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Meet Artist Residents
Adebukola Bodunrin is a film, video, and installation artist who explores language, culture, and media. In her collage animations, she manipulates film using unorthodox manual and digital techniques in order to produce unexpected cinematic experiences.
Her work has been featured on television series Transparent and Lost LA, which won her an LA Area Emmy award for segment direction. Her work The Golden Chain (a collaboration with Ezra Claytan Daniels, award-winning graphic novelist) is featured in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work has been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, the British Film Institute, Redcat Theater, Museum of Contemporary Arts Chicago, Festival Animator, and the Black Cinema House.
Bodunrin completed her Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Chicago.
Image: Adebukola Bodunrin, ...UNTIL ONE DAY..., October 4th 2013, videostill of stop-motion animation, detail featuring pencil sketches on paper, 15sec.
(Updated 2022)
Azadeh Gholizadeh, is a Chicago-based artist and architect. Born in Tehran, Gholizadeh received her BA in architecture from Shahid Behest University (SBU), MA in architecture from Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) in 2009, and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012.
Her work questions how she can transform her discomfort of border crossing and lack of geographical identity into a tool to attain intellectual freedom and a broader understanding of culture, identity and home. It is a response to past experiences translated into a new social environment. Defining boundaries and blurring the lines that demark her geographical identity are the subjects that she reflect in her practice.
Gholizadeh was a resident at the BOLT Residency Program in 2012-13 at the Chicago Artists Coalition and at the Center Program in 2016 at Hyde Park Art Center. She was the 2017 recipient of a Brenda Green Gender Inclusivity Scholarship for participation in the ACRE Residency program. She was also a finalist for the 2020 Chicago Artadia Award, 2020 American Muslim Futures Award and 2021 Hopper Prize.
Solo exhibitions include: Dawn to Dusk at Goldfinch; Oh, Swallow where do you live in Winter? at Apparatus Projects; and Within the Threshold at Chicago Artist Coalition’s Bolt Space. Group exhibitions include: Ten x Ten at Homeroom in Collaboration with Chicago Composers Orchestra; “Between Land and Sky: Azadeh Gholizadeh, Luis Romero, and Soo Shin” at Everybody Gallery; “Outliers” at the Franklin; “Transistors” at Ralph Arnold Gallery; “After Junkspace” at the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; “This is the place,” at ACRE; and “Artificial Life,” at the Chicago Artist Coalition.
Image: Azadeh Gholizadeh, Acclimated Bodies, 2016, cardboard, plaster, balsa wood, plaster, cardboard, other artist's scraps.
(Updated 2022)
Madeleine Bailey and Helen Maurene Cooper’s collaborative project Baccara is focused on a discourse around communication, negotiation, and power. Together, Baccara’s practice problematizes the notion of presence through photography, performance, mark making, and sculpture. Madeleine and Helen Maurene also maintain separate artistic and curatorial practices.
A multi-disciplinary artist and writer, Madeleine currently builds up layers of paper, photographs and paint to manipulate images into complex abstractions that capture subtle shifts in location and time. Helen Maurene is obsessed with Chicago-style nail art and has embedded herself in the West Side salon, Naughty Nail'z, where she makes photographic portraits and occasionally collaborates with nail techs to produce events.
Bailey holds a BA from Brown University in neuroscience, literary art, and visual art, and an MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cooper received her BA from Bard College in photography and African Diaspora studies and an MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. http://madeleinebailey.com http://hmcooper.com
Jennifer Mills's multi-disciplinary practice uses comedy, performance and object making to explore the condition of the art world.
Mills has exhibited widely in New York; Chicago; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Seattle, Washington; Washington, D.C. and Berlin, Germany.
As an extension of her practice, Mills has studied comedic improvisation at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade in New York City, as well as at Second City and Improv Olympic in Chicago. She has performed consistently as a comedian since 2008.
Mills was born in 1984 in Risby, England. She received her post-baccalaureate certificate from the New York Center for Art and Media in 2008 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 where she now teaches in the department of contemporary practices.
Image: Jennifer Mills, Joke #46: Caniballs, 2013, visual joke assemblage (numbered and titled for a corresponding joke book)
(Updated 2022)
Joseph G. Cruz is a research-driven artist whose practice involves geo-historical and trans-contextual investigations of history and epistemology. No object, history, or human has priority as an activator in these investigations. Cruz is a time-traveling archeologist with no sense of normative hierarchies nor linearities.
He has attended numerous residencies and shown nationally with solo exhibitions at Evanstan Art Center; Chicago Artist Coalition; Comfort Station, Chicago; SAIC Student Galleries (Previously Sullivan Galleries) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and a solo project (representing the BOLT Residency) curated by Dieter Roalstraete at EXPO Art Fair, Chicago. Notable group exhibitions include: Phoenix Institute of Contemporary Art, Az; Evanston Art Center, Il; Edward Cella Art and Architecture Gallery, CA; Waiting Room Gallery, MN; Hyde Park Art Center, Il; Soap Factory, MN; and Chicago Artists Coalition, Il.
Cruz earned his MA at the University of Notre Dame and his BFA with an emphasis in sculpture and sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He resides in Michigan City, Indiana with his wife, daughter and dog.
Image: Joseph G. Cruz, Sonic translation of the topography of the Farside of the Moon (picture disc detail), 2013, sound installation, vinyl record, album sleeve art.
(Updated in 2022)
Laura Davis creates sculpture, drawing and installation in order to disrupt notions of value at the intersections of art, design and craft. Her interest lies in the endgame of material goods and how manipulating context can alter that narrative.
Solo exhibits include 65Grand, Aspect/Ratio, Bar 4000, The Chicago Cultural Center, threewalls and the Chicago Artists Coalition. Notable group shows include Hans Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Julius Caesar Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Hyde Park Art Center. Her work has been written about in Art in America, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Art 21 Blog, Art Slant and Newcity. She was awarded the Faculty Enrichment Grant from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 and the Artadia Award in 2015.
Davis received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2004, her BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art in 1996 and currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Image: Laura Davis, Fist Rings, 2013, Air drying clay, necklaces, mixed media
(updated 2022)
Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer. Influenced by existential philosophy and mindfulness meditation, she explores desire and impermanence through the portal of repetition in her cross-stitch embroideries, remix videos and temporary, collage installations. "All the conscious and unconscious repeated gestures we make as human beings are a lived engagement with the fact of existence," says Yeapanis. "We are here now, but someday we won’t be." Responding to that fact with wonder and play, as opposed to anxiety, Yeapanis's recent sculptural “landscapes” are improvised on the floor from thousands of hand-made and collected components. These landscapes last the length of each exhibition.
Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017), Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018) and Kent State, Stark (North Canton, Ohio 2019). Stacia's most recent solo show was The Thin Line Between One Thing and Another, at Finlandia University (Hancock, Michigan) in January 2020.
She was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence and a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at Chicago Artists Coalition’s BOLT Residency. Stacia is an instructor in the department of fiber and material studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in 2006, and she conducts weekly interviews with artists for OtherPeoplesPixels. Learn more about Stacia Yeapanis’s solo BOLT exhibition OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
Image: Stacia Yeapanis, Over and Over Again, 2012, digital and handmade media
(Updated 2022)
