Chris Pappan is an artist of Kanza, Osage and Lakota descent. His cited influences are Heavy Metal and Juxtapoz magazines, and the Lowbrow art movement with its cultural roots in 1970s underground comics, punk, and hot rod cultures.  His art reflects the dominant culture’s distorted perceptions of Native peoples and is based on the Plains Native art tradition known as Ledger Art.  Chris is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and a nationally recognized painter and ledger artist. His work is in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington D.C); The Field Museum of Natural History; The Newberry Library, The North American Native Museum (Geneva, Switzerland); Missoula Art Museum (Missoula, Montana); and The Spencer Museum of Art (Lawrence, Kansas), among others.  Chris recently exhibited his work at the Field Museum in Drawing on Tradition, a two-year exhibition and intervention into the decades old and problematic Native North American Hall, which has changed little since its establishment in the 1950s. The exhibition presented a contemporary view of Indigenous perspectives, acting as an agent of change within the institution.

Cecilia Beaven is a visual artist and art instructor from Mexico City based in Chicago. Cecilia holds an MFA in Studio from SAIC which she coursed as a Fulbright scholar and a BFA with honors from ENPEG La Esmeralda (Mexico City). Cecilia’s multidisciplinary artwork has been shown in solo shows in Mexico City, Houston, and Chicago, as well as in group exhibitions in Mexico, the US, Colombia, Sweden, Italy, and Japan. She has painted murals in several cities such as Hiketa, Paris, Houston, Chicago, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Pachuca, Tepoztlan, and Tijuana, where she was commissioned to paint a segment of the border wall between Mexico and the US. Through her work, which includes painting, drawing, animation, film, and sculpture, Cecilia develops a speculative mythology with unique visual narratives. Cecilia questions who gets to tell stories and establish the official cultural narratives. The artist affirms her creative agency by modifying existing tales and mythology and seamlessly adding fiction and personal anecdotes. Through this analytical and ludic experimentation, Cecilia brings a unique perspective on Mexican identity that goes beyond folklore and mainstream ideas of Mexico. In 2019 Cecilia was awarded the Leroy Neiman Foundation Fellowship at Ox-Bow School of Art, in Saugatuck, Michigan. In 2020 Cecilia was invited as a resident at the Mono Rojo Ceramics workshop in Mexico City. In 2021, Cecilia was awarded the year-long Radicle Studio Residency at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago.

Turtel Onli is an artist whose career has touched upon a variety of disciplines in fine and applied visual art. He has been an art therapist, educator, and illustrator. He has also distinguished himself in painting, drawing, illustration, publishing, fashion, and multimedia production. This includes an extensive exhibition and publication record.  He is known for having coined the term Rhythmistic in the 1970s to interpret his stylizations which fuse primitive and futuristic concepts. This was manifested with several solo exhibitions at Chicago’s innovative Younger Gallery during that prolific period.

Onli earned a BFA and MAAT from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago which included studies in Paris France at the Sorbonne and the Centre Pompidou.  He has work in the collections of  The Cool Globes Public Art Exhibition, The Chicago Children’s Museum, The Dusable Museum, The Johnson Publishing Company, The estates of Mile Davis and Alice Coltrane, along with freelancing illustration for the Rolling Stones, McDonalds, Motown, MODE Avant Garde Magazine, the Paris Metro Magazine, and Holt, Rinehart, &Winston to name a few.

He has received many awards including Honorable Mention in the Salon Show at the Munster Center for Visual and Performing Art and the Prix Arts Electronica, a Laureate in the Concours des Dessin with the Foyer Internationale Accueil de Paris.  His artwork was selected for presentation at FESTAC 1977: The Second World Festival of Black and African Art and Culture in Lagos Nigeria.  Between 1990 and now, he is a regular Visiting Artist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a three-time solo exhibitor at the ETA Creative Arts Foundation in Chicago.

Farah Salem (she/her) is an artist and art therapist from Kuwait, whose photo, performance, and installation practice questions the potential erasure of sociocultural conditioning, focusing on the gendered nature of trauma as it is embedded within her experiences as an Arab woman. Her studio and art therapy practices are bridged by social activism. In both, she focuses on community building through art-making, investigating the use of materials for social-emotional wellbeing, accessibility of mental health services, and raising awareness about domestic and gender-based violence. She holds a BA in Visual Communications from Gulf University for Science and Technology and an MA in Art Therapy from SAIC. Farah’s work has been exhibited at United Photo Industries (New York), Mana Contemporary (Chicago), Site Galleries (Chicago), La Galerie (Dubai), and Contemporary Art Platform (Kuwait). 

Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. In past work, Jared broadcasted audio and text based work through the radio (CENTRAL AIR RADIO, 88.5 FM), in live DJ sets, and on social media. They consider themselves a data thief, understanding this role from John Akomfrah’s description of the data thief as a figure that does not belong to the past or present. As a data thief, Jared Brown makes archeological digs for fragments of Black American subculture, history and technology. Jared repurposes these fragments in audio, text, and video to investigate the relationship between history and digital, immaterial space. Jared Brown holds a BFA in video from the Maryland Institute College of Art and moved back to Chicago in 2016 in order to make and share work that directly relates to their personal history.

Candace Hunter (she/her) is a Chicago based artist. She creates collages, paintings, installations, and performance art. Plainly, she tells stories. Through the use of appropriated materials from magazines, vintage maps, cloth, and various re-used materials, she offers this new landscape of materials back to the viewer with a glimpse of history and admiration of the beautiful. 

During the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, she began to do two things, offer free art classes on Instagram and to create what she now calls her “Brown Limbed Girls” – a growing series of whimsical brown girls enjoying their lives. She is extremely happy to share the girls with a new audiences in New Orleans and Northern California.

Candace has most recently received 3Arts Next Level/Spare Room Award, the Tim and Helen Meier Family Foundation Award, the 2016 3 Arts Award, and honored by the Diasporal Rhythms Collective. In 2020, she served as a juror for the Kentucky Foundation for Women and was asked to speak at the Midwest Women in Ecology Conference.

Rufina Bazlova (she/her) visiting from Belarus is an artist who works with the traditional folk embroidery as a medium to depict socio-political issues. In 2020 she gained an international profile for her series The History of Belarusian Vyzhyvanka. Bazlova is a coauthor of the installation “The red thread“ in Aachen dedicated to the three Belarusian female opposition leaders who won the Charlemagne prize in 2022. Currently as a member of Stitchit art group (in collaboration with a curator Sofia Tocar) Bazlova works on a social art project #Framed in Belarus that invites people from all over the world to stitch stories of political prisoners in Belarus.

Rotem Tamir’s art focuses on traditions of object making and how they morph as they travel with their bearers through time and space, echoing the complex stories of relocation and shuffled identities. Although removed from their particular histories and geographies, her objects nonetheless pay homage to the traditions from which they emerged, revitalizing those as products of contemporary enquiries about places, belonging and politics.

Rotem Tamir immigrated to the United States from Israel in 2011. Currently she serves as the Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Law Warschaw Gallery, MN ; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; the Harn Museum, Gainesville, FL; Kav 16 Community Gallery for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; BCA Center, Burlington, VT; Artists’ House, Tel Aviv, among others.

Tamir has been awarded residencies at Sculpture Space, Utica, NY; Franconia Sculpture Park, MN and Art OMI International Arts Center, among others. She received the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship award; the Artis Exhibition Grant from artiscontemoprary.org, New York, NY, and recently the 2021 McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists.

Rhonda Wheatley (she/her)  is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist, energy worker, and educator whose installations and interactive projects are grounded in the speculative and metaphysical. Her recent projects include a solo show at Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC); group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), DePaul Art Museum, and Art League of Houston; and performances as part of the MCA’s In Progress series, at Gallery 400, and at the Terrain Biennial, to name a few.

As part of her practice, Wheatley seeks to cultivate healing and personal transformation via wellness workshops, such as those she’s facilitated with Creative Capital, The University of Chicago, Threewalls, 3Arts, Chicago Artists Coalition (CAC), 6018North, and more. Additionally, she teaches at HPAC and has taught contemporary art at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis. Wheatley received CAC’s inaugural Coney Family Award and a 3Arts ‘Make a Wave’ Grant, and she was a Loghaven Fellow. She received her MA from DePaul University and BA from Loyola University.