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Meet Artist Residents
Alex Belardo Kostiw is an artist, designer, and educator in Chicago. Her practice deals in poetic, adapted, and iterative elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms. Through storytelling, Alex frames nebulous moments in familiar experiences, making room for perceptions to shift and transform. She is most interested in how knowledge takes shape in and relates to imagination. Themes in her work include the hidden parts and possibilities within the self; human connections defying time and space; the limits of language; and the interactivity of reading.
Alex holds an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at the Evanston Art Center, Co-Prosperity in Chicago, and Carlow University Art Gallery, among others.
Armando Román is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in the Midwest. He received his BFA in Studio Arts from Denison University and his MFA in Visual Arts from The Ohio State University. His drawings traverse themes of religion, homosexuality, community, and the self. The Mexican landscape, both cultural and literal, is of particular interest to him. He creates work to better understand his own relationship with Mexico, which is simultaneously familiar and foreign to him. Familiar, in that countless stories have been retold to him of this place, where his mother and father were born. Foreign, in that he has no permanent relationship with it. Hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration are used in his practice as tools of resistance.
Crawling Through Glass, 2023. Inkjet and Pastel on Canvas. 44'' x 60''
bARBER (b. 1982, US) lives and works in Midwest America. He is a non-representative figurative painter relying on elements of abstraction to personify the invisible nature of the individuals he paints. Heavily influenced by the music and makeshift bred from the underserved quadrant of Black American culture, he repurposes everyday materials, such as junk mail, packaging, and found objects, to construct artworks from a cultural perspective.
Please learn more at www.PropelledAnimals.org and @BarberPaintsPeople.
Kathryn, 90” x 42”, mixed media on paper
Michelle Chun (b. 1993) is a painter and visual maker. Born and raised in Southern California, she is shaped by experiences of cross-cultural realities and interdisciplinary practices. With a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MAR in Visual and Material Culture from Yale Divinity School, she approaches her practice both as embodied meditation on the sacred ordinary, acute emotions, migration and home while also a theological practice of incarnation, redemption, and liturgy. In 2022, she was a resident at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist’s Residency receiving the Longform Scholarship and participated in the Black Arts Movement School Modality taught and facilitated by artists and scholars such as Fred Moten, Sonia Sanchez, and Romi Crawford. She has shown at Helen J Gallery in Los Angeles, The Yard: Williamsburg in New York, and Gelman Gallery in Rhode Island among other exhibitions. She also makes music with the collective Miso Peanut Butter.
Molly Blumberg is an artist based in Chicago, IL. Her sculptural practice sits in the spaces between our human bodies and the materiality of lived environments, imagining their potential permeabilities. Trained as a sculptor and a papermaker, her work is grounded in an extreme engagement with materiality. Through a playfully physical studio practice and a dedication to process based exploration, she explores how it feels to be a body.
She earned her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in fiber & material studies in 2020 and her BFA from the Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts in sculpture in 2012.
Headshot: Glitter Guts
Image: Provisional Bodies, 2024, Mixed Media, Installation View
(updated 2025)
b. NYC - lives and works in Chicago
Exploring the porous boundaries between the internal self and external world; mourning failed attempts at bridging the gaps.
Image: Untitled, Magic 8-balls, 2023
(updated 2025)
Ruby Que is a Chicago-based installation artist and experimental filmmaker who occasionally performs, carves, and weaves. In their work they open portals and create hauntings. They engage with celluloid film both as a medium and as a material, with a specific interest in the vulnerability of film as a metaphor for the cycle of life. They’ve attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, and No Nation Art Lab amongst others. Their works have been exhibited at Kavi Gupta, Comfort Station, Mana Contemporary, and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. They hold a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Image: A Movie is a Thing Alive
Shonna Pryor is a conceptual artist, art programs producer, and an educator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her interdisciplinary art practice is inspired by references to food theory and its peripheral objects and concepts as a lens through which to critically engage the politics of identity, memory, power, and play. Afrofuturist aesthetics underscore the visual language of these expressions via reclaimed objects, installation, painting and public programming. Pryor's work has been exhibited in major cities such as Chicago, Detroit and New York, with esteemed artist residencies at Hyde Park Art Center; High Concept Labs; and Chicago Council on Science and Technology, respectively.
WallPAPER of Respect--Cocoa
Sophia Karina English (they/them) is a latinx crafts person, sculptor, and performance artist from San Francisco,CA and based in Chicago,IL. Presented with a series of eradicated cultural and personal histories due to colonization, poor record keeping, and family secrets, English uses their work to ask questions and keep track of what feels important at the time. Working from their home studio English uses beadwork as reference to the Latin American tradition of storytelling through beaded textiles.
If Then How Long, glass beads, adhesive, wooden board, thread, ready made shelf 15"x18"x4" 2018
Sungho Bae (b. Seoul, Korea 1988) is an artist working primarily in sculpture, video, and installation. He focuses on re-rendering the visual domain, considering images as mediators, consumption as a strategy, and humans as mutants. This is to navigate the mechanism of the image-making system and how an individual processes such images as superficial data. The symbiotic but dissonant relationship between the visual status of collected images and their context has been the driving force behind an act of repurposing. He received a BFA from Seoul National University and an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Above all, he is an avid toy collector.
Acupuncture Anatomy_How to be Unnamed, but Loved, 2022, Anatomical model produced from repurposed plush toys of various Frankenstein's monsters, product tags of plush toys, panel with plush toy fragments, RGB map tacks indicating which plush toys were used, anatomy kit, medical cart, 78in. x 35in. x 18in. / 25in. x 17in. x 33in.
V, a.k.a Vincent Phan, et al. (Valienese, b. 1992 A.D.) is an earthly-alien collective. Their works are systems-oriented investigations of chaos in nature and the nature in the chaos. V et al. adopts furniture and composts organic materials to create a hybridized existence of humans and nature. These creations are then traded for soil in human-occupied territories in order to create a new terra of possibility. Hybridizing objects and materials, V et al. re-naturalizes the man-made back into a natural ecology that once was its birthplace but has now become foreign.
V et al. trades earthly-alien creations for the soil of colonized territory. This accumulated soil then builds Valien, a new continent that exists within colonized continents. As long as V et al. lives, this terra expands as the soils are added. As long as Valien exists, V et al.’s reality exists as do the earthly-alien creatures that constitute Valien.
Youree Kim (they/them) is an interdisciplinary disability artist, activist, and researcher based in Chicago. Youree’s works seek to navigate the complicated realities of how disabilities are produced, perceived, and represented in the face of critical sociopolitical issues. Their process involves intricate research on disability history, representation, and narratives, and conversations with various entities and collaborators. They have Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master's degree in public policy and human rights at Adler University. Their writings were shared at Truthout, AK Press, Riksha magazine, Spork!, and more.
A black and white image shows a group of people holding balloons before releasing them to the sky. The bottom text reads, “At Truman College. During a vigil for victims of police violence. July 12th, 2016.”
