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Meet Curatorial 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
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
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
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
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
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"
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
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
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"
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
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
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
