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Meet Curatorial Residents
Christina Nafziger is a Chicago-based writer, editor, curator, and critic interested in research-based artistic practices, labor and power, the impact archiving has on memory and identity, and the ways in which location affects identity and art making, particularly in the Midwest. She believes in the unlimited potential of approaching all things with a anti-authoritarian, collaborative mindset. When she is not writing she is reading about cyborgs, dolls, and AI.
Christina holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths University of London and a BA. in Art History from Herron School of Art & Design. She is currently the Managing Editor at the arts publication and archiving initiative Sixty Inches From Center. She is also the Associate Editor at the contemporary art publication Create! Magazine.
With a decade of experience as an arts writer, Christina’s writing has been published by the Chicago Reader Chicago-Sun Times, Sixty Inches From Center, Create! Magazine, Newcity, Ruckus Journal, and more. She is also co-editor of Sixty Inches From Center’s inaugural book Chicago Artists + Archives Project: Case Studies in Collaboration (2023).
Image: Photo of an exhibition curated by Nafziger titled Haunted Nostalgia: the mall will be closing in 10 minutes…, featuring the work of Katie Neece.
Christine Magill (she/they; b. Boston, MA, 1996) is a curator, nonprofit administrator, and art collections professional currently based in Chicago, Illinois. She received a BA in French Studies from Boston University in 2018 and MAs in Modern and Contemporary Art History and Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. Previous curatorial projects include two iterations of <i>New Work</i> and the 2022 SAIC <i>Faculty Sabbatical Triennial</i> at SAIC Galleries.
Christine's curatorial practice centers around ideas of space, time, materials, and connections, specifically examining architecture and spatial layout of display spaces in direct conversation with the artworks shown alongside artists' material processes of creating. They are also interested in languages, translations, cultural differences, and global understanding as methods of both curation and communication. As such, she speaks proficient French alongside her native English and is working on their literacy in Korean and German.
Image: Christine Magill, Installation shot of New Work, 2021. Work pictured: Liang He, Running Bunny (2021), plastic fabrics, fans, cardboard, and wires; and Xinyan Wang, Intriguing Uncertaintied (2020), acrylic on cardboard
Francine Almeda is a Chicago-based Filipina-American gallerist, independent curator, cultural producer, writer, and DJ. She is the Founder and Director of Tala, an independent contemporary art space and gallery with a multitudinous program containing a library and atrium marketplace. Prior to this, she founded Jude Gallery, an artist-run project and exhibition space which ran from 2021-2024. As a gallerist, Francine builds community-based platforms for artists that encourage transdisciplinary experimentation of all mediums with the goal of proposing new realities. Her practice nurtures new methods of collaboration in order to expand the capacities of art as a caretaking tool. With a focus on conceptual, narrative-driven curatorial projects, and public programming, Francine supports QTBIPOC artists at all stages of their career. She has spoken and sat on panels across Chicago, including the Arts Club of Chicago, Soho House Chicago, and The Silver Room. She was a participant in the ICI’s Curatorial Seminar (2022), and is currently a Curatorial Resident at Chicago Artists Coalition (2024-2026).
Image: Tala Inaugural Show Installation Shot - Credit: Steven Piper
Headshot: Steven Piper
Gordon Fung (b. 1988, San Francisco, CA; lives in Chicago, IL) is a transdisciplinary artist-curator who works with large-scale curatorial/collaborative practices, experimental audiovisual performances, new media installations, noise music, experimental film/video, media archaeology, participatory works, and happenings.
Expanding the traditional caretaking role of the curator, he applies stewardship to artworks, artists, history, culture, and the community at large to ensure constructive dialogue between them. Recognizing the cultural significance of media and technology, his curations bring equilibrium to art scenes where media arts are underrepresented. Serving as a mediator and facilitator, he builds a heteroglossic bridge to foster a more supportive environment that elevates both institutions and independent DIY scenes.
Inspired by the unique Chicago video/media arts lineage and collectivity in Fluxus, Gordon forms and directs the experimental time-based arts collective //sense to showcase large-scale experimental community theater performances, exhibitions, and screenings. Counteracting the marginalization of experimental time-based arts, he curates and fosters a collaborative common ground for sound, video, performance, and media artists to create gesamtkunstwerk through synergy. By democratizing media tools, he empowers and mobilizes the community to rectify media injustice imposed by corporations.
As a firm believer in collectivism, his large-scale curation cultivates two maxims: “making good communities better” and “finding arts in all things.” Referencing Fluxus and happenings, he creates brave spaces for participants to unleash their imagination in artmaking through deskilling and unlearning.
Gordon has presented experimental community theaters at the International Museum of Surgical Science (2024), No Nation Art Lab (2023), Comfort Station (2023), and MacLean Ballroom (2023). His curated exhibitions include: (re)understanding media: extension of agency in the global village (Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition 2024 in Austria), prismatic (re)ality (2024), and //show what you can (2023). He launches neomediapolis, an experimental and community space in Chicago, to support video, media, and performance arts.
Image: Gordon Fung, and the home of the [placeholder]—S1E1_pilotComfortStation (2023), experimental community theater, duration varies - Photo by Alex Teng-feng Kuo
Jordan Barrant is a Chicago-based writer, curator, and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the cosmological intersections of the ineffable, with a focus on land-based and intuitive practices. Through oral histories and archival research, Jordan views the past as an invitation to imagine brighter, more loving futures. Through arts writing and curation, Jordan brings her practices and praxis to the forefront, weaving poetic writing and methodical experiences into the fold of her work.
Jordan earned her Bachelor's degree in Women’s Studies from Spelman College and a Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has completed curatorial residencies at Artpace San Antonio and curated exhibitions, including The Black Domestic at SITE Galleries and the GREYSTONE Collective, and has a forthcoming exhibition at Roots and Culture. She has written for Burnaway, the Boston Art Review, the Chicago Reader, and the Black Embodiments Studio: A Year in Black Art and has been awarded grants from 3Arts and the Pulitzer Center.
Rooting her work in a Black feminist methodology, Jordan centers queer, Black and Brown folks in her practice.
Image: The Black Domestic at SITE Galleries, 2023
Headshot: Arieanne Evans
rachel dukes is a Chicago-based freelance writer, independent curator, and arts administrator from Grand Prairie/Arlington, Texas. rachel's practice incorporates her interest and research on (Afro) Surrealism which she defines as a surrender of the mind to the realm of the unknown and marvelous to challenge conventional modes of being.
rachel earned her undergraduate degree in Accounting from the University of Arkansas and holds a master’s degree in Museum and Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois Chicago. rachel has supported the production of exhibitions at the South Side Community Art Center, Gallery 400, and the Hyde Park Art Center; her writing has been featured in the Chicago Reader, Sixty Inches From Center, and New City. A passionate advocate for community centered arts programing, rachel also serves as a board member for Chicago Tap Theatre.
Image: Installation shot, Beyond Frames: Black Women Collectors Shaping Cultural Heritage in Chicago, 2025, South Side Community Art Center, Photo courtesy of Lennell Davis
Headshot: Reagan Dukes
Serena JV Elston is a curator and artist whose work interrogates the relationship between the body and structures of power. Her exhibitions explore themes of ecology, posthumanism, disability, and embodiment through an intersectional, post-colonial lens. Working with artists that experience chronic illness and disability, Serena focuses on platforming experiences of the oppression of bodies. Through her curatorial projects she examines the fragile interdependence of bodies and institutions, reframing disability as a site of resistance. Elston’s exhibitions challenge colonial legacies of labor and wellness, creating spaces that foster radical reimaginations of society and care.
Image: SPACORE Magazine Issue 001, 2024, 84 pages
Headshot: Steven Piper
Sidney Mori Garrett is a Houston, TX born, Chicago, IL based curator, arts administrator, and artist. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and Digital Media from University of Houston and a Masters of Fine Art in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Garrett has created multimedia works that have exhibited nationally and internationally at Alabama Song Art Space, Blaffer Art Museum, Art Licks Weekend and Wedge Gallery among others. Her written works have been published in Byline Houston, Gulf Coast Journal, and The Smartest Thing. In 2017, Garrett performed in Scales with Solange Knowles at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX and later continued to work with Knowles in 2019 for When I Get Home. She is also a founding member of JUICEBOX, a community platform for Black and Brown women, queer, and transgender & gender-nonconforming (TGNC) DJ’s. She has curated exhibitions for Project Row Houses’ Community Gallery, ICOSA Collective, and the School of Art Institute of Chicago's Wellness Center. Her artistic, administrative, and curatorial practice is rooted in her southern Black Feminist’s lens of love, mindfulness, and care. Garrett has held previous positions at Lawndale Art Center, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Project Row Houses while also serving as an Artist Board member for Art League Houston from 2018-2019. She is currently Manager of Programs at 3Arts, Communications Manager at Hyde Park Jazz Festival, a member of Nikkei Uprising (a group of Japanese American activists in Chicago organizing towards abolition & the collective liberation of all peoples), and a core member of Companion Cooperative (a volunteer-run art exhibition and programming space in Chicago).
Image: Sidney Garrett, Finding Necessities curation at ICOSA Collective, 2020
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
Meet Artist Residents
Alivé Piliado-Santana is a curator, arts administrator, and writer working between Chicago and Mexico City. She currently serves as the ALAM Curatorial Associate at the National Museum of Mexican Art, as part of the curatorial cohort for the Advancing Latinx Art in Museums, a national initiative supported by the Ford, Getty, Mellon, and Terra Foundations. Her previous institutional roles include serving as a Research Associate in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. There, she co-curated Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds (2025) and contributed to the research and catalogue for Remedios Varo: Science Fictions (2023). In Mexico City, she served as curator at the Museo Nacional de San Carlos and oversaw the 20th-century collection at the Museo Nacional de Arte. Her curatorial work has also extended to exhibitions on modern Mexican art in Argentina, Chile, and France.
Alivé’s current practice engages with contemporary Latine artists whose work resists fixed narratives of transnationalism and instead navigates the aesthetics and politics of diaspora, identity, language, migration, and nostalgia. She recently curated storefront into chicagoacán (2024), a solo exhibition by Leticia Pardo at SITE Galleries.
She has presented her research and curatorial projects at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Casa Wabi, the College Art Association, Loyola University Chicago, UNAM, and the International Society for the Study of Surrealism. Her writing has been published by the Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Fundación Sebastián, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes de México, and Letras Libres.
Image: Installation view of Leticia Pardo's storefront into chicagoacán, SITE Galleries, 2024. Image credit: Mikey Mosher
Headshot: Juan Olvera
an emard’s practice is a meditative process exploring world-building mythologies and the myth-making potential of queerness. Working with oil paint and leaded glass, they find poetry in the space between art and meaning; between concept, intention, and form.
In emard’s paintings, the surface of the canvas is in an interstitial state at all times. The image finds its way through processes of rubbing and blending paint on the surface and acts of removal by sanding and scraping. It is through this approach that emard creates an atmosphere of becoming, where boundaries are forgiving and time is nonlinear. Emard’s leaded-glass objects function as viewfinders and are a means to implicate and imprint physical space. The accumulation of glass and solder impose image, gesture, and frame onto their surroundings as an acknowledgement and question. In doing so, these leaded-glass objects create a kaleidoscope of the coexisting queer mythologies.
Like queerness, the future exists in the cracks and gestures of the present. It is from this devotional, affective space that emard creates art that enchants, clinging to the notion that art is a conduit towards new places, dimensions, and futures.
an emard was born into a working-class family in suburban Chumash Land / Ventura, CA and spent their formative years navigating queerness in the shadow of the Catholic Church and the light of lemon orchards, asphalt, and the Pacific Ocean. emard now resides on the unceded homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires / Chicago, IL. emard has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Vermont at venues including Steve Turner Gallery, Block Museum, Usdan Gallery, Kibum MacArthur, Weatherproof, Some Clouds, among others.
Image: an emard, Viewfinder, 2022
bex ya yolk (b. Richmond, VA, 1994) is a transdisciplinary visual artist, book maker, researcher, and adjunct professor based in Chicago, IL. yolk earned a BFA in Graphic Design from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and an MFA in Visual Communication Design with a concentration in Book Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a full merit scholar. yolk has received grant endowment and recognition from the Atlanta Contemporary, Codex International Biennial Artists' Book Fair and Symposium, the College Book Art Association, VCUarts Adjunct Faculty Research, and the Judith Alexander Foundation. yolk has been invited as an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI, ACRE in Steuben, WI, Real Time and Space in Oakland, CA, and Aviário Studio in Ferreira do Zêzere, Portugal. They are the senior designer at Cita Press, an independent publishing platform promoting open access, public-domain works of feminist literature.
yolk is the founder of an artists’ book bindery + publishing initiative—THUNGRY which focuses on disrupting what we’ve come to understand qualifies a Book, complicating traditional ways of book building + semantics through experimentation and queering praxis. THUNGRY explores historical research, sociology, and speculative theory into 'the Maternal Complex' made up of subgenres like care work, reproductive design, rematriation, container technologies, abortion access activism, reproductive justice and health care disparity in the U.S, the maternal identity, matrescence, and the gestational state especially in queer folx exploring the intersectionalities between the Book + this kind of body.
Image: bex ya yolk / the book of every title / 2023 / plywood, Tyvek, LED, ink, Migra Italic typeface, sand / 3' x 8'
Headshot: MJ Minutoli
Carina Vargas-Nuñez is a multidisciplinary artist who employs paint and textiles to delve into the tapestry of identity, disability, and family history. Carina has used artistic expression from a young age to process their experience with disability and envision worlds outside of the constraints imposed by their complex health challenges. This world building has continued into their practice today, where Carina uses bright colors and defined lines to illustrate narratives aimed at better understanding their sense of self. Their work is an amalgamation of memory, family stories, folklore, and history—pieced together to shape almost fantastical scenes rooted in elements of symbolism and magic realism
Carina’s work has been featured at Cam Contemporarie, the Chicago Athletic Association, the Bridgeport Art Center, The Other Art Fair, Comfort Station, and the Logan Arts Center. They have designed a mural for Centro Hispano in Madison, WI. Carina has participated in residencies with Unpack Havana in Havana, Cuba and Cam Contemporarie in Chicago, IL.
Image: Carina Vargas-Nunez, Cieba in Caimanera, 2023, Acrylic on Canvas, 60" x 60"
Headshot: Zakkiyyah Najeebah
Cay Mims (she/they) is a Black, queer artist living on the Northside of Chicago. Their primary goal is to synthesize sociological frameworks with their personal experiences. Their work is overwhelmingly concerned with representing themes of displacement, erasure, impermanence and memory. Qualitative and curious, never didactic, and infused with personality; they seek to create moments that are comfortably familiar to some, while amicably informative to others.
Cay also is an emerging, independent arts programmer and curator. Placing an emphasis on marginalized artists, they have hosted and supported creative events around the city for the past year. This includes facilitating/moderating a series of artist conversations in conjunction with shows at the German Cultural Center and (formerly) The Martin; curating an emerging artist pop-up at DragonFly Gallery; and hosting a Black Pride Movie Screening at the Logan Theater.
Cay graduated in 2021 from Vanderbilt University with a BA in Studio Art and a BA in Sociology. They have shown work in a number of galleries nationally including Space 204, Nashville TN; Dedo Maranville Fine Arts Gallery, Valdosta, FL; Buckham Gallery, Flint, MI; M. G. Nelson Gallery, Springfield, IL; The Bridgeport Art Center, Chicago, IL.
Cay also loves cooking, jazz records, trivia, and YouTube.
Image: Cay Mims, DURAG, 2022, Oil on Panel, 35" x 30"
Cecilia Beaven is a visual artist and art instructor from Mexico City, based in Chicago. Cecilia holds an MFA in Studio from SAIC which she pursued as a Fulbright scholar and a BFA with honors from ENPEG La Esmeralda (Mexico City). Cecilia’s multidisciplinary artwork has been shown in solo shows in Mexico City, Houston, and Chicago, as well as in group exhibitions in Mexico, the US, Colombia, Sweden, Italy, and Japan. She has painted murals in several cities such as Hiketa, Paris, Houston, Chicago, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Pachuca, Tepoztlan, and Tijuana, where she was commissioned to paint a segment of the border wall between Mexico and the US.
Through her work, which includes painting, drawing, animation, film, and sculpture, Cecilia develops a speculative mythology with unique visual narratives. Cecilia questions who gets to tell stories and establish the official cultural narratives. The artist affirms her creative agency by modifying existing tales and mythology and seamlessly adding fiction and personal anecdotes. Through this analytical and ludic experimentation, Cecilia brings a unique perspective on Mexican identity that goes beyond folklore and mainstream ideas of Mexico.
Cecilia has also been the recipient of distinctions like the year-long Radicle Studio Residency at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago (2021), the Leroy Neiman Foundation Fellowship at Ox-Bow School of Art, in Saugatuck, Michigan (2019), and the Fulbright program (2017). In 2022 she was considered one of the “100 Most Creative Mexicans in the World” by Forbes Mexico, and in 2023 she was included in the “Art 50 – Chicago’s Artists Artists” list by NewCity magazine.
Image: Cecilia Beaven, Moon Bloom, 2023, Acrylic enamel on wall, 9' x 30'
Chelsea Bighorn (b.1989) was born and raised in Tempe, Arizona, and is Lakota, Dakota and Shoshone – Paiute. She is a textile artist that works in finding the beauty in her rich mixed Native American and Irish American heritage. Finding great inspiration in the history of traditional dance, Bighorn works to celebrate her memories of attending Powwows with her grandmother through her large-scale textile pieces.
Bighorn has a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber Material Studies. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, SITE Santa Fe, EXPO Chicago and Center for Native Futures.
Image: Chelsea Bighorn, Vertebrae, 2024, Canvas, MX dye, artificial sinew, glass beads, 64" x 68"
Headshot: Lillian Heredia
Diana Noh is a Korean American interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL, working at the intersection of photography, fiber, and installation. Her work centers on the reconstruction of distressed photographs of abandoned spaces and landscapes to explore the trauma of cultural in-betweenness and emotional neglect. Raised between two cultures, Diana’s process of tearing, burning, sewing, and layering photographs mirrors her navigation through internal fracture and personal recovery. Her manipulated imagery often stands in for the body—hidden but present, broken yet restored—offering spaces for reflection, confrontation, and restoration.
She received her M.F.A. in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and her B.F.A. in Photography/Motion Picture from Kyungil University in South Korea, with additional training in art therapy. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago, IL; Coker University in Hartsville, SC; and Space HNH in Seoul, South Korea. She has shown in group exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA; Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL; Hudson Valley MOCA in Peekskill, NY; and Editart in Geneva, Switzerland, among many others.
Her work is held in the collections of Jennifer and Dan Gilbert, Kyungil University, and numerous private collectors. Recent recognitions include Artist of the Month at Brushwood Center and first place at Verde Variants, Union Street Gallery in Chicago Heights, IL. Diana has also participated in residencies at the Peninsula School of Art in Fish Creek, WI, and Talking Dolls in Detroit, MI.
Diana frequently shares her practice through lectures and workshops at institutions including Wayne State University in Detroit, MI; Brushwood Center in Riverwoods, IL; and The Arts Council in Fayetteville, NC.
Image: Diana Noh, After Nine, 2022, Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle canvas, thread, wires, yarn, 89 inch x 121 inch
FÁTIMA (b. Earth, 0000) is a Mexican artist working in the fire arts: blacksmithing, lightworking, metal casting and fabrication. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a focus in Sculpture and Printmaking from Loyola University in New Orleans and pursued her Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In her art practice, FÁTIMA delves deep into the roots of radical ancestry, seamlessly weaving ancient techniques into her contemporary creations. Each piece becomes a vessel through which she communicates with the past, present, and future. Objects and spaces transcend their physical forms, becoming conduits for ritualistic expression with the intention of forging narratives of connection.
Image: FÁTIMA, BRASERO I, 0000, Fire, light, ritual, gathering, steel, 27" x 27" x 16"
Gabriel Moreno (b. Galesburg, IL, 1992) works between sculpture, collage, and installation. Moreno’s work believes sculpture is a language of “touch:” a poetic operation where two things meet and change one another. With this in mind he is interested in the medium’s phenomenological coalescence of object, figure, and site.
Fundamental to the work is a longstanding interest in the history of industrialization’s simultaneous productive and extractive forces. In particular, a ten year project looking at Maytag Refrigerator Manufacturing’s relocation from the midwest and what this absence generated. Refrigerators have been forefronted in this inquiry as objects that sometimes resist entropic decay while at other times succumbing to it. Positioned within a cultural situation of failure and persistence he asks “how do social conceptualizations of time frame our experience of such an inheritance?”
His works have been exhibited in galleries and museums including The University of Chicago (2024), The National Museum of Mexican Art (2023), Produce Model Gallery (2019), Randy Alexander Gallery (2017), Trinity College (2017) and Figge Art Museum (2013). He has been featured and given interviews to publications such as NewCity, WBEZ’s Reset, and Denizen Designer. He received BA’s from Knox College in 2014 and completed his MFA at the University of Chicago in 2016. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Image: Gabriel Moreno, Maytag Assembly NASCAR NASCAR NASCAR, 2024; Wood, gesso, image transfer; 42.5" x 22"
Headshot: Olivia Wolf
Gunjan Chawla Kumar (b.1980) is an American- Indian artist living and working in Chicago. Kumar is natively from Punjab, India and moved to the United States in 2011. Gunjan is a materialist and works with various pigments and textiles from around the world. She has spent many years traveling through India and other countries in South Asia observing age-old practices in textiles and indigenous arts. Her interest in archeology, particularly prehistoric cave paintings and related schools of art play an important role in carving her process and ideology. She is a textile graduate from National Institute of Design and Technology, New Delhi (2003) and holds a bachelor’s degree in arts from DAV College, Chandigarh, India (2001). Her works have been exhibited globally and are a part of noted private and public art collections worldwide.
Image: Gunjan Chawla Kumar, Sifr 9, 2024, Pigment on Hand Woven Cotton (Khadi) on Wood Panel, 36" x 36"
Herman Aguirre is a Mexican American artist born and raised in Chicago, were he continues to live and work. He received his BFA (2014) and MFA (2017) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a youth instructor in the Continuing Studies Program and as part-time faculty in the Painting and Drawing Department. He was one of eight individuals to be awarded the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship for Performing and Visual Arts (2017). He is represented by Zolla/Lieberman Gallery (CHI) and Portrait Society Gallery (WI). His work has been exhibited in several art fairs, galleries, and institutions within the country and is also part of several museum’s permanent collections throughout the United States.
Aguirre explores subjects that are deep-rooted in the war on drugs and inner-city violence. Through a rigorous process, he tries to capture the visceral, visual, and psychological effects these issues have on his surroundings and its effects in his community. He uses experimental methods and traditional techniques to create labor intensive pieces that bridge the gap between painting and sculpture, incorporating architecture, image, texture, and symbolism as means capture the immediacy of these subjects. Aguirre uses his studio practice as way to combat, honor, protest, and mourn these subjects, allowing him to cope and co-exist with these realities.
Image: Herman Aguirre, ¡Ni uno mas!, 2023, Oil and oil/acrylic skins on panel, 63" x 98" x 4.5"
“I tend to work with my hands versus my fingers as I question the traditions of both hard work and Haute Couture. I mirror the violence seen around us by physically tearing, burning, stapling, knotting and puncturing materials that tie back to my identity. To find myself I must destroy what I am given. Being from Western KY, a place that values hard work in the traditional sense, I am drawn to explore heavy materials and ideas within a reconstructive fashion practice. I aim to rebuild an understanding of the places I live within and the identity imposed upon me.”
Originally from Western KY, where corn is farmed and coal is mined, Isaac Couch has brought his southern perspective to the northern city of Chicago where he lives and works. After receiving a Bachelor's degree in Merchandising Apparel and Textiles in 2019 from the University of Kentucky, he went on to earn his Masters of Design at SAIC in 2021. Following graduation, he was awarded the 2021 Luminarts Fashion Fellowship, the 2021 Fashion Council Fellowship, and the 2023-24 Arts Club of Chicago Fellowship. He has shown work with the Weinberg Newton Gallery in Chicago, the Lexington Art League back in his home state, the Comfort Station in Logan Square, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Image: Isaac Couch, HANDS DOWN, 2022, Installation at the Lexington Art League /// Image Credit: Jakob Green
Headshot: Max Li
Jairo Granados-Cardenas (b. Michoacán, Mexico) is a self-taught film photographer whose captivating work reflects a profound connection to both his Mexican roots and the vibrant cultural tapestry of his current home in Chicago, IL. Jairo spent his formative years immersed in the dynamic fusion of his Mexican heritage and the distinctive atmosphere of a Mexican-American household in the northern suburbs of Chicago.
Despite lacking formal training, Jairo's artistic journey has been defined by an innate ability to capture the essence of human experiences through the lens of his camera. His evolving perspective is shaped by a keen understanding of composition, an astute mastery of color, and a unique flair for storytelling. These elements converge seamlessly in his photographs, creating a visual language that transcends cultural boundaries and resonates with viewers on a profound level.
Currently based in Chicago, Jairo Granados-Cardenas draws inspiration from the bustling urban landscape and the diverse tapestry of people that populate the city. His work is a testament to his intuitive response to human actions and gestures, a skill that has become instrumental in capturing moments of cultural intimacy and visual surrealism. Each photograph tells a story, weaving together the threads of daily life with an artistic vision that invites viewers to engage with the complexities of the human experience.
Image: Jairo Granados-Cardenas, Wrench Cross, 2023, Canson Rag Photographique 310gsm (Mounted by D-rings + Wire), 22.5" x 34"
Headshot: Felton Kizer
Leticia Pardo is an artist and architect from Mexico City, based in Chicago. Her work, largely influenced by her background in architecture, reflects on the ways in which place making, migration and political borders manifest in the built environment. Through the lens of place making, which Pardo defines as the way in which an individual or a group of people employ tangible or intangible resources to build a sense of belonging at a specific place, her work ponders on the personal and political layers interwoven within the architectures that shape us socially––from the domestic space to the public realm. Documentation is often a point of departure in Pardo’s work. Recurring to seriality and indexicality, she employs different media such as casting, architectural drawing, photography and printmaking to construct sculptures and installations that respond to specific sites. In her past work, Pardo has captured the visual, architectural and aesthetic codes of neighborhoods in which Mexican immigrants have established in Chicago. During trips to the US/Mexico border, she has also made records and captured impressions of the presence of an imposed physical boundary that results in the surge of different ways of adaptability around it, but most importantly an undeniable social and political impact on all of us, regardless of how near or distant we are from it. Her work has been shown at the Foto Museo Cuatro Caminos in Mexico City, the São Paulo Architecture Biennial, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, SITE Galleries, Hyde Park Art Center, among others. She has attended residencies such as Art Omi in NY, Pocoapoco in Oaxaca and KinoSaito in NY. Leticia is currently an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington.
Image: Leticia Pardo, migajas (32.53384° N, 117.12311° W), 2024. Embossments and imprinted rust from fragments of the US/Mexico border wall that fell upon the crossing of two men, on legal-size paper. Each print 14" x 8.5"
Headshot: José de Sancristóbal
Martha Osornio Ruiz is an interdisciplinary artist born in Veracruz, Mexico, and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Osornio Ruiz started her art career after graduating with her MFA in Sculpture from the School of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, collaborating on various community projects, installations, and video performances. Her current work focuses on her first-generation immigrant experience and her DACAmented status.
Image: Martha Osornio Ruiz, La Casa de mi Abuelo, 2023, Projection, windows, 19ft x 20ft, Amount varies
Headshot: José Ibarra Rizo
Maryam Faridani is an Iranian artist currently living in Chicago. By using moving images, installations and performance, she tries to explore how the given technical systems today leads to creation and maintenance of a particular set of social conditions as the environment of that system. Humor is an important aspect of her work as she finds it to be an effective way to talk about matters that are usually dark and bitter.
Faridani received the MacDowell Fellowship in 2023 and the Define American Fellowship in 2020. She was named as one of the Chicago Breakout Artists in NewCity Magazine in 2022. She has shown her work at Currents NewMedia Festival, Everson Museum of Art, and Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts among many others. She received her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019 and holds a B.F.A. in Theater from the Art University of Tehran.
Image: Maryam Faridani, Give me a minute and I will be out, 2022, 9 minutes
Headshot: Elnaz Javani
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
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
Nekita Thomas is a multidisciplinary experiential graphic designer, educator, and researcher dedicated to harnessing design for social impact. Her work focuses on the intersection of race, well-being, and urban design, spatializing justice and reimagining the civic role of design in our lives and communities. Bridging graphic design, tactical urbanism, and civic engagement, her research explores design's capacity to strengthen communities, initiate radical imagining, and amplify civic participation through anti-racist placemaking solutions. Thomas's initiatives, including public installations and participatory design workshops, guide communities toward envisioning and actualizing healthier, more inclusive, and just spatial environments and futures.
Thomas’s practice has helped steward projects with the National Public Housing Museum's Corner Store Co-op, the Chicago Sukkah Festival as part of the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and SkyART Chicago in reimagining the future of South-Chicago. These collaborations highlight her dedication to creating spaces that foster dialogue and understanding, emphasizing the critical role of design in addressing societal issues.
She has presented her work across disciplinary domains on both national and international stages, including venues such as the Krannert Art Museum, the Black in Design Conference at Harvard (BiD), the American Institute of Graphic Arts Design Educators Conference (AIGA), the International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference (IASDR), and artist residencies such as at Ragdale Foundation. These platforms have not only showcased her contributions to the field but also amplified her voice in the critical conversations around spatial justice.
Thomas holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MFA in Visual Studies from the University at Buffalo New York. She is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and Design for Responsible Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Image: Nekita Thomas, Black Space Protocols, 2022, Public Installation
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"
OAK is a polymath artist based in Chicago. OAK's multi-disciplinary practice harnesses the power of language as a tool of resistance in response to repression and censorship through various mediums including sound, image, clay body, and works on paper.
By drawing on the tradition of Black Indigenous practices that use language to convey messages of hope, resistance, and resilience in the face of captivity, OAK's exploration of the uses of language within in the Black community serves as a form of fugitive repair, building an alternative archival history during cycles of censorship.
Image: OAK, "It Don't Cracc!!", 2024, sumi ink on multi media paper, 9 x 12
Headshot: Lauren Crew
Pablo Lazala Ruiz (b. Bogotá, 1992) is a Colombian artist, architect, exhibition designer, and educator living and working in Chicago, IL. He is interested in the specificity of spaces and in creating critical materiality that openly engages in conversation with the ideologies that haunt and inhabit them. He believes in the possibility of creating new spatial support platforms that invite voices from diverse contexts to manifest.
His practice investigates the dynamics that shape public and private spaces while questioning ideals of progress and colonization processes, particularly in Colombian and Latin American diasporas. This exploration often unfolds through invoking and burying physical and ideological structures. His work both reinforces and engages in conversation with spaces' rituals. It disassembles the rhetorics of architecture through removals, dwells within the languages of construction and its scaffolding's temporalities and materialities, and gravitates through the formal and conceptual structures of installation and sculpture to create intentional (re)positionings that reveal the systems produced by the built environment.
He received his MFA (2024) from the Sculpture Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the New Artist Society scholarship. He earned a BFA (2016, Honors) and a BA in Architecture (2019) from the University of the Andes in Colombia.
He has exhibited work in solo and group shows at the National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), Museum of the Bank of the Republic (Bogotá), The Wrong Biennale (Alicante/Bogotá), Santa Fé District Gallery (Bogotá), Compound Yellow (Chicago), Espacio Odeón (Bogotá), Espacio Más Allá (Bogotá), Nueveochenta, Liberia, and SGR galleries (Bogotá), and Chapinero ArteCámara Gallery (Bogotá). Since 2019, he has also worked as the director of architecture, exhibition designer, and installation coordinator for the Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo, with projects at MoMA, Serpentine Gallery, MCA Chicago, Sydney Biennale, and more.
Image: Pablo Lazala Ruiz, Andamio y Balsa (Scaffold and Raft), 2024, Red chalk powder, chalk reel line, raw clay, plantain leaf. Image Credit: Jonas Mikosch Müller-Ahlheim
Pedro Montilla (Bogotá, 1997) is a Colombian artist whose practice unfolds through painting as a way to understand the experience of being alive and surrounded by life. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a BFA from Universidad de los Andes. He is currently based in Chicago and works between the city and the Altiplano Cundiboyacense in Colombia.
His work emerges from the understanding of Painting as a mystical being, in whom science and magic converge in a continuous conversation. Through this lens, painting becomes a space for transformation, reflection, and attentive presence. Pedro works primarily on fique fabric, a fiber cultivated, dried, and woven in the Colombian Andes, traditionally used to transport coffee beans and harvests. This surface connects his artistic practice with his Andean roots, while also holding a strong sense of dislocation and the memory of what it touches. On it, he creates hybrid objects that exist between painting and tapestry, holding an imagery of landscapes, scenes, and abstractions that reflect an amalgam of internal states and lived experience.
He has presented solo exhibitions at Polícroma Galería in Medellín and participated in group shows at EXPO Chicago, Chili Art Projects in London, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Galería El Museo, SGR Galería, and multiple editions of ARTBO in Bogotá. He has received awards such as the New Artist Society and the Second Year International Graduate Scholarships from SAIC.
Image: Pedro Montilla, Mayo Sur, 2025, Oil and distemper on fique, 118” x 86.6”
Headshot: Emily Miller
Reevah Agarwaal is a multi-disciplinary artist from New Delhi, India, currently based in Chicago, IL. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2024. Through textiles and collage, her work explores girlhood and the complex dualities that exist in domestic relationships. Using repurposed found textiles that have a personal history, she creates quilts and collages that reference her childhood, relationships, and the domestic spaces she has lived in. By employing material history, intuition, and memory, she aims to reconstruct and reclaim narratives of women and girls.
Her work has appeared in various shows including Stainless Gallery in New Delhi, and at Zhou B Art Center, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Purple Window Gallery, Color Club, South Asia Institute, FLXST Contemporary, Free Range, and The Martin in Chicago. She also has permanent public artwork on view in South Chicago which was funded by Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) and South Chicago Parents and Friends. Recently she received the New Futures Award from The Other Art Fair.
Image: Reevah Agarwaal, Will I be free?, 2024, Repurposed cotton razai, saris and other miscellaneous personal clothing, thread, yarn, tights, wall decals, nail polish, and hair baubles, Approximately 80" x 108"
Headshot: Inaara Vishnani
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
Ruth L. Poor, raised in Indiana, uses their work to dissect memories of the rural Midwest and to investigate intersections between power, American history, faith, and deviancy. Poor received their MFA from the Painting & Drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and completed their B.A. in Studio Art and Religious Studies at Cornell College and DePauw University. They currently reside in Chicago, Illinois, where they teach at SAIC and advise with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. They have shown work at the University of Chicago [Chicago, IL], the New York Academy of Art [New York, NY], Zolla/Lieberman Gallery [Chicago, IL], Pinto International Gallery [New York, NY], ADDS DONNA Gallery [Chicago, IL], Manifest Gallery [Cincinnati, OH], Woman Made Gallery [Chicago, IL], and Indiana University [Bloomington, IN].
Image: Ruth Poor, Lessons en Rouge, 2022, Spray paint, embroidery, machine stitching, acrylic, bbs, oil, on tapestry, 23" x 40" x 2"
Headshot: Ricardo Bouyett
Sangwoo Yoo, born in Seoul, is an artist driven by the intention to reawaken modern senses and aims to engage with social realities and the environment through the ecological cycles of materials. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the United States and Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Seoul in Korea.
Yoo was the recipient of the 2024 Eldon Danhausen, 2025 Anderson Ranch Arts Center, 2024 MASS MoCA Residency Fellowship, which was fully sponsored by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has been nominated for both the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship and the MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. He won the second-place award in the 2023 William and Dorothy Yeck Award, and was the grand prize winner of the Hoguk Art Exhibition in Korea in 2016. His works have been displayed in renowned Korean institutions such as The War Memorial of Korea, the United Nations Peace Memorial Hall, the Yanggu Humanities Museum, and the ChunCheon National Museum. One of his pieces is currently part of the collection at The War Memorial of Korea in Seoul.
Moreover, Sangwoo is scheduled to participate in the 2024 EXPO CHICAGO with sponsorship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has held several solo exhibitions at Comfort Station Gallery, SITE Gallery in Chicago, Dos Gallery, and Red Brick Gallery in Seoul.
Image: Sangwoo Yoo, Portrait of Loss (dust), 2024, Discarded Christmas tree, Variable Dimension
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
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"
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
Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez is an interdisciplinary artist born in Michoacán, México, and hailing from Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta's Civil Rights Movement legacy offered a springboard for activism that helped Cambrón navigate living in an anti-immigrant state while undocumented. This spirit of resistance informs her practice as she explores her lived experience and its thread in the movement toward collective liberation.
Cambrón's practice is an expression of undocumentedness that draws from her family's lineages of labor. Her work intertwines the labor of love in fiber methods that has persisted after crossing the border and the self-taught labor of furniture production that sustains her family today and has enabled them to thrive on their own terms.
Through intergenerational and matriarchal modes of making, Cambrón reclaims discarded materials from her family's furniture projects. By transforming remnants of textile, vinyl, and leather into portraits and abstracted works and installations, she generates various pathways to maneuver in and out of visibility. This agency to visually code-switch is a critical tactic in her work as she confronts the state violence imposed on undocumented people. Reclaiming discarded materials through crocheting, sewing, and netting gives her a loving way to hold her community's precarity while subverting the ways this country animalizes and criminalizes them.
Cambrón earned a B.A. in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College (2014) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2025) as a 2023 fellow of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. She has had solo exhibitions at the University of South Carolina's Upstate Art Gallery (2022) and Oglethorpe University Museum of Art (2023), which acquired her painting Estela Tejiendo I. She has exhibited at the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and exhibited and curated at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.
Image: Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez, Zillow, 2024, Discarded textile, vinyl, and cork with copper leaf from artist's family's commercial furniture-making practice, polyester fiber fill, quilting thread, crochet thread, 42" x 30"
Headshot: Lydia Daniller
