her BA in Art and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Image: We Are Never Never Other, 2018, Medium: PVC coated vinyl, Dimensions: 137 1/3 × 264 inches (348.7 × 670.6 cm) Photograph © Alise O'Brien Photography
(updated 2019)
Meet Artist Residents
Alejandro Figueredo Diaz-Perera is an emerging artist from Havana, Cuba. Working across the mediums of video, photography, painting, installation and text, Diaz-Perera presents metaphors to illustrate how relationships are established among social individuals. Through his practice, he seeks to make connections between the quotidian and the universal. Recent exhibitions include the Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival at Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago; solo exhibition at Garcia Squared Contemporary, Kansas City; solo exhibition at the Chicago Artists Coalition; collaborative action at Aspect/Ratio, Chicago; group exhibition at Freeark Gallery, Riverside, IL; collaborative exhibiton at the SUB-MISSION, Chicago; and participation in festivals and exhibitions in Cuba including the International Festival of Video Art, the 10th and 11th Havana Biennials, and group gallery exhibitions. Learn more about Alejandro Figueredo Diaz-Perera’s solo BOLT exhibition A Home Coming (revisited).
An undisciplined creator. Amina Ross creates boundary-crossing works that embrace embodiment, imaging technologies, intimacy and collectivity in physical and digital spaces. Amina has exhibited work, spoken on panels and taught workshops at venues throughout the United States. Amina's intention within a media-centering practice is to engage sensuality and sense-perception as modes of reclaiming the body. Amina is currently a 2018-2019 Artist-in-Residence at Arts & Public Life and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. As an educator Amina is currently an adjunct lecturer in the Contemporary Practices department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Co-lead artist of Teen Creative Agency at the Museum of Contemporary Art. As a curator and cultural organizer Amina is curator of ECLIPSING, a multi-media festival celebrating darkness.
 David Alekhuogie (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) attended the University of California at Berkley where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and minored in ethnomusicology before his transition to art-making. Alekhuogie began making photographs while working for various music publications, such as The Source, Complex, and The Fader. He has also photographed production materials for record labels, including Warp and Stones Throw. Alekhuogie received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus in Photography in 2013 and received his MFA from Yale University in 2015. Alekhuogie’s multi-disciplinary practice is centered on photography and investigates memory, technology, media, and power. Learn more about David Alekhuogie’s solo BOLT exhibition A Thin Blue Line.
 David Bodhi Boylan’s work in wood sculpture aims to freeze moments of material transience and imperfection, and elevate them to significant subjects of artistic intervention. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. In 2014 he was the recipient of the Traveling Fellowship, presented by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He has exhibited his work in group and solo exhibitions in Chicago, New York, Boston, and Cleveland. He lives and works in Chicago.
 Iris Bernblum is a multi-media artist. She explores ideas around tension and release, power and play, fantasy and escape using a range of media, including writing, video, photography, and sculpture. She is interested in the boundaries between the normal and abnormal, and the possibilities of quiet subversion. Bernblum has shown at Artist’s Space and The Elizabeth Foundation in New York, The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and The Brooklyn International Film Festival, among others. She received her MFA from Columbia University in New York and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about Iris Bernblum’s solo BOLT exhibition Today is a New Day.
 Jaclyn Jacunski is a printmaker, sculptor, organizer, writer, and teacher whose art considers the productive engagement of vacant spaces, gentrified neighbors, and contested landscapes. Her works questions what is present in the land and what has been left behind for communities. The materials from lots, found objects, news articles are used to create new objects that work to be critical of the operations of power and property. Her sources stem from small acts of resistance in public spaces and are strongly influenced by handmade objects and printmaking's populist ethic. Jaclyn is Chicago-based artist earning her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and B.F. A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has written for the magazine ArtInPrint and was recently highlighted in Chicago Artists Month. She currently works at SAIC's Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration and has also taught there along with Harrington College of Design. She has exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center, Harold Washington College and Columbia College's Center for Book and Paper Arts and A + D Gallery. She was an artist-in-residence at Spudnik Press and the Director of the Chicago Printer’s Guild. Learn more about Jaclyn Jacunski’s solo BOLT exhibition Start Together.
 Johana Moscoso is an artist who explores co-narratives of South American and North American cultures. She incorporates a variety of mediums into installations that express her interest in gender roles, culture, and migration. In her fiber work she utilizes stitch and embroidery to create tapestries that reference the migratory journeys of her family. These tapestries become abstract maps that trace the time, labor, and nostalgia of these journeys. In her performance work she strives to evoke intimate feelings that cannot be described in words but are better expressed through movement. By using traditional Latino dance in her performances Moscoso questions gender roles in Hispanic culture. Engaging these fragile human states is the pivotal endeavor in her performance work. Ultimately, her application of fiber, textiles and performance with physical environments has enabled her to create performative installations that empower the feminine presence and celebrate culture and migration. Â
 Influenced by the cultural milieu of inter-ethnic relations in Indonesia, Leonard Suryajaya’s work explores intricate and complicated layers of selfhood in the context of cultural background, intimacy, sexual preference, and personal displacement. By utilizing photography, video, along with elements of performance and installation, and through the use of personal narrative and story telling, his work challenges and deconstructs the perspective we use to scrutinize and observe our roles in a transnational global world. Suryajaya received his MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about Leonard Suryajaya’s solo BOLT exhibition Don't Hold On to Your Bones.
Suzette Bross is a lens-based artist living and working in Chicago, Illinois. Her practice explores notions of time, technology, liminality and community. Consistently addressed in her projects are the spaces in between time that occur in everyday life, created utilizing everyday technologies. Bross’ film background is evident when she investigates the nature of time and applies elements of motion to her conceptual work. Through her community based work, Bross hopes to engage viewers and demonstrate the significance of art in the everyday. Bross has collaborated with “StreetWise” magazine which helps Chicago homeless women and men achieve personal stability and strength through social services and aiding with employment. She is also the Founder and Executive Director of the non-profit arts organization, “CPS Lives”, which creates residencies for artists in Chicago Public Schools to create art, engage students and share stories about the importance of public school education.
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