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Meet Curatorial Residents
Ariel Gentalen is an educator, curator, and arts organizer seeking to diversify narratives and create platforms for engaging critical dialogue, among artists, artwork and audience. Their current research focuses on situating socially engaged art in theories of intersectional feminisms. They are currently the Residency Coordinator at the Hyde Park Art Center and the Conference Manager at Third Coast International Audio Festival. They received their BA in Art History and Women’s Studies from California State University, Fullerton and their MA in Arts Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about Ariel Gentalen’s HATCH exhibitions You will be the archivist of your desires, this land is your land, and Sweet Creature.
Danny Floyd is a curator, artist, researcher, and educator based out of Chicago. He holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, an MA in Visual and Critical Studies, and an MFA in Sculpture both from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). His written and studio work deals with the social aspects of perceptual realms like weather, music, architecture, and mediated cultures. Danny currently teaches in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at SAIC. He is a founding member of Ballroom Projects, an artist-run initiative on Chicago's South Side, and a regular contributor to Serpentine Magazine. Learn more about Danny Floyd’s HATCH exhibitions A Rainbow in Curved Air, Beyond Words, and Boondoggle.
Meg T. Noe is an interdisciplinary artist and curator. Her curatorial practice studies aesthetics and politics. Through her work as the Exhibitions and Programming Director at Weinberg/Newton Gallery (Chicago, IL), Meg curates exhibitions focused on issues of social justice in partnership with nonprofit organizations. In two years, she organized seven exhibitions with programming for international and grassroots organizations, including “Soul Asylum” for Human Rights Watch, and “Try Youth As Youth” for the ACLU of Illinois. Meg also likes dark things. Her artworks express a fascination with morbidity, the material of memorialization and ritual, and celebrations of the macabre under late capitalism. She received a BA in Photography from Columbia College of Chicago in 2013. Learn more about Meg T. Noe’s HATCH exhibitions social distortion, In your head, and Artificial Life.
Sheridan Tucker Anderson is a Chicago based curator, art historian and arts advocate. She has curated exhibitions at the School of the Art institute of Chicago, the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Artists Coalition, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, as well as supported exhibitions at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Anderson served as Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, where she worked to diversify the museum’s collection and served as research assistant for several exhibitions, including but not limited to the Terra Foundation for American Art funded exhibition The Many Hats of Ralph Arnold: Art, Identity and Politics. Anderson has served as Curatorial Research Assistant at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts; there she supported The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts funded project The Ties that Bind Waves of Pan- Africanism in Contemporary Art and Society.
Anderson has been awarded several fellowships including the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Curatorial Fellowship and the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been selected for Chicago Artists Coalition’s HATCH Residency where she served as Curatorial Resident. Anderson is a member of the Equity and Museum Practice Advisory Committee at the Art Institute of Chicago and a member of the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Museum Council. Recent publications include: The Diasporic as a Site of Memory: Self Identity and Commemoration in the Work of Zohra Opoku (2019), The Ancient and the Recent: Kudzani Chiurai's We Live in Silence (2018), Bordering the Imaginary: Ralph Arnold, Napoleon Bonaparte, and “The Hawaii Days” Series (2018). Recent exhibitions include The Poetics of Relation and In Their Own Form: Contemporary Photography + Afrofuturism. She holds a BA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MA in Art History from the University of Chicago.
Currently, Anderson serves as Assistant Director of Gallery 400 at University of Illinois at Chicago, where she manages Gallery 400’s administrative functions, working closely with the director to implement Gallery 400’s mission to support and present contemporary art and programming that prioritize interpretative reflection, critical inquiry and sustainable community partnerships.
Meet Artist Residents
Amy Leners is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. She holds a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Book, Paper and Print from Columbia College Chicago. Her work is in collaboration with forgotten spaces, exploring our relationships to architecture and space, specifically our homes and how the possible ephemerality of these spaces affects our psyche. Using handmade site specific pigments, alternative photography processes, printmaking and handmade paper she creates works that are made by and of these spaces. Learn more about Amy Leners’s HATCH exhibitions Rites and Beyond Words.
Andrew Barco is an object, installation and performance maker based in Chicago, Illinois. His work is concerned with the often strange and improbable ways ideas and habits can be transmitted across cultural landscapes and through time. With an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Andrew’s work uses craft and industrial histories, quirky and edgy relational gestures, and philosophical inquiry to create affective and thoughtful encounters. His work has been featured in group exhibitions in Durham NC, Baltimore MD, Hartford, CT, and Chicago, IL, New Orleans, LA. Learn more about Andrew Barco’s HATCH exhibitions Boondoggle and Beyond Words.
Anna Showers-Cruser creates hybrid forms that most often propose non-hegemonic expressions of gender. ASC is interested in the possibility of calling on abstraction through sculpture, fibers, craft, and painting traditions, in order to build a lexicon of community language. Their work expands sculpturally on the foundation of forms mined from southern Queer Femme identity. Humor, body modification, protest, burlesque, kink, hospitality, and the materiality of mental illness are intrinsic to the work. Recent exhibition sites include Baby Blue Gallery, Ralph Arnold Gallery at Loyola University, Arts + Public Life Arts Incubator, the Hyde Park Art Center, the Kinsey Institute, the Vermont Studio Center, and Inferno, NYC.
(updated 2019)
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)
Brittney Leeanne Williams is a Chicago-based artist, originally from Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami (Untitled Art Fair), London, Venice, Italy (Venice Biennale), Antwerp, Copenhagen, and Hong Kong, as well as in Chicago and throughout the Midwest. Williams attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2008-09). She is a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient and a Luminarts Fellow. Williams’ artist residencies include Arts + Public Life (University of Chicago) and McColl Center for Art + Innovation, among others.
Image: Brittney Leeanne Williams, The Bridge from Garden to Desert, (2020). Oil on Canvas. Dimensions 49.5 x40 inches.
Cameron Clayborn is a sculptor, performance artist and community organizer. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. Cameron works with people, opposites, weight, and imagery of death as material to complicate the aesthetics of the black, brown, and African-American body; with audience participation his body shifts from a state of vulnerability to powerful and sexy. He seeks to “turn inside out” the private discourses we have with ourselves and others to an open public dialogue. Cameron has exhibited and performed at Chicago Art Department, Links Hall, Archer Ballroom Projects, Tritriangle, and Fat City Arts. Learn more about Cameron Clayborn’s HATCH exhibitions Sweet Creature and Superficial Paradise.
Caroline Liu (b. 1987) is a painter, illustrator, and muralist currently based in Chicago, IL. She received her BFA from the University of New Mexico in 2011 and moved to Chicago in 2013. Caroline is currently painting murals for companies such as Adidas, Goose Island, Lululemon, and Vans, as well as public murals for the Chicago CTA, private galleries, and breweries. Her work has been shown on TV shows such as Netflix’s Easy and Vam’s Damaged Goods. She has spoken in art talks at Soho House Chicago and the Kanter McCormick Gallery. She is a 2016/17 Hatch Project Artist in Resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition, 2017 Artist Resident at the Chicago Art Department, and a 2016 Bridge Artist in Resident at the Hyde Park Art Center. Her work has been featured on the front page of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago RedEye.
Image: Sorry Mom, 2018, Dimensions: 54" x 72", Medium: acrylic, faux fur, and crystal ribbon on canvas
(updated 2019)
Daniel’s work investigates the act of remembering, and the roles time and memory play into his practice using photography, painting, and installation. Learn more about Daniel Hojnacki’s HATCH exhibitions In your head and Superficial Paradise.
Frances Lightbound is an interdisciplinary artist from the UK. Her work is informed by architecture and urban design, working with media including print, sculpture and site-responsive installation to explore embedded ideologies and power systems in the urban environment. She received her MFA in Printmedia from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, where she received a New Artist Society Scholarship (2014-2016). She was a 2015-2016 EAGER Grant recipient for Topographies of Defense, a collaborative research project examining defensive architecture and urban design in Chicago. She gained a BA (Hons) from the Glasgow School of Art (Scotland) in 2012, and was a founding member of the Scottish artist collective 2|1|4|1. Her work has been exhibited in venues in Chicago and the Midwest, London, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Learn more about Frances Lightbound’s HATCH exhibitions this land is your land and You will be the archivist of your desires.
Gulsah Mursaloglu begins her works with the experience of distance: smelling a thing inches away from her nose and then understanding it from afar with her eyes. In her installations, she works intimately with materials and objects and embeds them within precarious systems that monumentalize them, giving them responsibility. Though this new context may give the materials and objects new aspirations, it does not rewrite their humble origins. Rather, viewing her work presents an opportunity to travel over these distances: from insignificant to astounding, from a child’s play to an adult’s observation, from near to far, from the kitchen to the monument. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BA in Sociology from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. Learn more about Gulsah Mursaloglu’s HATCH exhibitions Boondoggle and Artificial Life.
Jeff Prokash embraces the freedom of reinterpretation to suggest new relationships between the subject and the staging of the built environment. Objects are positioned to present intrinsic systems of organization, interpolating unexpected associations through the production of subjective narratives. Prokash produces a reconsidered relationship with the material world and a reorientation of the value systems that are implicated in the construction and reconstruction of the built environment. Jeff Prokash is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator in Chicago, IL. He received his MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BFA from University of Wisconsin Madison. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2015 and has received awards and fellowships including the Eldon Danhausen and Edward L. Ryerson Fellowships and the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. He currently teaches in the Sculpture department at SAIC. Learn more about Jeff Prokash’s HATCH exhibitions Boondoggle and Artifical Life.
By adopting the roles of image gatherer, entrepreneur, documentarian, object-maker, and organizer, Joseph Wilcox explores how institutional control and social power structures undermine the autonomy of the individual. He was the co-founder of LDOC, a free yearlong arts publication distributed on the Red Line train in Chicago, an artist-in-residence at LATITUDE Chicago, a HATCH Projects resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition, and the first place winner of The Bloooom Award by Warsteiner. Solo and two-person exhibitions include The Rangefinder Gallery (Chicago, IL), Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), Western Pole (Chicago, IL), and Good Children Gallery (New Orleans, LA). He received his BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design and his MFA from Lesley University.
Image: In Search of Martin Klein (Still), 2017, Digital Video, 18:51 minutes
(updated 2019)
Keeley Haftner (b. 1985) is a Saskatchewanian-Canadian artist based in the Netherlands whose sculpture deals with garbage as a material and as a philosophical construct. Haftner seeks to create a space between her materials and the viewer that acts like a worry stone in their pocket – an object that both soothes and mirrors contemporary climate anxiety at the same time. Haftner’s work has been exhibited internationally in the US, Canada, and Europe at venues including MOCA (Toronto), SÍM (Iceland), Schering Stiftung (Berlin), and the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her BFA in 2011 from Mount Allison University (MTA) and her MFA in 2016 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in Fiber and Material Studies.
Haftner has received various grants, awards, public commissions, and residencies from organizations including HATCH Projects at the Chicago Artist Coalition, Struts & Faucet Media Arts Centre, Vermont Studio Center, BMO Financial Group’s 1st Art! Art Competition, and the University of Chicago’s Arts, Science & Culture Initiative Collaboration Grant . She has given workshops and talks at galleries, universities, conferences and festivals including Transmediale (Berlin), Currents International New Media Festival (Santa Fe), and Open Engagement at the Queen’s Museum (NYC), among others. Selected publications include the 3D Additivist Cookbook (2016) by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke and What Is? (2017) with essays by Michael Golec and Hannah Pivo. Haftner is a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grant, and a Haagse Kunstenaar with Stroom Den Haag.
Image: Material Bias in Glass (02), 2018, 43 x 43 x 7cm, mixed media
(updated 2019)
Lesley Jackson makes quasi-functional objects that challenge our relationship with inanimate things through the use of overtly poetic gestures. Lesley Jackson was born in Louisville, KY and earned her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Recently her work has been shown at Heaven Gallery, Cornerstore Gallery, Born Nude Gallery, and NADA New York with SPF15 Exhibitions. Forthcoming projects include solo exhibitions with Efrain Lopez Gallery and 4th Ward Project Space in early 2017. Learn more about Lesley Jackson’s HATCH exhibitions A Rainbow in Curved Air and Beyond Words.
Marissa Chris Zain Neuman recently graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA and holds a BA in Art History and Journalism from Loyola University. Human life has always existed in communities and though our dependence upon one another has always persisted, our understanding of it has not. Independence, capitalism and the all encompassing American Dream has undermined the vast network of human connection that sustains daily life. Marissa's work aims to address relationships in a way that celebrates interdependence through contemplation. She has shown her work at For the Thundercloud Generation (Chicago), Roman Susan (Chicago), Links Hall (Chicago), the Luggage Store Gallery, (San Francisco), and Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery (Providence). Marissa has ardently pursued alternative educational spaces through participating in residencies at Ox-bow School of Art, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Byrdcliffe Artist Colony and ArtReach at Lillstreet Art Center. Learn more about Marissa Chris Zain Neuman’s HATCH exhibition You will be the archivist of your desires.
Matt Mancini’s work is a hodge-podge of fragmented language which ruminates somewhere between some good ole magical mystery ‘shit’ and dystopian certainty. Matt Mancini was born in Philadelphia, PA. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. He recently completed his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and holds a BFA from Rutgers University. He has recently shown at Little Berlin in Philadelphia, Julius Caesar, Fernway Gallery, LVL3, Ballroom Projects, Heaven Gallery, and Roots and Culture in Chicago. Learn more about Matt Mancini’s HATCH exhibitions A Rainbow in Curved Air and Artificial Life.
Nicole Mauser’s works have been featured in exhibitions at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; High Concept Labs, Chicago; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago; Reynolds Gallery, Richmond; Fort Gondo, St. Louis; and is in permanent collections of The Alexander, Indianapolis; The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park. Select works have been featured in New American Paintings, Newcity Magazine and The Kansas City Star. She contributes writing and reviews to Newcity, Art Practical, 8½ x 11, Bad at Sports Blog and The Journal for Humanistic Psychiatry. Mauser was a co-founder of the artist-run gallery PLUG Projects as well as a co-founder of KCPAC (Kansas City Plein Air Coterie). Currently, she is a Lecturer at the University of Chicago and Adjunct Assistant Professor at UIC. Nicole Mauser received an MFA from the University of Chicago and a BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design. Learn more about Nicole Mauser’s HATCH exhibitions Superficial Paradise and Rites.
Pooja Pittie is a visual artist who lives and works in Chicago.
Born and raised in India, she trained as an Accountant and moved to the U.S. in 1999. An MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business led her to a career in Finance and Entrepreneurship. In 2015, she decided to pursue her lifelong passion for art and made a career change to focus on painting full-time. Pittie has an incurable and progressive form of muscular dystrophy and her studio practice is based on the struggle for balance between a slow-moving body and an active mind. Pittie's paintings have been exhibited at venues such as Expo Chicago and Art Miami. She is represented by the McCormick Gallery in Chicago.
Image: Caught in the Middle of a Memory, Year: 2018, Dimensions: 40x40 inches, Medium: acrylic on canvas
(updated 2019)
Rebecca Himelstein is an interdisciplinary artist who tracks cultural forms and processes understood as normal or natural through repetitive and rule driven interactions with them. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a thesis on race and gender expectations in speech speech synthesis technologies. Learn more about Rebecca Himelstein’s HATCH exhibitions social distortion and Superficial Paradise.
Sydney Shavers is an artist whose photographs, collages, films, performances and sound pieces question established conventions and spaces of existence. In her adolescence she switched schools frequently going from one that was racially diverse to a school where she was one of a handful of black students and back again. This experience has influenced her practice in which she creates a new language, one where conventional symbolism is challenged and the viewer is left to create new associations to relate to the world. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about Sydney Shavers’s HATCH exhibitions Sweet Creature and You will be the archivist of your desires.
Yesenia Bello lives and works in Chicago. Her work reflects on lived experiences as a first-generation Mexican-American and especially responds to the loss and regain of her first language over time. Her installations, drawings, and sculptures have been presented at spaces including The Chicago Cultural Center, Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Chicago and LA), Goldfinch Gallery (Chicago, IL), Super Dutchess Gallery (New York, NY), The Overlook Place (Chicago, IL), Comfort Station (Chicago, IL), 6018 North (Chicago, IL), and Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago,IL). She was part of the HATCH Projects 2016-2017 group at Chicago Artists Coalition and recently completed the 2018-2019 Center Program at the Hyde Park Art Center. Residencies include ACRE, Oxbow, and Carrizozo AiR. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus in Fiber and Material Studies.
Image caption: Held in Potential Disuse. 2019. mixed media installation (image credit: Alex Younger)
