Andres L. Hernandez With his work as an artist and as an architect, Andres L. Hernandez reckons with a built environment designed not for the inhabitants but in spite of them. With his experience as an architect building in Black neighborhoods, he’s uniquely familiar with what it means to negotiate Blackness in public spaces. Through a contemporary lens, he revisits moments in Black urban history like the Great Migration and Civil Rights Movement. His black-and-white maps and collages tell the story of government policy by tracing lines that lead to poverty and divestment in Black communities. His sculptures are made up of empty liquor bottles and bandanas, crumbs of gravel, broken pallets, and other detritus that litter urban areas and find beauty in the urban mundanity. In that same vein, he knows what it takes to be a steward of equitable public spaces. He’s a founding board member of The Black Reconstructive Collective, an organization with the goal of dismantling white supremacy in art, design and academia. He’s also on the exhibition design team for the museum of the Obama Presidential Center. Andres’ works reimagine urban trappings into art that tell a story about history, policy, Blackness, about the unique experience of belonging to a space that repels. (Jen Torwudzo-Stroh)
Michiko Itatani/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Michiko Itatani When Michiko Itatani was a child in Japan, she planned to be a writer. Although she became a visual artist, after more than a hundred exhibitions of her work, Itatani says she is “still dealing with the idea of fiction,” which is apparent in her art. Anyone who has ridden the El past the Washington stop has seen the mystical world of her creative vision on the platform. She has received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Women’s Caucus for Art in 2020. Having both studied and taught at SAIC, Itatani considers herself a “made in America artist” and says her vision remains “pathetically optimistic.” (Susan Aurinko)
Salvador Jiménez-Flores Jalisco, Mexico-born Salvador Jiménez-Flores never met a medium he didn’t like—he’s familiar with all of them, and even his drawings are mixed media, via added materials like metal and gold. Jiménez-Flores’ skill with ceramics and his sense of societal and political issues combine in his installations to create biting social commentary on tough subjects like colonialism and identity. A 2021 United States Artists Fellow, he has received a Joan Mitchell Grant, as well as other accolades. An assistant professor at SAIC, his work has been shown widely. (Susan Aurinko)
Arnold J. Kemp/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Arnold J. Kemp Arnold J. Kemp works in painting, drawing, photography, performance, sculpture and poetry and everything in between. Exploring the intersections of identity, history and the African American experience, his work seamlessly integrates personal narratives with wider historical, social and cultural contexts. Masks have been central to the artist and educator’s practice since the late 1990s, when he started to experiment with the ways they convey a timeless sense of trauma. Using aluminum foil as a material that serves multiple purposes, the work takes many forms: deflecting threats, deceiving potential dangers and safeguarding the invaluable—be it art, emotion, identity or belief. Ultimately, Kemp invites introspection and self-transformation. (Vasia Rigou)
Jenny Kendler/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Jenny Kendler Artist, activist, naturalist—Jenny Kendler identifies with many different titles but in her essence she’s an advocate of beauty in its purest form. Her work, focusing on climate change and biodiversity loss, serves as a response to ever-growing environmental concerns and simultaneously seeks to raise awareness of the dangers lying ahead. Small-scale works like “Forget Me Not” (2020)—created out of a vintage boombox, sustainably sourced shells, adhesive, cassette tape and looped audio—meet large-scale public art installations, like “Birds Watching III,” 2023 at Hayward Gallery at London’s Southbank Centre. Often inviting viewer participation, Kendler’s work is on a mission to move the world beyond thinking about positive change—and into actually doing something about it. (Vasia Rigou)
Caroline Kent Caroline Kent’s installation for the MoMA’s Modern Window created two universes, purple and blue, punctuated with inquisitive wooden forms circling fields marked by cryptic recesses and enigmatic characters: teal, lavender, neon green, yellow. Part game board, part esoteric map, part hieroglyphic tableau, Kent’s work—including, but not limited to, sculpture, painting, and performance—presents a menu of forms that possess a mysterious internal cohesion, challenging language’s regular registers. Learn to read Kent’s signs, and they’ll point you anywhere: from recent solo exhibitions at Patron in Chicago, the Figge Art Museum in Davenport and Casey Kaplan in New York to important group exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Guggenheim (which has also collected Kent’s work, alongside the Walker Art Center, the MCA and MoMA). Kent is an assistant professor in Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern University. (Emeline Boehringer)
Anna Kunz/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Anna Kunz Anna Kunz believes in optimism, color and kindness, which has been a recipe for her success, bringing her shows in many American cities, as well as Poland and Spain. A native Chicagoan, Kunz has garnered awards and residencies, including 3Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She has curated and acted as a curatorial advisor, collaboratively (Kunz’s favorite word) created décor for theatrical and dance productions and is a founding member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery and Kunz, Vis, Projects. She admires artists who are “physically dedicated to their work as a means to know themselves” and are “vocational in their pursuits.” That, in fact, describes Kunz herself. (Susan Aurinko)
Damon Locks. Photographed at the Floating Museum studio/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Damon Locks Visual artist, educator and vocalist-musician Damon Locks, whose most recent release, the collaborative album “New Future City Radio” that Pitchfork describes as “blending sample-based electronica with improvisatory jazz and adapting Afrofuturist themes of Black liberation and revolutionary spirit,” is no stranger to the arts and activist communities in Chicago. Locks serves on the board of Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project, a community-building endeavor that connects artists and scholars with incarcerated students at Stateville Correctional Center. A founding member of the band The Eternals, Locks also fronts Black Monument Ensemble, the multidisciplinary artist collective that has delivered spectacular musical performances at art venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Walker Art Center, and at music festivals worldwide. (Nicky Ni)
Robert Lostutter/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Robert Lostutter Robert Lostutter is best known for his meticulous, powerful watercolor paintings of human and bird-like hybrids, which he has been making since the early 1970s. Many of his pieces include faces obscured by feathers, with various elements of nature springing from their bodies. Lostutter’s most recent work, “Songs of War,” exhibited at Corbett vs. Dempsey, is a departure from the usual subject but remains true to his unique style. Lostutter was a member of what is now known as the Chicago Imagists, associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lostutter’s watercolors had a solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society in 1984, as well as at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2006, and his work has been included in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Terra Museum of American Art and the Corcoran Gallery. (Nicole NeSmith)
Luftwerk’s Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero/Photo: Joseph A. Mietus
Luftwerk Petra Bachmaier, who was born near Munich, Germany, and Sean Gallero, who hails from the Bronx, met in 1999 while at SAIC. Their first collaborative effort came in 2007, and the rest, you might say, is history. They have created light and sound works for the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago, the Barcelona Pavilion in Spain and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, to name just a few. Each credits the other and their collaboration for their artistic successes. Both felt the desire for an artistic career at a young age and both are grateful to be able to make a living from doing what they love. (Susan Aurinko)
