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Meet Artist Leaders
Meet Curatorial Residents
Alexandria Eregbu is an artist, curator, and visionary. On a fundamental level, Alexandria believes that art and expression are essential functions of community. As such, her work has been most dedicated to providing creative experiences that empower black audiences engaging the arts. Her early interests in civic engagement were initially fostered through her involvement as Lead Teaching Artist with Teens Reimagine Art, Community, and Environment (TRACE)— a youth activism program facilitated through the Chicago Park District.
Most recently Alexandria held a two year position as Curator for Illinois Humanities' city-wide initiative, Envisioning Justice— which examined how incarceration affects Chicago communities and interrogated the failures of our criminal justice system. Previous curatorial projects include, The Annual: A New Exhibition for Chicago Art presented at Chicago Artists Coalition in partnership with EXPO Chicago, Tertiary Dimensions presented as part of PLATFORMS—a retrospective exhibition of Chicago's queer art collective, Chances Dances, and Marvelous Freedom / Vigilance of Desire, Revisited— a group exhibition that engaged the richness of Chicago’s Surrealist past with new works from 13 contemporary artists of the African diaspora.
As an artist, Alexandria’s practice draws from history, lived experiences, and her own imagination to deepen her connectivity to the natural world. Her multi-vocational practice has received generous support from the Chicago Cultural Center's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Rebuild Foundation, Independent Curators International, Joyce Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, and 3Arts. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Photo: Jackie Rivas
Erin Toale is an artist, administrator, writer, and curator. She earned Dual MAs in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism and Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, and a BFA in 2D and 3D Fine Arts from Moore College of Art and Design in 2006. She has worked for a variety of non-profits, galleries, and research centers including the Seattle Art Museum, the Rebuild Foundation, the Social Impact of the Arts Project, and the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She makes art about buildings, words, and people. Learn more about Erin Toale’s HATCH exhibitions Extraordinary Effort, Spectacular Failure, No-Fi, and Radical Natural.
Jeannette Tremblay is an arts educator, administrator, and curator with a background in painting and a budding quiltmaking practice. Her current research focuses on the historical, legal, and cultural constructions of racial whiteness in America and critical interrogations of whiteness in contemporary art. She works as the School and Studio Manager at Hyde Park Art Center and Adjunct Lecturer at the Art Institute of Chicago. Tremblay holds an MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; an MS Ed in Urban Special Education from Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY; and a BA in Fine Arts from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. Learn more about Jeannette Tremblay’s HATCH exhibitions Topography of Knowing, A History-shaped Hole in the Universe, and A Prophet Is Not A Fortune Teller.
JGV / WAR is the collaboration between Gibran Villalobos and William Ruggiero. Their practice includes writing, curating, research, and project development with a focus on socially engaged practice, and contemporary Latin American art. Villalobos and Ruggiero both are art historians and administrators whose research and projects position programming and civic engagement at the center of their practice. Through the use of “shadow curating,” they antagonize each other to create projects that have undergone a conceptual and pragmatic galvanization. Learn more about JGV / WAR’s HATCH exhibitions Artifice from the Cave, Suddenly Plastic, and Foggy Fantasies/Zones of Privacy.
Meet Artist Residents
Adam Liam Rose uses sculptural, photographic, textile, and papermaking processes to investigate how contemporary identities are formed by history, collective memory, place and architecture. Rose is an Israeli-American visual artist living and working in Chicago, IL. Learn more about Adam Liam Rose’s HATCH exhibitions A History-shaped Hole in the Universe and A Prophet Is Not A Fortune Teller.
Born in Allentown Pennsylvania, Ben enjoys fishing, ceramics, gluten and haiku about all of the above. red-bricked recorderslackjawed and thigh deep knottingflys in the back cast Learn more about Ben DeMott’s HATCH exhibitions Artifice from the Cave and Suddenly Plastic.
Cherith Lundin engages our perceptions and experience of space through drawing, painting, and installations. Her work abstracts moments of fluidity within familiar spaces, where boundaries between intimate/anonymous and interior/exterior blur. Learn more about __’s HATCH exhibitions A History-shaped Hole in the Universe and Topography of Knowing.
Dan Paz explores the labor of digital video production as a collaborative site where the intersections of the image-idea and lived experience are produced and contested. Paz is specifically interested in what emerges when divergent people come together around the camera to create simulations of reality. Through videos that focus on race, gender and queerness, my work uses the impossibilities of absolute replication to question the ability of the image to truly represent. Dan’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hayward Gallery, London; 4th Annual Camaguey Video Festival, Camaguey, Cuba; College Art Association at the Media Lab, New York; and the Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, California. In Chicago, Paz has exhibited at Johalla Projects, The Gene Siskel Film Center, Peregrine Program, Roots and Culture Contemporary, LinksHall and the Reva and David Logan Center. In 2012, Dan received The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Artist Connection Fund for the project "ARTE NO ES FÁCIL." Dan has published twice with Shifter Magazine and has work included in the permanent video collection, Eyeball Witness. In 2010, she was the recipient of the Ann Metzger National Award for Prints. Dan Paz received an MFA from The University of Chicago in Visual Arts and a BFA from The Atlanta College of Art in video, minoring in photography. Learn more about Dan Paz’s HATCH exhibitions The Square Root of Pi(e) and Modi • Operandi (on recipes, intimacy, trauma & other investigations).
Edyta Stepien focuses on large-scale video and sight specific installations. In her installations she is blurring the boundaries between what is natural and synthetic, what is organic and mechanic. She is creating hybrid immersive environments. Since 2009, Stepien has been resident artist and member of Chicago Art Department, a non-profit art organization dedicated to cultivating new voices, ideas and practices in contemporary art. She has been involved with a number of site-specific installations, events and performances in Chicago, including the Chicago Cultural Center, Millennium Park, Marwen Foundation, Collaboraction Theatre, Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago Art Department and Currents New Media Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Stepien was a guest speaker at the Reno Interdisciplinary Festival of New Media, Reno, Nevada. Her work was screened at the Directors Lounge experimental media festival in Berlin and the Expo Plymouth in London. Edyta has also worked with the Chicago History Museum to develop video installations for the exhibitions "Lincoln Transformed," "Shalom Chicago," and "Inspiring Beauty: Ebony Fashion Fair." Stepien was raised in Poland and moved to Chicago in 1998. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007) with an emphasis in film, video and new media, where she was also awarded the Chairman Merit Scholarship. Learn more about Edyta Stepien’s HATCH exhibitions Artifice from the Cave and Suddenly Plastic.
Hannah Barco is a performance artist, writer, object maker, and facilitator of relational situations; making work with the stuff of everyday life. Barco works from a Fluxus sense of humor and poetry, a Surrealist obsession with the uncanny, and stands firmly within the Feminist legacy that the personal is political. Her practice uncovers and follows the meaning, emotion and capacity for storytelling available within everyday things. In her research into the materiality and praxis of everyday life, Barco aligns the gestures in her work with an urgent need to reconsider our ideas of dignity, survival, remembrance, attention, poverty, inheritance and social responsibility. Barco considers "remembrance" as a responsibility, and storytelling as a form of respect—behaviors born of Barco’s Jewish and Southern upbringing. While her work is not directly autobiographical, it is deeply personal and imbued with emotion. Objects in flux, in motion, modified, on display, in the making, or even at play become the medium to trace connected nodes of people and things in our contemporary society and our history. Barco then asks, in what networks are we participating? Her practice aims to attune her audiences to what kinds of futures we are producing. Barco has performed, displayed and produced her work in Chicago; Boston; New York; Durham, North Carolina; Oakland, California; and Prague. Venues include, in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Artists Coalition, Sullivan Galleries, Hyde Park Art Center, Defibrillator Gallery and Grace Exhibitions, as well as the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and Mobius Performance Collective. Hannah Barco is Chicago-based artist with roots in Durham, North Carolina. She received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University in Boston, MA. She earned her MFA in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about Hannah Barco’s HATCH exhibition A History-shaped Hole in the Universe.
Hope Esser is a multidisciplinary artist that works in the realms of performance, video, sculpture, and costume. She has recently performed and exhibited at the Watermill Center, Long Island, New York; The Arts Club of Chicago; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, New York; Defibrillator, Chicago; New Capital, Chicago; and Sullivan Galleries, Chicago. Learn more about Hope Esser’s HATCH exhibitions Modi • Operandi (on recipes, intimacy, trauma & other investigations) and Quasi-Choreography.
Jenyu Wang uses contextualization and synchronization to explore the interconnections between sculptural objects and moving image. As an interdisciplinary artist, Jenyu utilizes different embodiments of time contained in static objects, photography and video to create installations about fleeting yet destructive moments in the psychology of the everyday. Jenyu Wang was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about Jenyu Wang’s HATCH exhibitions Modi • Operandi (on recipes, intimacy, trauma & other investigations) and The Square Root of Pi(e).
Jesse Seay makes electro-mechanical sculptures of waveforms moving through objects. Some sculptures invite people to play with them. Some make sound acoustically. She has also worked with recorded and synthesized sounds, in both stereo and multi-channel playback. Seay's work often revolves around “surveys” and her sculptures tend to be modular with the intent of showing how the same premise can create a hundred different results. Seay teaches sound art in the department of audio arts & acoustics, at Columbia College Chicago. Learn more about Jesse Seay’s HATCH exhibitions Extraordinary Effort, Spectacular Failure and No-Fi.
Kiam Marcelo Junio is a multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, video, printmaking, installation, burlesque, and performance art. His research and artwork center around queer identities, the Filipino American diaspora, post-colonial Asian American tropes and stereotypes, and politics of visibility in a social justice context. "Jerry Blossom" is Kiam’s alter-ego, a gender-queer Filipino femme-presenting persona who hails from an alternate post-queer, post-colonialist utopia. Kiam served seven years in the United States Navy. He was born in the Philippines and has lived in the US, Japan and Spain. He is also a registered yoga instructor and recently launched QIAM, a fashion brand. Learn more about Kiam Marcelo Junio’s HATCH exhibitions Foggy Fantasies/Zones of Privacy and Suddenly Plastic.
Lauren Carter’s mixed media sculpture, 2d work, and installations explore the ephemeral by examining the physical, spiritual, and cultural realms of healing. Carter is a Louisiana native who recently relocated to Chicago by way of Albuquerque, New Mexico where she received her MFA in the fall of 2012. Learn more about Lauren Carter’s HATCH exhibitions Suddenly Plastic and Artifice from the Cave.
Sculptor and woodworker Lily Dithrich engages in an investigation of personal relationships and introspections using furniture objects as suggestive representations of human archetypes. Acknowledging that iconic furniture forms are imbued with links to the human form, as well as with references to cultural preference and expectation, Dithrich creates studies of various human relationships that suggest characters without the literal representation of the human body. Her portraits display both interpersonal as well as intrapersonal interactions, bringing to life scenarios in which viewers are encouraged to situate themselves. Dithrich received her BA magna cum laude in studio art from Oberlin College. Learn more about Lily Dithrich’s HATCH exhibitions Foggy Fantasies/Zones of Privacy and Suddenly Plastic.
Liz Gadelha's photographic practice is influenced by a decade and a half of extensive dance training and performance. She dresses female subjects in custom-made garments to produce photographic series and performances with underlying narratives rooted in fiction in order to reveal fact. Her work is motivated by the notion that fabric and skin—enclosures for the human body—as well as the objects these enclosures brush against are components of a performance-based language—structures with which we communicate. Gadelha graduated with a BFA in Photography from UIC in 2011. Learn more about Liz Gadelha’s HATCH exhibitions Extraordinary Effort, Spectacular Failure and Radical Natural.
Lori Felker is an artist/filmmaker whose work focuses on the ways in which we process, share, and disseminate information, via screens, dreams, gestures, games and dialog. By employing and pushing these structures, Felker attempts to study the ineloquent, oppositional, delusional, frustrating and chaotic qualities of human interaction. Felker works in a variety of mediums and has shown her work internationally at festivals and spaces including the Rotterdam International Film Festival; "NYFF: Views from the Avant-Garde"; VideoEx, Zurich; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Curtas Vila do Conde Film Festival, Portugal; Glass Curtain Gallery, Chicago; LA Filmforum; BAMcinemaFest, Brooklyn; and Space Gallery, Pittsburgh. She is an Illinois Arts Council Agency artists grant recipient, a Wexner Center artist-in-residence and a Fulbright Fellow. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about Lori Felker’s HATCH exhibitions Extraordinary Effort, Spectacular Failure and No-Fi.
Megan Stroech is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Stroech’s work utilizes fabric cut outs and collaged found materials to explore dichotomies between realness and artificiality, image and object, and common vs. luxury through references from domesticity, still life and the body. Stroech received an MFA in Printmaking from Illinois State University in 2012, and BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. Stroech will be a resident artist in the 2019 Cooper Union Summer Art Intensive Program (NYC) and was recently awarded the Merit Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center and Staff Development Grant at Parsons School of Design. Stroech has completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Wassaic Project, Chicago Artists Coalition, and ACRE. Recent exhibitions include: EXPO Chicago, Field Projects (NYC), ROCKELMANN& (Berlin), CES Gallery (LA) and an upcoming feature in New American Paintings Magazine’s Northeastern Issue #140.
Image: Flower Mouth, 2018, Dimensions: 5x6ft, Medium: Fabric, felt, vinyl, collage, latex paint
(updated 2019)
Nina Barnett uses drawing, moving image and installation to examine particular locations in relation to time and vertical scale. Her work seeks connections between the geographical, the experienced and the physicality of surfaces, and playfully questions the relationship between the theoretical and the accidental. Nina is a South African currently living in Chicago. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her BFA from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Learn more about Nina Barnett’s HATCH exhibitions A History-shaped Hole in the Universe and Topography of Knowing.
Nora Renick Rinehart's work explores the scientific and emotional ways in which we relate to the colors of the sky. Rinehart received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She teaches a variety of textile classes at the Lillstreet Art Center. Learn more about Nora Renick Rinehart’s HATCH exhibition Extraordinary Effort, Spectacular Failure.
Rami George is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, video, text, and installation. They have exhibited and screened internationally, and continue to be motivated by political struggles and fractured narratives.
Image: Untitled (Samaritan Foundation), 2014, Installation
Sebura&Gartelmann is the Chicago based collaborative of Jonas Sebura and Alex Gartelmann started in 2010. Jonas received his BFA from Alfred University and his MFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Alex received his BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about Sebura&Gartelmann’s HATCH exhibitions Extraordinary Effort, Spectacular Failure and No-Fi.
Wolfie E. Rawk is a trans artist whose work currently includes video, sculpture, ceramics, fiber, glass and borrowed/transitory objects. They are interested in feelings of sympathy/empathy, cuteness, spectacle/boredom and horror. Learn more about Wolfie E. Rawk’s HATCH exhibitions Extraordinary Effort, Spectacular Failure and Radical Natural.