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Meet Curatorial Residents
Born on the northwest side of Chicago, Brett Swinney graduated from Columbia College with a B.A. in Photography 2004, to then work in the commercial photography industry for several years. During that time, he started to investigate ways to develop cultural projects that aimed to provide wider access to the production and presentation of art to new audiences, leading to the formation of Anysquared Projects. Projects produced through Anysquared include the "Cinema Minima Film Residency," "Post Post Post Modernism," and a variety of gallery shows and community art events. After attaining a Masters in Arts Administration & Policy, (SAIC 2014) his present focal point is to develop his creative practices while exploring alternative organizational models as a means to encourage collaboration and activism within the arts. Learn more about Brett Swinney​’s HATCH exhibitions Analogues, Amor Fati, and Ethno / graphic.
George William Price is an arts administrator and curator invested in artistic and political expressions that engender alternative, avuncular, and non-hierarchical histories. He was the founder and director of FLATspace, a curatorial project created to further the professional development of early-career practitioners across Chicagoland and foster connections with the academic community. Price has curated and administered numerous exhibitions and moving image programs for institutions such as Conversations at the Edge, Chicago Urban Art Society, Rapid Pulse International Performance Festival, and University of the Arts London. He has also worked for a number of arts organizations in both the USA and UK including Matt’s Gallery, London; Electronic Arts Intermix, New York City; and Video Data Bank, Chicago. He studied at both Camberwell and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts, London, and recently graduated with a Masters in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, he received the Dean's Scholarship and the Arts Administration and Policy Fellowship. Learn more about George William Price​’s HATCH exhibitions Revolvers Are Meant for Crocodile-skins, Hiding in Plain Sight, and Islands of the Sun.
Sharmyn Cruz Rivera is a Puerto Rican curator based in Chicago. Her curatorial endeavors and research revolve around sound art, video, contemporary dance, performance art, and human geography. She started as an independent curator and art writer for The Fractal, a multidirectional project focused on cultural commentary and art criticism. She holds a MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a dual BA in Art History and Modern Languages from the University of Puerto Rico. She was a curatorial fellow for the SAIC MFA Show in 2012 and a 2013 summer participant at Never The Same at University of Chicago, a project that documents Chicago’s history of socially engaged art. Sharmyn is currently a program assistant at LAMPO, an organization that promotes and supports artists working in electronic and electroacoustic music, free improvisation, sound art and other new forms. Recent projects include INSIDE VOICE: a sound art program at Threewalls and Home Channels at [Open House] as part of Platforms: 10 years of Chances Dances. Learn more about Sharmyn Cruz Rivera​’s HATCH exhibitions Exhaustion and Exuberance, Fiction Within, and for no space. Â
Meet Artist Residents
Alex Calhoun is an artist living and working in Chicago, IL, where she received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Chicago. Alex is primarily concerned with material histories and function, continually placing pressure on the relationships between historical forms and contemporary materials. Often incorporating humor into her practice, she believes that there’s something really serious about that which makes us laugh. Learn more about Alex Calhoun​’s HATCH exhibitions A Fine Line and Being, enough.
A recent MFA graduate of Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, Anansi's work offers perspective through a lens of cynicism. By means of conceptualization, appropriation, image, and sound manipulation, visceral/violent performance and audience control, he exposes visible and invisible power dynamics embedded in our society. Anansi attempts to guide viewers to assume a different interpretation than one they may already possess, by setting parameters, both physical and cognitive in order to view his work. In January 2015, Anansi did a performance titled "Punch Piece," a 9 minute test of endurance addressing outlets of rage at Beefhaus gallery in Dallas, TX. His piece "Cocaine Column/Build and Destroy," remnants of a performance comprised of 425 bricks made to resemble cocaine packages, was a featured work in the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas, 2015 finalist completion. Learn more about Anansi kNOwBody​’s HATCH exhibitions Tracing the Invisible and Amor Fati.
Angela Davis Fegan is a native of Chicago’s South Side. A graduate of Chicago’s famed Whitney Young High School, she received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parsons School of Design and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Angela has mounted shows at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Montgomery Ward Gallery, Galerie F, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, the DePaul Art Museum, The Center for Book Arts (NY) and the Hyde Park Art Center. Her work has been selected for book covers including How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps by Laura Yes Yes, The Truth About Dolls by Jamila Woods, Secondhand by Maya Marshall, Where Brooklyn At by Roger Bonair-Agard and All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell. Her MFA thesis, and on going practice, the lavender menace poster project, has been written up by The Offing (LA Review of Books), Hyperallergic, Chicago Magazine, the RedEye, Go Magazine, Pop Sugar, the Chicago Reader, and Newcity.
Image: Under New Management, 2019, Dimensions: 12x19", Medium: letterpress poster on recycled denim handmade paper and blood splatter
(updated 2019)
Austen Brown is an artist living in Chicago, IL holding his Master of Fine Arts from the School at the Art Institute of Chicago. Using geography and a site-based practice, he works with sound, video, and installation to draw conceptual lines between sites, exploring the relationships of people to place. His work has been shown internationally at Super-Sensor, Madrid, Spain; EXPO Chicago, IL; ACRE, Chicago, IL; Switched on Garden with funding from the Pew Charitable Trust, Philadelphia, PA; Flat Gallery, Chicago, IL; LODGE, Chicago, IL; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE; Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA. In 2014, he was an artist-in-residence at ACRE and has received awards including the Municipal Arts League Fellowship, Siragusa Foundation Fellowship, and New Artist Society Scholarship (SAIC). Learn more about Austen Brown​’s HATCH exhibitions A Fine Line and Being, enough.
B. Quinn’s interdisciplinary practice addresses the constraints of language, the sensibilities of painting, and a combination of research and idiosyncratic making that emphasizes the duality within materials themselves. Quinn was born in Pittsburgh, Pa, and earned her BA from Chatham College for Women, later receiving her BFA and MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has participated in exhibitions and projects internationally, as well as within the U.S.— most recently in a solo residency and project with MOTE 78 in Columbus, OH. Learn more about B. Quinn​’s HATCH exhibitions Revolvers Are Meant for Crocodile-skins and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Barbara Diener photographs in rural communities in Illinois that are reminiscent of the town in Germany where she grew up. Through the landscape and people she encounters she explores her own relationship to ideas of home, personal history and collective memory, while also addressing the persistence of these communities, despite their disappearing rural lifestyle. Born in Germany Barbara Diener earned her BFA from the California College of the Arts and MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Diener was the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Events in 2015. She is currently working as the Photography Collection Assistant at the Art Institute Chicago and teaches photography at Oakton Community College. Learn more about Barbara Diener​’s HATCH exhibitions for no space and Fiction Within.
Bobbi Meier is a Chicago-based visual artist working in sculpture, drawing, photography and installation. Through her abstract soft sculptures and domestically focused installations Meier explores themes of sensuality, emotional struggle and loss. Ambiguity is a primary consideration as she encourages the psychological impulse to see implications of the body in her abstract forms. Inspired by Louise Bourgeois and Sarah Lucas, these strong feminist artists have provided inspiration and guidance for Meier’s work through their reference to the body, psychological trauma, and use of domestic materials. Most recent exhibitions include; Fugitive Narratives and Front & Center at Hyde Park Art Center, Soft Sculpture at International Museum of Surgical Science, Exhaustion and Exuberance at Chicago Artists Coalition, Perspiration Glitz at Roots and Culture, Chicago; Evanston Art Center 24th Biennial, Evanston, IL; The Second Terrain Biennial, Oak Park, IL. She has been awarded residencies at; The Ragdale Foundation, The Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow, Anderson Ranch, Sanskriti-Kendra, in New Delhi, the HATCH Residency Program at the Chicago Artists Coalition, and was a participant and member of The Center Program at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2017. Meier earned her MAAE (2000), and MFA in Fiber and Material Studies (2011), from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Bryan McVey's work is dynamic in nature, and spans a multitude of spaces and environments, including travel, human endurance, the body, as well as urban and rural subjects.  The essence of my muse stems from experiences traveling and participating in endurance sports. Formally trained as an engineer, I use my technical knowledge and apply it to aspects of photography, helping to balance the formal approach and conceptual intent of my creative vision. My desire is to create a more artistically pleasing vantage point of spaces, movement, light, and action.  I’m constantly searching for the next location to apply my craft and strive to bring a more human connection to my photographs while depicting meaning of the subject. I firmly believe in a photograph's ability to elicit emotions by creating a scene, which resonates beyond the initial subject matter itself, and allows the viewer to get lost in its compositional story. Learn more about Bryan McVey​’s HATCH exhibitions Exhaustion and Exuberance and Amor Fati.
Caleb Yono is an interdisciplinary artist working to mediate discursive signs and affects of identity, class, and sexuality through representations of bodies charged with queer potential and tendencies. Through his practice, Caleb hopes to create relational ecologies of image and desire that elicit an estrangement of what is expected of the human through the shaping and rearranging of his own discursive mask. The result of Caleb’s work is a network of interdisciplinary gestures aimed at asserting "queer feeling structures” as momentary displacements of a harmful normative society. Caleb works to exorcise the fragmented trauma/exhaustion of the everyday.  He received his MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Learn more about Caleb Yono​’s HATCH exhibitions Revolvers Are Meant for Crocodile-skins and Fiction Within. Â
Carla Fisher Schwartz is a visual artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. Her studio practice examines the conceptual and poetic implications of mapmaking through print media, sculpture, and video installation. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, the Hyde Park Art Center, the McKendree University Art Gallery, and the Kala Art Institute. She received her MFA in Visual Arts from Washington University in St. Louis and her BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Learn more about Carla Fisher Schwartz​’s HATCH exhibitions for no space and Fiction Within.
Cassandra Stadnicki is a multidisciplinary artist investigating the human perception of reality. She examines the relationship between natural, tactile, and digital matter and how one influences the other. Her work focuses on a variety of subjects including conventionality, social conditioning, sexuality, and annihilation. Cassandra left an art piece in her alley once, it disappeared, and was later discovered on social media. Learn more about Cassandra Stadnicki​’s HATCH exhibitions Ethno / graphic and Amor Fati.
Erika RĂĄberg is a visual artist and writer who uses both still and moving images to explore the subtle relationships built into her surrounding environments, whether on the farm in rural Sweden which has been in her family since the 1600s or in and around Boston, Massachusetts, where mythologies surrounding the founding of the United States provide rich material.
RĂĄberg has shared work widely in Chicago, as well as in New York, Baltimore, London, and Stockholm. She earned her BA in English from Oberlin College in 2009, and lived and worked in Tokyo, Japan for the years following graduation. In 2015, she earned her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. RĂĄberg was recently the recipient of a grant from the American Scandinavian Foundation and a guest artist at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden.
Image: Untitled (still of work in progress), 2019
(updated 2019)
Hannah Givler is a sculptor whose inquiry is based around phenomenology, experiences of space, objects, and systems of value. She holds a MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institiute of Chicago, and continues her informal education in a round of workshops and residencies including: Penland School of Crafts, Visitor Center Artist Camp, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 8550 Ohio, and the Cob Cottage Company. Her work has been exhibited at venues nationally and internationally, including: Fourth Ward Gallery; Logan Exhibitions; Southside Hub of Production; Hyperlink Exhibitions; Banff Center for the Arts; Helen Day Arts Center; and The Cultural Center in Arusha, Tanzania. Learn more about Hannah Givler​’s HATCH exhibitions Analogues and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Hillary Wiedemann is interested in the transience of perception and the shifts that occur between the passive and active states of experience, as well as the moments when you are looking and then see, and when you are hearing and then listen. Using controlled light, both natural and artificially produced, in combination with minimal materials, she expands the subtleties of these in-between states into larger scale installations. Wiedemann received her MFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts and a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited her work in the San Francisco Bay Area; Los Angeles, CA; Kansas City, MO; and Brooklyn, NY. Additionally, she has helped to organize a variety of exhibitions, most recently serving as a Co-Director of the Royal NoneSuch Gallery in Oakland, CA. Learn more about Hillary Wiedemann​’s HATCH exhibitions Islands of the Sun and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Jeremiah Jones is an artist, ex-con, post-activist, anarchist, now posing as posh-dandy engaged in precarious sojourns. He creates installations and videos that explore the complex histories, landscapes and relationships that form our world. His process includes research, field production, and found images to create complex works that bring to bear contemporary systems and mythologies, incorporating seductive and beautiful formal experiments utilizing projected light and sound. He holds a B.A. from the Evergreen State College, and an M.F.A. from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at The Tacoma Art Museum, The Hyde Park Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum, as well as numerous independent art spaces and private collections in LA, New York, Chicago, and internationally. Learn more about Jeremiah Jones​’s HATCH exhibitions Islands of the Sun and Being, enough.
Jessica Harvey is a Chicago-based visual artist who uses photography, installation, and archival materials to explore the myths we create for ourselves and nature while trying to preserve a more desired history. She has attended residencies at ACRE, Anderson Ranch, Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, Hardesty Arts Center, The Luminary, and Vermont Studio Center. She has participated in group shows at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI), Johalla Projects (Chicago, IL), The Center for Contemporary Photography (Detroit, MI), and the Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI). Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include shows at Black Hills State University (Spearfish, SD), Hardesty Arts Center (Tulsa, OK), ACRE Projects (Chicago, IL), Good Weather (North Little Rock, AR), and The Luminary (St. Louis, MO). Harvey holds a MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA in Film and Video from Columbia College. In 2011, she was awarded a Fulbright Grant to Iceland. Learn more about Jessica Harvey​’s HATCH exhibitions Tracing the Invisible, Fiction Within, Rough Idle, and You Are Looking Good, A Real Good Looker.
John Steck Jr. is a visual artist from Chicago who received his BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has exhibited across fifteen states as well as in Iceland, Hungary, and Tokyo. Steck has completed artist residencies in both Ireland and Iceland and was also a finalist for the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellowship. His book Fragments, Volume One was selected as Best Books of 2010 on photoeye.com. Recent publications include Romka Magazine, Aint Bad Magazine, The Ephemeral, The Hand Magazine, and Incandescent. He currently has work in the Midwestern Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and in the Permanent Art Collection of the DePaul Art Museum. Steck taught at the Chicago Photography Center and is a current Adjunct Faculty at Waubonsee Community College. He will attend the Latitude Artist Residency in the fall of 2016. Learn more about John Steck Jr.​’s HATCH exhibitions Revolvers Are Meant for Crocodile-skins and Amor Fati. Â
Jon Chambers is an artist and educator based in Chicago. He received his MFA in New Media Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2012 and currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chambers produces art using technological objects, software, and networked interfaces while aestheticizing experiences of saturation, obsessions, and contradictions that emerge from our relationships with these technologies. His work often deals with playful or humorous themes. He has shown nationally and internationally, in screening venues, galleries, and online. Learn more about Jon Chambers​’s HATCH exhibitions Ethno / graphic and Being, enough.
Leander Mienardus Knust creates environments, constructs things, and composes music.  His sculptural works invite us to question relationships to the material world while remaining honest to their personal histories. His music, often employed to reflect ideas behind physical works, combines disparate elements to produce new potentials and expand genre convention. Leander is a co-founder of Fat City Arts, a non-profit, community driven project space and venue located in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. His bands perform regularly, and there is always something underway. Leander received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute in 2015. Learn more about Leander Mienardus Knust​’s HATCH exhibitions for no space and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Born in Athens, Greece, Marina Miliou-Theocharaki is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and dancer. In her practice, definitions of culture and ethnic identity are silently confronted. The spatial and conceptual drift between fictional and socio-politically charged geographies that push her to delicately investigate definitions and compositional arrangements of distance, borders and, non-belonging. Her work has been exhibited in venues including the Den Theater Chicago; Dfbrl8tr Performance Art Gallery, Chicago; Chicago Home Theater Festival; Woman Made Gallery; Fancy House Gallery, Chicago; the group exhibition Words we Live By, curated by Molar Productions; as well as the Cook County Jail, Chicago. Miliou-Theocharaki was a member of the Chicago-based performance group, Collective Cleaners. They performed in various venues including the MCA Chicago and the Jane Adams Hull-House Museum. Miliou-Theocharaki was awarded the 2015 BFA/Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as the 2014 George Roedern Undergraduate Award in Visual & Critical Studies. She currently holds a position as a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. Learn more about Marina Miliou-Theocharaki​’s HATCH exhibitions Tracing the Invisible and Being, enough.
It’s all in the tongue. De Lara relies on physical humor, seduction, and the uncanny to create provocative and enigmatic sculptures. He explores the complexities of wood species as he finds them to hold infinite formal possibilities and inherent beauty. He aims to perceive and maximize the sensory, sensible, sentimental, and sensuous dimensions of human nature. A mallet, chisels, and abrasives are rooted in his workmanship, while the conjunction of textural depth and high attention to detail turn him on. Being physical with the entire production process is an essential aspect of De Lara's practice, as he uses his own body, physical presence, and behavior to inform the work. The gaze between the viewer and his work is mutual. De Lara holds a High Honors BFA from The University of Texas at Austin and has exhibited work nationally and internationally: Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, and Mexico City. He is a co-founder of Fat City Arts in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood.
Soheila Azadi is a visual artist focused on performance practice and performative installations. Her practice involves human interactions within the public sphere, while investigating these social interactions through artistic and critical frames. Her performances are transient social sculptures limited to a moment in time and site-specific space that hold transformative potential. Her experiences as a Muslim woman who has lived under a theocracy in Iran, and as an immigrant who is living in the U.S. under a democracy, have motivated her to research the separation between the biological sexes (which is a stipulation of many orthodox religions). Her performances—products of social space—are environments where culturally imposed differences between race and sex are acknowledged by participants. She generates settings where people can experience a community in which they develop relationships that empower themselves and others. Learn more about Soheila Azadi​’s HATCH exhibitions Islands of the Sun and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Stephanie Graham is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Chicago. Her work draws on her fascination with subcultures, social class, relationships, and, of course, being black. She holds a BA in Cinematography and Photography from Columbia College Chicago. Stephanie has a love for 90 Day Fiance, the Real Housewives, and memes.Â
Image: Stephanie Graham, Love You Bro, #5.Â
Artist Photo: Dorey Kronick
Woomin Kim works with the edge of things; where they meet with the world. The edge vibrates as each side absorbs or reflects the other. She touches, rubs, sands, and covers things around her to break her habitual perception and reveal the gap between what things are and her subjective understanding of them. Her installations consist of marks on the surfaces or residues that are created in the process of the physical investigations and symbolic gestures. She earned her BFA (2010) from Seoul Nationality University and received her MFA (2015) from School of Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about Woomin Kim​’s HATCH exhibitions Analogues and Amor Fati.
Hello! I am Yaloo. I am an active culture maker, a poetic gleaner, and a perpetual fresh-off-the-boat. I have recently started a project Yaloofarm (tentative title) about cornhead aliens and their new fancy tractors. The aliens are fascinated by the swagg of John Deere, the Ferrari of American agriculture and badass vastness and perfection of the Midwest’s farmland. I completed my MFA (2015) and BFA (2011) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with a focus on digital image making & video installation. I was the first recipient of Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Scholarship by Video Data Bank (VDB). I have shown my works internationally, including Seoul (South Korea), Vancouver (Canada), Malmö (Sweden), Frankfurt (Germany), Brooklyn (NY), Seattle (WA), Columbus (OH), and Chicago (IL) since 2009. Learn more about Yaloo​’s HATCH exhibitions Ethno / graphic and Fiction Within.
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