Pugs Atomz (he/him/his)
Visual Arts Fellowship Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
www.pugsatomz.com

Painter, muralist, designer, documentarian, radio host, and musician, Pugs Atomz embodies the essence of a true Renaissance figure in Hip Hop culture. His artistry and musical compositions have graced television shows, movies, commercials, sporting events, and video games, casting a wide-reaching influence. Venturing across the globe, he paints, performs, and shares his insights with audiences far and wide.  Presently, he channels his creativity into designing for his own label, USUWE 93, alongside collaborations with various brands. Engaged in public art initiatives with DCASE, the Englewood Arts Collective (which he co-founded), CPAG, and the Muralsrus crew nationwide, Pugs draws inspiration from his roots in Englewood, where the vibrant performances on the Green Line train and the captivating murals and graffiti art of his Chicago neighborhood ignited his passion.  Pugs Atomz sees artists as the storytellers of their communities. His music and art transcend mere personal expression, serving as poignant narratives of the richness, resilience, and creative vitality inherent within Black communities. Through his dedicated practice, he bears witness to and documents the boundless brilliance and joy that thrive within these cultural landscapes.

Nicole Davis (she/her/hers)
Crafts Fellowship Recipient
Milan, Illinois
nicoledavisart.com
Photo credit: Phyllis Davis

Nicole Davis is a visual artist and educator based in the Quad Cities area. Having served as a Special Education teacher for twenty-one years, she pivoted to pursue a career in art. In 2020 Nicole graduated with honors from the University of Iowa with an MFA degree in Painting and Drawing. Her current art practice encompasses textiles, photography, and painting. Her artwork utilizes the energy embodied time-honored materials to address issues related to her lived experience as a Black woman. Black feminist theory, memory, and identity are themes deeply rooted in her work.  Nicole was honored with numerous scholarships and fellowships in pursuit of her graduate work and has had residencies at Ox Bow. She has been a visiting critic and/or given lectures at institutions including: Cornell College, Drake University, Divine Word College, and the Figge Art Museum. Her artwork has been shown throughout the Midwest, at the Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN, Koehnline Museum in Skokie, IL, Legion Arts in Cedar Rapids, IA, South Bend Museum of Art in South Bend, IN, and Freeport Art Museum, Freeport, IL among other places. She is featured in the publication New American Paintings, No. 153, and in 2020 she was selected to be an Artivism Fellow for the Broadway Advocacy Coalition. Nicole is currently an Art Instructor and Gallery Coordinator for Eastern Iowa Community Colleges.

Kira Dominguez Hultgren (she/they)
Crafts Fellowship Recipient
Urbana, Ilinois
Website: https://www.kiradominguezhultgren.com
Photo credit: Definition Foto

Kira Dominguez Hultgren  is a U.S.-based artist, weaver, and educator. They studied postcolonial theory and literature at Princeton University, and studio arts and visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts. Their research interests include material and embodied rhetorics, re-storying material culture, and weaving as a performative critique of the visual. Dominguez Hultgren weaves with the material afterlife of a so-called multiracial family: Chicanx-Indigenous-Indian-Hollywood Hawaiian-Brown-Black. Instead of being passed down, Dominguez Hultgren builds looms to weave into the frayed edges of lost language, culture, traditions, and lives that were deliberately cut-off in past generations. Her looms – whether digital jacquard, backstrap, floor, post – materialize this present absence often as largescale checkboxes and X-marks. Questions about cultural appropriation and codeswitching, exoticism, and performing cultural misrecognitions occupy their practice. Dominguez Hultgren has exhibited their work broadly including shows at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in NYC, Ballroom Marfa, the San Jose Museum of Quilt and Textile, the Roswell Museum, Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco. Their work has received critical attention including reviews in the New York Times and Architectural Digest; and is in the de Young Museum of Fine Art’s permanent collection. Recent residencies and fellowships include the Basque BioDesign Center in Bilbao, Spain, Gensler, Facebook, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Upcoming exhibitions include Craft Front and Center at the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC and a public art installation in collaboration with the city of Berkeley, CA. Dominguez Hultgren is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the School of Art + Design. They are a 2024 United States Artists Fellow.

Susan Giles (she/her/hers)
Sculpture Fellowship Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
www.susangiles.net
Photo Credit: Kip Wilkinson

Susan Giles’s interdisciplinary practice explores the intersections of memory, communication, and physical presence. Individual and collective narratives of movement, monuments, architecture and landscape have informed her studio work. Recent interpretations of recalled experiences and corresponding hand gestures seek to define where language becomes sculptural.  Giles’ work has shown in Chicago at Glass Curtain Gallery, the Chicago Cultural Center, The Hyde Park Art Center, THE MISSION, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Renaissance Society, as well as Mixed Greens in New York, Galería Valle Ortí in Valencia, Spain, and Five Years, London, UK. Major commissions include a permanent sculpture for the University of Chicago in 2021 and a public art commission by Jason Rosenthal in memory of Amy Krouse Rosenthal for the Chicago Park District in 2019. She is currently working on a commissioned sculpture with artist Jeff Carter for the Illinois Art-in-Architecture program. In 2021 she was a finalist for a Creative Capital Award. She has received numerous grants, including an Individual Artist Project Grant from DCASE in 2022, 2019, 2017 and 2015, awards from the Illinois Arts Council in 2014 and 2009, a 2005 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a 1998 Fulbright Grant to Indonesia. Giles was a 2023 Visiting Teaching Fellow in Built Environment, Arts, Design & Architecture at University of New South Wales in Sydney. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ben Grosser (he/him/his)
Digital Arts Fellowship Recipient
Urbana, Illinois
https://bengrosser.com

Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural, social, and political effects of software. Recent exhibitions include Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Barbican Centre and Somerset House in London, Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, SXSW in Austin, and the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. His projects have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País, and Folha. The Guardian (UK) proclaimed Grosser’s film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE to be a definitive artwork of the 21st century, “a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.” RTÉ (Ireland) dubbed him an “antipreneur,” and Slate commended his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” His artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, and Investigative Aesthetics, as well as volumes centered on computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art, and Digital Art. Grosser is Professor of New Media at the University of Illinois (USA), and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Max Guy (he, him, his)
New Art Forms Fellowship Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: https://maxguy.studio
Photo Credit: Shir Ende

Max Guy (b. 1989 McAllen, Texas) lives in Chicago, Illinois. Guy works with paper, video, performance, assemblage, and installation and uses fast, ergonomic ways to make poetry of the world, filtering it through personal effects. He received a BFA in 2011 from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in 2016 from Northwestern University. Guy has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Drawing Room at The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery 400, Good Weather, Prairie, Apparatus Projects, Produce Model, and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; AND NOW (Dallas); Jack Shainman, Nicola Vassell, Laurel Gitlen, Kai Matsumiya (New York); Romance (Pittsburgh); Each Modern (Taipei), Good Weather (Chicago), Gallery 400 (Chicago), Krannert Museum of Art (Urbana-Champaign); Malmö Museum of Art (Malmö, Sweden); What Pipeline (Detroit); and Galeria Federico Vavassori (Milan).

Patrick Earl Hammie (he/him/his)
Visual Arts Fellowship Recipient
Champaign, Illinois
http://patrickearlhammie.com

Patrick Earl Hammie is an interdisciplinary visual artist—painter, printmaker, illustrator, curator—and educator. Hammie’s work reclaims Black agency and authorship through representation, abstraction, and pastiche to offer stories that expand notions of self, community, and others.  He specializes in portraiture, systems of knowledge production, and the politics of representation. His works are in the collections of the David C. Driskell Center, John Michael Kohler Art Center, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, Kinsey Institute Collections, Lawrence University, Purdue University, and University of Illinois. He has exhibited in Germany, India, South Africa, and across the United States. He is the inaugural recipient of the Alice C. Cole ‘42 Fellowship from Wellesley College and was an artist-in-residence at the John Michael Kohler Art Center. He has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Midwestern Voices and Visions, Puffin Foundation, and Tanne Foundation. Hammie was born in New Haven, Connecticut and has a BA from Coker University and an MFA from the University of Connecticut. He is currently Professor, Chair of Studio Art, and Director’s Fellow in the School of Art & Design and Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Robert Chase Heishman (he/him/his)
Photography Finalist Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
http://www.robertchaseheishman.com

Robert Chase Heishman's artistic practice is conceptual, experimental, and expansive – working across photographic image-making, film/video, and painting.  His playful and poetic storytelling – pursued individually and collaboratively – invites others to pay closer attention and contemplate images, thus delving deeper into reality. His work is informed by first-hand experiences and research related to the labor, use, and power of images in our globally connected lives. In addition to his studio-based works, Heishman regularly embarks on documentary and film projects that facilitate engagements with a range of people, communities, and subject matter, taking him to different places in the world. Travel and first-hand experiences is important to Heishman personally, artistically, and civically as it helps to broaden his understanding of the beauty of the world, as well as the injustices that exist. Heishman exhibits and screens his work nationally and internationally. He has presented work at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO), Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago, IL), The Peninsula (Chicago, IL), Roots and Culture (Chicago, IL), Andrea Rehder Arte Contemporânea (São Paulo), Chicago Manual Style (Chicago, IL), Triskel Arts Centre (Cork, Ireland), Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH), Goldmine (Pittsburgh, PA), Silver Eye Photography (Pittsburgh, PA), BWA Wrocław Główny Gallery (Wrocław, Poland), The Tetley (Leeds, UK), Sharjah Biennial 14 (Sharjah, UAE), Barbara Wien (Berlin, DE), and has engaged in numerous collaborations, notably with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Radiohead, Sigur Rós, Megan Schvaneveldt, and Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz.  Heishman is one of ten 2024 “Breakout Artists”, an award/feature that Newcity arts magazine (Chicago/São Paulo) releases once a year. 

Elise Holowicki (she/her/hers)
Digital Arts Finalist Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: https://eliseholowicki.com

Elise Holowicki is an award-winning filmmaker and creative who has developed a body of work that leans into the irreverent and abstract while maintaining a strong social message at its core. Her breadth of commercial and narrative work spans a long list of clients and collaborators such as Google, NBC Universal, Turner, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, HBO, Headspace, Live Nation, Comedy Central, and Hulu.  Originally from Chicago, Holowicki supports local education nonprofits and is passionate about making arts programs more accessible to the next generation of storytellers.  

Laurie Hogin (she/her/hers) 
Visual Arts Fellowship Recipient
Mahomet, Illinois
Website: lauriehogin.com
Photo Credit: Greg Boozell

Laurie Hogin is an artist and occasional writer who currently lives in rural East Central Illinois.  She received her BFA from Cornell University, where she also studied cultural anthropology, in 1985 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. Her work consists primarily of allegorical paintings, many garishly framed, of mutant plants and freakish animals in languishing, overgrown landscape settings or posed as though for classical still life or portraiture. An evolving, multimedia installation practice conceptualizes these framed paintings as objects among other, psychologically- and culturally-related structures—strange architectural details, mutant furniture, weird interpretations of the “decorative arts”, miniature dioramas, and other references to practices by which humans organize their habitats and “frame” their experience of the world.  Laurie’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally for more than 35 years. She has had more than 30 solo exhibitions and been included in more than 125 group shows, including at the DePaul Museum of Art, the Illinois State Museum, the Rockford Art Museum, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, Asheville Art Museum, Racine Art Museum, Palo Alto Art Museum, De Cordova Museum, Carnegie Art Museum, the J.M. Kohler Arts Center, the International Print Center of New York, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Peoria Riverfront Museum, and many others; Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Koplin Del Rio in Seattle and Los Angeles, Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee, Littlejohn Contemporary in New York, and others.  Her work is included in numerous public and private collections and has been reviewed and reproduced in hundreds of publications.  Laurie works as a Professor of Studio Art at the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  

Kelly Kristin Jones (she/her/hers)
Photography Fellowship Recipient
River Forest, Illinois
Website: www.kellykristinjones.com

Kelly Kristin Jones uses photo-based interventions and counter monuments to unsettle well-worn imperial attributes and consider alternative vocabularies. Following a trail of found decorative objects, doctored historical records, and vernacular imagery, Jones considers the role white women play in shaping stories in the service of whiteness. Addressing the violence of both medium and myth, Jones uses her own body to climb, carve, and collapse racially coded objects and photographs.  Kelly Kristin Jones was raised on the West Side of Chicago and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships including a 2022 Individual Artists Program Grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, a 2021 Illinois Arts Council Grant, a 2019 Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH residency, 2019 LATITUDE residency, and 2019 Luminarts Cultural Foundation Project Grant. She was a featured artist in the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial and the 2023 Chicago Humanities Festival.

Emily Hooper Lansana (she/her/hers)
Ethnic & Folk Arts Finalist Recipient 
Chicago, Illinois
Website: https://www.3arts.org/artist/emily-lansana

Emily Hooper Lansana is a community builder and performing artist. As a performing artist, she is known for her work with Performance Duo: In the Spirit. She is also an accomplished solo performer. Her distinctive style carries on the rich tradition of Blackstorytelling which celebrates Black culture and history. She is recognized for her innovative performance of African and African American folktales and historical stories. For more than thirty years, she has performed as a storyteller, sharing her work with audiences throughout Chicago and across the country. She has been featured at the National Storytelling Festival, the National Association of Black Storytellers Festival, and at a variety of museums, colleges and performance venues including: the Southern Foodways Conference, the Mississippi Museum of Art, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago Folk Festival, the Old Town School of Folk Music, Dance Africa Chicago, Amherst College, Cleveland Association of Black Storytellers, Minneapolis Black Storytelling Festival, and Rhode Island Black Storytelling Festival. She has curated and directed a number of innovative storytelling performances that introduce diverse audiences to the powerful role of storytelling and to the myriad possibilities that grow from the intersection of time honored traditions and creative collaborations.  She is the Artistic Director of SOL Collective where she supports the development and performance of original stories by women of color. Awards include: the 3arts Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Center Community Award, the Oxbow Inspirators Award, and the Epic Women of Color Arts and Community Award. Her work seeks to honor those whose stories are often untold, especially those of the African diaspora. She is a graduate of Yale University (B.A.) and Northwestern University (M.A.) She serves as the Senior Director of Programming and Engagement at the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago where she also teaches Storytelling in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies and at the Crown School of Social Work. She is honored to be mother to four creative sons and grandmother to a beautiful granddaughter.

Claire Lieberman (she/her/hers)
Sculpture Finalist Recipient
Bloomington, Illinois
Website: www.clairelieberman.com
Photo Credit: Chris Blade

Claire Lieberman creates seductively dangerous objects inviting viewers to contemplate Americans’ almost erotic obsession with violence, from the sublimated aggression of children’s war toys and professional sports to the tactile allure of weapons and armor.  Her highly-polished black marble sculptures, immersive installations, Jell-O projects, and prints evoke toys, guns, grenades, flowers, sex toys and fruit, drawing connections between childhood play and conflict in contemporary culture. She is recognized also for her video installations using real Jell-O and her toy guns in glass and ice.  Lieberman has shown internationally at Mudac Museum, Lausanne, Switzerland; Forum Schlossplatz, Aarau, Switzerland; ACC Galerie Weimar, Germany; Gallery F-15, Norway; and the Seoul Arts Center, Korea. Her solo shows and projects in New York include Massey Klein Gallery; Project: ARTspace; 601Artspace; and The LAB for Installation and Performance Art. Solo exhibitions nationally include Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta; PDX, Portland; Gebert Contemporary; Phoenix and Santa Fe; Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Kimura Gallery, University of Alaska.  Lieberman earned a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston and Tufts University, and an MFA from Pratt Institute. Lieberman is a full professor of sculpture at Illinois State University.

Fern Logan (she/her/hers)
Photography Finalist Recipient
Carbondale, Illinois
Website: https://fernlogan.com

Fern Logan started her career as a graphic designer and photographer. She worked for several years in the corporate world before moving into the academic arena. In her academic career her work was recognized and received several grants and awards, as well as numerous gallery and museum exhibitions. Logan’s work has been shown widely since the early 1970s when she emerged as a promising photographer from Paul Caponigro’s Apeiron Workshop. Her work was included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, and the groundbreaking exhibition Reflections in Black: Contemporary African American Photographers at the Brooklyn Museum. Fern Logan’s artworks are included in the permanent collections of the Harlem State Office Building, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Bellevue Hospital Center, New York,  the Michigan Technological University and DePaw University. She is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute. Fern Logan is Professor Emerita of Cinema & Photography at Southern Illinois University. She also taught Photography and Graphic Design at Elmhurst University and Michigan Technological University. Her book The Artist Portrait Series, which included portraits of prominent Black artists such as Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett and Jacob Lawrence was published by Southern Illinois University Press. Logan was recognized for this work with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Her work with digitally manipulated imagery was honored with two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships. She was just awarded another Illinois Arts Council Fellowship award for 2024. Ms Logan currently has the honor of being on the board of directors for Artspace 304 in Carbondale, IL. 

Danielle and Kevin McCoy (she/her/hers & he/him/his)
New Art Forms Finalist Recipients
East St. Louis, Illinois
Website: work/play (w-o-r-k-p-l-a-y.com)

WORK/PLAY is an interdisciplinary studio based in East St. Louis, Illinois founded by Danielle and Kevin McCoy. Their practice is rooted in the Black experience and spans across several disciplines. They incorporate design, printmaking, and publishing to explore notions of identity, racial inequality, erasure, and redacted histories. The duo relies on their own personal archive to develop new bodies of work. This reference material includes found images, omitted historical offerings, as well as news clippings from past and current events. This assemblage of materials converges to closely examine the relationship between master narratives and the effect they have on the collective and historical consciousness. WORK/PLAY has exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, Luminary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MCA Denver, Volkshochschule Stuttgart Photo Gallery in Germany, and Wassaic Project to name a few. They have collaborated with 21c Museum Hotel, The Portland Stamp Company, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Barrett Barrera Projects, The Arts Club of Chicago, Aperture Foundation, Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. For publishing, they have designed books for Ivan McClellan, Eight Seconds: Black Rodeo Culture; Zora J Murff, True Colors (Or, Affirmations in a Crisis); Awol Erizku, Double Image; Valerie J. Bower, (Watts (revisited); and Kamau Amu Patton, Second Mind | Alto Age. 

Reggio McLaughlin (he/him/his)
Ethnic & Folk Arts Fellowship Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: www.reggiothehoofer.com
Photo Credit: Sarah Elizabeth Larson

Reggio “The Hoofer” McLaughlin is the Windy City’s most revered master of tap dancing. Born on Chicago’s South Side, McLaughlin developed a fondness for tap dancing while watching a performance in second grade.  With few professional opportunities and little knowledge of the dance scene, McLaughlin began his career dancing in the subways to earn money to eat. Later he joined the roster of Urban Gateways, a nonprofit dedicated to providing arts experiences for Chicago’s underserved youth, and presented programs at schools, libraries, museums, and park facilities that combined performance, historical commentary, and demonstration. With a professional track record, McLaughlin left the subway behind, securing bookings as part of dance team programs and as a workshop leader across the city. Recently, McLaughlin worked closely with ragtime pianist Reginald Robinson and the Carolina Chocolate Drops on the musical production Keep A Song in Your Soul: The Black Roots of Vaudeville, which garnered support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation’s MAP Fund, and the Joyce Foundation. In 2014, McLaughlin received New York City’s prestigious Flo-Bert Award. In 2015, the Old Town School of Folk Music honored “The Hoofer” with its Distinguished Teaching Artist Award and in 2020, named a dance studio in honor of Reggio. In 2021, the National Endowment for the Arts honored McLaughlin with the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts: the National Heritage Fellowship. In 2022, the City of Chicago gave him the Esteemed Artist Award and, in 2023, the American Tap Dance Foundation presented him with the prestigious Hoofer Award.

Michael J. Miles (he/him/his)
Ethnic & Folk Arts Fellowship Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website:  https://milesmusic.org
Photo Credit: Chris Walker

Michael J. Miles is a master banjoist, guitarist, orchestral composer, author of numerous theatrical works combining music and history, and an acclaimed music educator. Alone in concert or with his signature stage production, From Senegal To Seeger, he has had standing ovations on four continents. But give him a string quartet, jazz band, orchestra, or choir and Michael creates new music bringing critical rave, and professional respect from musical legends. In a world poisoned by international heartache Michael has reached across borders with music as the powerful and wordless weapon of respect. For his work in Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey, Michael has been heralded by the US State Dept on three occasions for his powerful and enduring musical diplomacy. He served as Program Director, Old Town School of Folk Music (1984-1998); President, International Folk Alliance (1990-1992); Teaching Artist, Ravinia Festival (1999-2014); Adjunct Professor at VanderCook College of Music, Villanova University, West Chester University, Central Connecticut State University; Music Director, Global Voices Initiative; Choir Founder & Director, Passages Charter School, Chicago. A signature of Miles’ artistic output includes what he calls “musical documentaries for the stage.” These commissioned stage productions, with cast sizes ranging from 1-16, feature music, politics, popular culture, literature, and history. Titles include “How Africa Met Ireland in American Song,” “America 1968,” “Transcontinental: Stories of the Steel Rail,” “100 Years of Protest” and more. In 2018, Miles was named by the Old Town School of Folk Music as the “Musician and Educator of the Year.” The City of Chicago, in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022, honored him with DCASE grants to create new compositions. 

eliza myrie (she/her/hers)
New Art Forms Fellowship Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: https://www.elizamyrie.com
Photo Credit: zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal

eliza myrie is an artist and educator based in Chicago. myrie’s work engages questions of labor, language, and site through personal histories, race and class. Primarily a sculptor and printmaker, dimension, volume, and an examination of how representation and subjectivity are realized or ignored via physical and conceptual processes are central to her work. myrie received her MFA from Northwestern University and was a participant at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The Whitney Independent Study Program. She has received awards from Artadia, The Propellor Fund and has been a resident at Bemis Center, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Arts + Public Life at The University of Chicago. Myrie is a co-founder of the Black Artists Retreat [B.A.R.] and a lecturer at School of the Art Institute Chicago. She has contributed to publications with Sming Sming Books and MIT Press. Her exhibitions include the Kennedy Museum of Art, The Arts Club of Chicago; Gallery 400; Vox Populi; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Jose L. Ovalle (he/him/his)
Ethnic & Folk Arts Finalist Recipient
Berwyn, Illinois
Website: https://mexicandancecompany.org

Jose Luis Ovalle is President and Artistic Director of the Mexican Folkloric Dance Company of Chicago. Born in Nuevo Laredo Tamaulipas, Mexico, his family emigrated to the U.S.A. and settled in Chicago where he began his dancing career. He returned to Mexico for more intensive study of the vast Mexican dance and music repertoire that has over 300 styles and rituals with associated costuming that numbers into thousands of regional styles. It is a lifetime, never ending study. He returned to Chicago and formed Alma de Mexico Dance Company and later, in 1982, he founded the Mexican Folkloric Dance Company of Chicago (MFDC), now into its 43^rd year. MFDC has performed for Presidents Reagan, Clinton, Mexican president Fox and toured Mexico and Ireland. In 2007 Jose received the Immigrant and Refugee Award from Changing Worlds for his 33 years of contribution to the arts. He also has been awarded other artist grants from IACA, The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, The National Museum of Mexican Arts and others. His company has been awarded 376 Grants, Awards and Recognitions and is mentioned in three books: “A Feeling for Life” by Margy McLain, “Incentive Genius the History of The Museum of Science and Industry” by Jay Pridmore and “Images of America Mexican Chicago” by Rita Jirasek and Carlos Tortolero. MFDC has been declared a Chicago Cultural Treasure by IFF. A more comprehensive 43-year history can be viewed at http://www.mexican-folkloric-dance-chicago.net .

Olivia Petrides (she/her/hers)
Visual Arts Fellowship Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: www.oliviapetrides.com
Photo credit: Nathan Keay

Olivia Petrides is a painter, illustrator, and Associate Professor Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her large-scale works on paper, based on travel to remote and fragile landscapes, display imagery of fragmentation and dissolution. References to current politics are inserted through collaged text and newspaper fragments. She views the abstracted field as a gathering place in which to engage social discourse and explore partisan language within the context of environmental space. Among the awards she has received are a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; a Margaret Klimek Phillips Fellowship; three Illinois Arts Council Special Project Grants; and a SAIC Marion Kryczka Excellence in Teaching Award. Petrides traveled to Iceland on a Fulbright Grant with a concurrent residency at the Reykjavik Municipal Art Museum. She revisited Iceland twice and then Greenland with support from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. She returned to the subarctic North Atlantic where she had residencies with the Faroe Islands Museum of Natural History. Petrides has also received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Vermont Studio Center; the Roger Brown Studio; Yellowstone National Park and many residencies at the Ragdale Foundation. She illustrated two volumes in the Peterson Field Guide Series, published by Harper Collins Publishing Company and (to be) reissued by Princeton University Press. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; US National Park Service; Hafnarborg Institute of Art, Iceland; the Illinois State Museum; the Field Museum, Chicago; the Brauer Museum, Indiana; and the Openlands Organization, among others.

Libby Reuter (she/her/hers)
Photography Finalist Recipient
Alton, Illinois
Website: watershedcairns.com

Libby Reuter is an Alton-based printmaker, mural painter, found-object sculptor, and installation artist. Since the flood of 1993, her work has been focused on water. From 2011 to 2022, she created found-glass sculptures, or cairns, to mark the Mississippi River Watershed in collaboration with photographer Joshua Rowan. Their Watershed Cairns photos and cairns have been exhibited in Midwestern galleries, including the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis; Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; the Minnesota Marine Arts Museum, Winona; and the Dubuque (Iowa) Museum of Art.  Currently, the work can be seen at the National Geospatial Innovations Center at T-REX in downtown St. Louis and from May 3—November 3, 2024, at the USACE National Great Rivers Museum in Alton, Illinois.  Reuter’s plastic-waste sculpture Trashin’ was commissioned for the Missouri History Museum and later exhibited at the National Audubon Center at Riverlands in West Alton, Missouri. In addition, her sculptures have been shown at the Jacoby Art Center, Alton, Illinois; the Bonsack Gallery, Ladue, Missouri; at Art St. Louis, St. Louis Artists Guild, and Des Lee Gallery, in St. Louis, Missouri.  Reuter was associate dean at Washington University School of Art (now the Sam Fox School of Design and Art) in St. Louis, Missouri, and executive director/curator of the William and Florence Schmidt Art Center at Southwestern Illinois College, Belleville, Illinois until her retirement.

Monica Rezman (she/her/hers)
Sculpture Finalist Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: http://monicarezman.com

Monica Rezman is a multi-media artist who explores intimacy within abstraction through the use of traditional media and everyday found materials. She studied painting and textile design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While at SAIC, she spent a study-abroad year at the Instituto Allende in Mexico. In 1993, she studied classical drawing and painting at the Florence Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. In 1999 and 2002 consecutively, Rezman was awarded an Art-in-Residence in Gujurat, India, One of the world’s most revered craft communities in textiles. For the last forty years, she has exhibited nationally and internationally including exhibitions at the Riverside Art Center, 2019, Governors State University Gallery, 2019, Merida English Library, Mexico 2015, The Chicago Cultural Center, 2017; The Contemporary Art Gallery, India 1999, and the South Bend Regional Museum of Art 1998. In 2017-18 she was the Artist-in-Residence at the Chicago Artist Coalition’s Field/Program. She is a 2020 recipient of an Individual Illinois Arts Council Grant. Her work has been reviewed by Hyperallergic, Alan Artner (Chicago Tribune) and New City. She has recently had a one-person exhibition at 65 Grand, a group show at Kavi Gupta Gallery and Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Los Angles. She is currently an Artistin-Residence at the JO-HS Gallery in Mexico City.

Jose Santiago Perez (he/him/his) 
Crafts Finalist Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: https://josesantiagoperez.com/home.html

José Santiago Pérez is an artist and educator based in Chicago. He is a Spring 2024 Fiber Fellow at Colorado College, a 2022 Lunder Institute for American Art resident fellow at the Colby College Art Museum and a 2019-2020 HATCH resident at Chicago Artists Coalition. His work has been supported by an Illinois Arts Council Agency grant, an Individual Artist Program grant from the City of Chicago, and a Chicago Artists Coalition SPARK grant. José has presented solo and group exhibitions in Chicago, the Midwest, and across the country. Features and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Basketry+ Magazine, Sixty Inches from Center, Newcity Art, and the Archives + Futures Podcast. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches in the Fiber and Material Studies department.

Bradley Temkin (he/him/his)
Photography Fellowship Recipient
Skokie, Illinois
Website: https://bradtemkin.com

Brad Temkin’s (American, 1956) work is held in numerous permanent collections, including those of The Art Institute of Chicago; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Amon Carter Museum; Eastman Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. His images have appeared in such publications as Aperture, Black & White Magazine, TIME Magazine and European Photography. He has numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in 2007. Temkin has published 3 books: Private Places: Photographs of Chicago Gardens (Center for American Places) 2005; Rooftop (Radius Books) 2015; and The State Of Water (Radius Books) 2019. He has taught at Columbia College Chicago since 1984.

Frank Trankina (he/him/his)
Visual Arts Fellowship Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: www.franktrankina.com

Frank Trankina is an internationally exhibited artist/painter. Born in Chicago, he received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For the past thirty-five years, he has been creating narrative paintings by combining characters from his extensive collection of remnants of popular culture within the context of still life painting. In his most recent works, he explores art culture, and painting in particular, being constructed and referential, by setting up, and painting, “art galleries”. His international exhibitions include: University of Cambridge Kettle’s Yard, England; Megumi Ogita, Tokyo, Japan (2010, 2012, 2015, 2018); Exco Daegu, South Korea; Art Busan, Busan, South Korea; Alpineum Produzentengalerie, Lucerne, Switzerland; AHOI Gallery, Lucerne, Switzerland; 100 Tonson Foundation and VER Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand. Among his noted national and regional exhibitions include: (Tibor de Nagy Gallery) SPRING/BREAK SHOW, New York, NY; ArtBasel, Miami; American University Museum, Washington, DC; Illinois State Museum; Rockford Art Museum; Chicago Cultural Center; Union League Club of Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center. Trankina’s paintings have been collected into international and national private collections in Indonesia, Switzerland, Japan, Chicago, New York and Washington DC, and is in public permanent collections including, Elmhurst Art Museum, Rockford Art Museum, John Michael Kohler Art Preserve, and numerous other institutions. Trankina is Professor of Art at Northern Illinois University. 

jina valentine (she/they)
Visual Arts Finalist Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: www.jinavalentine.com 
Photo Credit: Noelle Theard

jina valentine is a visual artist, mother, and educator. Her practice is informed by traditional craft techniques and interweaves histories latent within found texts, objects, narratives, and spaces. jina’s work involves language translation, mining content from material and digital archives, and experimental strategies for humanizing data-visualization. She is also co-founder of Black Lunch Table, an oral-history archiving project. Her work has received recognition and support from the Graham Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Art Matters among others. jina received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon and her MFA from Stanford University. She is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Natalia Villanueva Linares (she/they)
Sculpture Fellowship Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: https://nati.work

Natalia Villanueva Linares is a French Peruvian Artist graduated with highest honors from Beaux Arts, the National School of Fine Arts of Paris. She currently lives in Chicago and works between North + South America and Europe. Natalia speaks in amounts and believes in poetry made from excessive quantities, in simple objects radiating with power over her everything. There is in the work a notion of continuity which communicates between the immense and the minute. She transmutes found, worn, old objects or those found in the banal of everyday life. The concept of sensitive mathematics animates a large part of her work, either through the abundance of large quantities of gestures and objects, or in its relationship to space and temporality. She has a magnetic affection for large collections of objects charged with history. With an animistic relation to certain materials, she invites others to feel the magnitude of their generosity. Her work has been shown in two major exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris. She exhibited at the Sala Miro Quesada Garland in Peru (2013), Collège de Bernardins in Paris and La Graineterie (2018). Natalia had her first solo shows with Doyang Lee Gallery (2014, France) DPM gallery (2019, Ecuador), Wu Gallery (2021, Peru), Comfort Station in Chicago (2022). Her solo show at the Museo de Arte de San Marcos (2022, Peru) won the Luces Award for best solo exhibition of the year. In 2023 she exhibited at DePaul Art Museum, Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago IL),  El Lobi (Puerto Rico) and the School of the Art Gallery (Canada).  Natalia is a cultural worker, she co-founded the non-profit organization Yaku in Peoria IL. She is the former Director of the Artist-run mini mansion High Place and founder of the magazine Ukayzine, created to promote international cultural exchanges through the visual Arts. Natalia is a contributor for Sixty Inches From Center, she created the series Desde los Archivos/from the Archives and was an organizer of the critic program Canje.

Jade Williams (she/her/hers)
New Art Forms Finalist Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website: www.sexandthestudio.com
Photo Credit: Alex Hazel Studios

Jade Williams is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and writer whose practice reflects the ways that she engages in the radical traditions of alteration, adornment, collecting, and congregating. Using textiles, family heirlooms, embellishments and other reflective materials, her world-building works investigate how she is both building and becoming an ideal home for her inner child and future selves. Jade received her BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign and is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works have been exhibited at spaces including the Krannert Art Museum, the Evanston Art Center, the Leather Archives and Museum, Dominican University, and Woman Made Gallery. Jade is a 2021 HATCH Artist Resident with the Chicago Artists Coalition, a 2022 Luminarts Cultural Foundation Fellow in Visual Arts, and a 2022 Economic Securities Project Artist Fellow. She currently lives and works in the Chicago Area where she's tending to her collective, The Black Bloom Project.

Betsy Youngquist (she/her/hers)
Crafts Finalist Recipient
Rockford, Illinois
Website: https://www.scottandbetsy.com

In 1972 at the age of 7, Betsy and her family took an airstream camper trip throughout the Northwest US and Western Canada, introducing Betsy to First Nations, American Indian and Inuit artwork and people. Betsy attributes her love of beads, and the power to incorporate mythological and spiritual understandings through art, to that early encounter. To this day, Betsy admires cultures where art is a sacred creation, and a bridge between the spiritual with the mundane.  Betsy began applying beads to her watercolor paintings over thirty years ago and has continued to embellish as a mainstream technique. The award-winning artist is known for her innovative beaded mosaics. Creating through the narrative lens of surrealistic anthropomorphism, Betsy’s sculptures explore the magical connection between man and the natural world. When creating her embellished objects, Betsy collaborates with sculptor R. Scott Long in designing and constructing the forms. The techniques Betsy uses are self-taught. From 2016-2023, Betsy co-owned an art gallery in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Today she teaches workshops and sells her work in various galleries and museum shops across the United States.

Jade Yumang (he/him/they/them)
Crafts Fellowship Recipient
Chicago, Illinois
Website:  jadeyumang.com

Jade Yumang was born in Quezon City, Philippines, grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, immigrated to unceded Coast Salish territories in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and has been living in Chicago since 2018. He has exhibited his work in several museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York, NY), Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles, CA), Art-in-Buildings (New York, NY), Art League (Houston, TX), TRUCK Contemporary Art (Calgary, AB), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS), Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA), Western Exhibitions (Chicago, IL), BronxArtSpace (Bronx, NY), District of Columbia Arts Center (Washington, DC), Glasshouse (Brooklyn, NY), and ONE Archives (Los Angeles, CA). Jade has received several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council. He has been a resident artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Fire Island Artist Residency, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Residency, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. He earned an MFA with Departmental Honors from Parsons School of Design in 2012 and a BFA with Honors from the University of British Columbia in 2008. Jade is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.