Hyun Jung Jun

Session seven - August 20-26

Born in South Korea and based in Chicago, Hyun Jung Jun is an artist whose installations are measures and meditations which take up more time than they do space. Working with commonplace commodities such as candles, bread, wooden structures, Jun’s work borrows from familiar, domestic language to describe and search the ornate identities of our individuality and culture. In recent years, Jun has expanded her work to include edible forms in a cake project titled Dream Cake Test Kitchen. Jun received her BFA at SAIC and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. Her recent exhibitions include Goldfinch, LVL3, the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelly Foundation with Chicago Artists Coalition, No Place Gallery, Hans Gallery, The Drawing Room at Arts Club of Chicago and EXPO Chicago. Her work has been featured in Chicago Reader, the New York Times and Newcity Magazine. Jun is one of Newcity’s breakout artists for 2021.

Nance Klehm

Session seven - August 13 – 19

Nance Klehm (she/they) has been an ecological systems designer, consultant, and agroecological grower for more than three decades. Her approach is centered on instigating change by activating already existent communities, and her work demonstrates her lifelong commitment to redefining the way human populations coexist with plant, animal and fungal systems on this planet.

Nance is internationally respected for her work on land politics and soil heath. Her work has received extensive national and international media coverage and has been mentioned in over 30 books. She is the author of The Soil Keepers: Interviews with practitioners on the ground beneath our feet (2019) and The Ground Rules: a manual to reconnect soil and soul (2016).

She currently splits her time between Little Village, a densely packed, diverse urban neighborhood in Chicago, and fifty acres in the Driftless Region, where she runs Chop Wood Carry Water Residency and cultivates and forages medicinal and edible plants, keeps bees and a fruit orchard, raises ducks and native quail, and grows for several indigenous seed banks.

Learn more about Nance Klehm at www.socialecologies.net

Chris Bogia

Session six - August 6-12

Chris Bogia’s work reflects an ongoing interest in interior design and decorative art. As Bogia says, “My work sits in a queer space between contemporary art and decorative art, courting and resisting both worlds simultaneously”. Formally, Bogia’s work spans works on paper, textiles, and sculpture, frequently incorporating individually hand laid strands of yarn into the surfaces of his work. Thematically, Bogia says: “I like to work on a primary subject as a series for an extended amount of time like bonsai trees, fountains, or mandalas, contemplating their potential as cultural and poetic symbols while investigating their forms through repeated design and color iterations until I feel I have extracted and imbued enough depth of meaning and visual delight in equal measure.” Bogia received his BFA at New York University and MFA from Yale University. He currently lives in Queens, NY. Bogia is the recipient of a 2018 grant from the Pollack-Krasner Foundation, a 2018 Queens Council for the Arts grant, the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Artist Community Engagement Grant, the 2015 Tiffany Foundation grant, and was an artist-in-resident at the Queens Museum Studio Program 2016-2018., Recent exhibitions include a 2021 public project with Art in Buildings in NYC, a solo presentation at Mrs. Gallery 2019, group exhibitions at Hesse Flatow, NYC, Primary, Miami, RUSCHMAN, Chicago, The Public Art Fund, NYC, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, Bric, Brooklyn, Mrs. Gallery, The New Museum, and a presentation at NADA with Mrs. Gallery in 2020. Bogia is the co-founder of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), the first LGBTQ artist residency in the world, located in Cherry Grove, on Fire Island, and was FIAR’s acting director from 2011- 2020. He is currently an instructor of sculpture at New York University.

Brendan Fernandes

Session six - July 30 – August 5

Brendan Fernandes, as a multidisciplinary artist, examines issues of cultural displacement, migration, labor, and queer subjectivity through installation, video, sculpture, and dance. He is invested in confronting the complexities of transitional and transnational identities, with a particular interest in incorporating elements of cultural performance into contemporary art, arising from his unique cultural background as a Queer, Kenyan-Indian Canadian.

Sharif Farrag

Session five - July 23 - 29

Sharif Farrag (b. 1993, Reseda, CA) merges classic ceramics styles with his own improvisational building techniques, representing his hybrid identities through clay. Farrag received a BFA from the University of Southern California in 2018 and an MFA in ceramics at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2023. He was an artist in residence at Cal State Long Beach’s Center for Contemporary Ceramics from 2018 to 2020. He has had several solo exhibitions at Los Angeles galleries, including François Ghebaly, in lieu, New Image Art, and gallery1993. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, New York; the 2020 Clay Biennial at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; Adams and Ollman, Portland; High Art, Arles; and Matthew Brown, Los Angeles. He is included in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, the Rubell Museum in Miami, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Farrag lives and works in Los Angeles.

Tyson Reeder

Session four - July 16-22

Tyson Reeder (b. 1974, Fairfax, VA) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Solo exhibitions include Daniel Reich Gallery, New York; Office Baroque, Brussels; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; CANADA, New York. His work has also appeared in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as Pace Gallery, New York; Acquavella, Palm Beach; Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York; Venus over Manhattan, Los Angeles; Peter Freeman Gallery, New York; Jack Hanley, San Francisco, among others. Reeder has co-organized many group exhibitions and projects, including Drunk vs. Stoned at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, The Early Show at White Columns; The Dark Fair at the Swiss Institute New York and the Köelnischer Kunstverien, Cologne; and the 24-Hour Super Jam at Canada, NY. Reeder performed at the Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine Gallery, London as part of the fashion collective George De George.  Reeder’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum and Flash Art, among other publications. His paintings are included in the collections of the MoMA and the Rubell Family Collection.

LJ Roberts

Session four - July 10 – 15

LJ Roberts is an artist and writer working in Brooklyn, New York and Pioneertown, California. Their work addresses queer and trans temporalities and movement, material deviance, chosen kinships, archives, and narrative. Recently the artist has been featured in exhibitions at Pioneer Works, Hales New York, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Brooklyn Museum, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, and The Renwick Gallery at Smithsonian American Art Museum where their work is in the permanent collection. The artist has been the past recipient of a Fountainhead Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University, and residencies at IASPIS, MacDowell, Ox-Bow School of Art, ACRE, Pioneer Works, Bag Factory, and Textile Arts Center. LJ was awarded the 2015 White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQI artists and the 2019 Women’s Caucus for Art President’s Award for Art and Activism. In 2022 they were a Colene Brown Art Prize Awardee. LJ Roberts is represented by Hales, London and New York and teaches at Parsons School of Design.

Mark Thomas Gibson

Session three - June 25 - July 1

Mark Thomas Gibson's personal lens on American culture stems from his multifaceted viewpoint as an artist—as a black male, a professor, and an American history buff. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his exploration of contemporary culture through languages of drawing, painting, print, and sculpture revealing a vision of a satirical, dystopian America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within the story. Gibson (b. 1980, Miami, FL) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. He is represented by M+B in Los Angeles and Loyal in Stockholm. In 2016, he co-curated the traveling exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo. Gibson has released two artist books, Some Monsters Loom Large (2016) and Early Retirement (2017). In 2021, Gibson was awarded residencies at Yaddo and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency.  He was awarded a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia, PA and a Hodder Fellowship from Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.  Gibson was most recently awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, NY. In October 2022 he had his most recent solo exhibition Here He, Hear Ye!!! at Hurley Gallery at Princeton University.

Jennifer Sullivan

Session two- June 11 - 24

 Jennifer Sullivan is a painter who lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens. Her paintings are a diary and a form of psychoanalysis, that evolved from earlier work in performance and video. Recent solo exhibitions include Original Face, Deli Grocery Gallery, Ridgewood, NY (2022), Sleeper, Turn Gallery, New York, NY (2021), Devotional Paintings, Julius Caesar, Chicago, IL (2020), Female Sensibility, Emma Gray HQ, Los Angeles, CA (2020), Exiled Parts, No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH (2019), and the soft animal of your body, Emma Gray HQ, Los Angeles, CA (2018). Sullivan has exhibited widely including group exhibitions at Marinaro, Brennan and Griffin, Rod Barton, NADA Miami, and Klaus Von Nichtsaggend. Awards include fellowships with Paint School at Shandaken Projects (2020) and the Fine Arts Work Center (2012-13), and residencies at the Lighthouse Works, Skowhegan, Ox-Bow, and Yaddo. Her work has been reviewed in the NY Times, Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, and Art Papers. She is represented by Emma Gray HQ in Los Angeles, CA.

Melina Ausikaitis

Session one- June 4 - June 10

Melina Ausikaitis is an artist, a dedicated musician and lyricist, a skilled seamstress, a spoken word performer, curator and playful image- and object-maker.  She has exhibited and performed all over the country and traveled the world playing in her bands Joan of Arc and Aitis Band.  She is as much an inventor as an artist, and as much a librarian as a songwriter. This is an artist who incorporates so many interchanging and overlapping dimensions that it’s as if she’s created her very own genre. 

Samantha Bittman

Session one - May 28 – June 3

Samantha Bittman  is a visual artist and educator based in Woodstock, NY.  In her practice, she works with woven patterning to generate paintings, graphic wallpapers, and tiled installations.  She has participated in residency programs at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Ox-Bow School of Art.  In 2012, she received the Artadia Award.  Recent solo exhibitions include, Ronchini, London, UK; Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL; Morgan Lehman, NY, NY; and Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including David Castillo, Miami, FL; Shane Campbell, Chicago, IL; and Rhona Hoffman, Chicago, IL.  Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Wall Street International, and The Washington Post, amongst others.  In 2022, she founded Catskill Weaving School, an artist-run school that offers in-person and online weaving and weaving-related workshops, based in Catskill, NY.  She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.