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Rachel Niffenegger, Jonathan Meyer, Michael Zapata, and Jon Siskel recognized for innovation, past achievements, and community contributions

The Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Charitable Foundation for the Arts today released the names of their 18th Arts Achievement Awards. Their Foundation recognizes Chicago-based artists in mid-career who push the artistic envelope.

This year, the Foundation is giving out four awards to Chicago area artists in several genres, a total of $160,000 in awards. The 2023 awardees are visual artist Rachel Niffenegger, dancer and artistic director Jonathan Meyer, author Michael Zapata, and documentary filmmaker Jon Siskel.

Rachel Niffenegger uses curious and experimental media to create interior psychological portraits. Rooted in expanded painting her specters are pulled from the folds of psychedelic clay, spiraled through mirrored metal work and meticulously rendered in colored pencil from an archive of visions conjured in concert with generative technologies. Her work has been
included in museum shows in the Netherlands, Chicago, New York, Berlin, Liverpool, Denver, and Milwaukee, among others. Niffenegger, born in Evanston in 1985, received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Rachel attended the de ateliers residency in Amsterdam NL in 2011. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago. Helen observes, “Rachel’s work elongates, distorts and ultimately reveals the truth she explores.” Learn more at Western Exhibitions.

Jonathan Meyer builds idiosyncratic movement palettes as crafts plying the waters of strange lands that can delight, baffle, and open new vistas. Jonathan Meyer discovered dance at Oberlin College with Nusha Martynuk and Ann Cooper Albright. After a capoeira immersion in Brazil with Maestre Medicina, they completed a Cunningham-focused program at UNC Greensboro. Meyer has danced with The High Risk Group, Pierre-Paul Savoie, Asimina Chremos, and The Seldoms. In 2002 Meyer created Khecari in Taos, New Mexico. In 2006, they moved to Chicago, and re-launched Khecari with co-director Julia Rae Antonick. Meyer has been a CDF Lab Artist and RDDI participant, and an artist in residence at Djerassi, Ragdale, Hambidge, Abigail, The Kohler Art Center, Links Hall, The Chicago Cultural Center, and The Chicago Park District. Khecari means, “In a given moment, there is an
infinite empty field rife with possibility. Movement limits the limitless and makes nothingness something; it creates.” Helen says,  “Jonathan’s work reveals the world we can experience in the voids of living.” Learn more at Khecari.org.

Michael Zapata’s fiction, which is formed from stories of exile and unstable realities, has been described in the New York Times as “hypnotizing” and in Axios as an important “part of the growing Latinofuturism movement.” He is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. He also currently serves on the boards of Stories Matter Foundation and MAKE Literary Productions. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family. Helen observes, “magic, soul and love permeate Michael’s work.” Learn more at michaelzapata.com.

Jon Siskel is a documentary filmmaker committed to telling stories that have entertained and inspired audiences since he and Greg Jacobs co-founded Siskel/Jacobs Productions in 2005. Siskel has produced and directed documentaries that have played across the United States and around the world. Siskel’s films have showcased subjects as disparate as a high school poetry slam competition (Louder Than a Bomb) a biography of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (Unexpected Justice), and have explored issues at the intersection of education and social justice (No Small Matter). Jon is an Emmy award winner for 102 Minutes that Changed America, a documentary about the events of September 11, 2001, produced for the History Channel. Siskel’s work has also been featured on Discovery, A&E, OWN, PBS and National Geographic. Jon’s latest film is the short documentary, MEMORIAL, about the July 4th mass shooting and one of the memorials that reflected the power of healing through art, love and community in his hometown, Highland Park, Illinois. Helen praises Jon, saying, “He brings a gift of vision and empathy to the discovery of truth.” Learn more at siskeljacobs.com.

Ruben Aguirre, Bril Barrett, Kate Berry Brown, Tomeka Reid and avery r. young recognized for innovation, past achievements, and community contributions

The Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Charitable Foundation for the Arts today released the names of their 17th Arts Achievement Awards. Their Foundation recognizes Chicago-based artists in mid-career who push the artistic envelope.

This year, the Foundation is giving out five awards to Chicago area artists in several genres, a total of $200,000 in awards. The 2022s awardees are painter and muralist Ruben Aguirre, dancer and artistic director Bril Barrett, artist Kate Berry Brown, jazz cellist Tomeka Reid, and poet and interdisciplinary artist avery r. young.

Ruben Aguirre has produced murals in the Chicago area, across the U.S., and abroad. Aguirre’s work is an intersection of abstraction, graffiti, formalism, and mural painting. Ruben’s compositions organically build a visual language often referencing the socio-historical background of each site location. He has exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Hyde Park Art Center, and The National Museum of Mexican Art. His work has been covered by the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and Art News. Aguirre’s public works have been commissioned for clients such as Google, Adidas, Linked IN, Conde Nast, and others.
For more information, see http://www.theshiftchange.com.

Kate Berry Brown is an abstract artist living and working in Evanston, Illinois. Through ink on paper and paint on wood, she explores contrasting ideas of abundance and gratitude with feelings of density and crowdedness in both motherhood and American humanity.

She holds a BFA from Washington University and a Masters in Floral Design from Boerma Instituut in Alsmeer, Holland. She has exhibited at galleries nationally, including the Colored Pencil Society’s International Exhibition in Atlanta, WomanMade Gallery in Chicago, and at the newly founded Stay Home Gallery in Tennessee. She has shown extensively in her home city of Evanston, IL, including Gallery 901, 1100 Florence Gallery and Over the Rainbow Gallery among others. For more information, see https://www.kateberrybrown.com.

Bril Barrett is a dedicated tap dancer, whose mission is to preserve and promote tap dance as a percussive art form, foster respect and admiration for the history and culture of tap, and continuously create opportunities for the art form and its practitioners.

Bril founded The M.A.D.D. Rhythms Tap Academy, located at the Harold Washington Cultural Center in Bronzeville. M.A.D.D. creates an alternative to the schools to prison pipeline that exist for many black and brown youth, including a very successful Novice to Performer program. Bril has taught and/or performed in Europe and across the United States. For more information, see https://meierfoundation.org/award_recipients/bril-barrett/.

Tomeka Reid, cellist and composer, is one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians in Chicago’s jazz and improvised music community over the last decade. Tomeka’s recordings with her Tomeka Reid Quartet showcase her improvisational acumen as well as her dynamic arrangements and compositional ability. She has also appeared with many of leading jazz artists of this generation, including Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Nicole Mitchell, Dee Alexander and Mike Reed.

Tomeka launched the first Chicago Jazz String Summit, a semi-annual three-day international festival of cutting edge string players held in Chicago. In the Fall of 2019 Tomeka Reid received a teaching appointment at Mills College as the Darius Milhaud chair in composition. Tomeka is a Foundation of the Arts (2019) and 3Arts Awardee (2016) awardee. She received her doctorate in music from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017. Just recently, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. For more information, see https://www.tomekareid.net

avery r. young is a poet and teaching artist who has been an Arts and Public Life Artist-In-Residence at the University of Chicago. He is a 3Arts Awardee, Cave Canem fellow and a co-director of The Floating Museum. His poetry and prose has been featured in BreakBeat Poets, Teaching Black, and Poetry Magazine. His most recent album tubman. (FPE Records) is the soundtrack to his first collection of visual and traditional poetry, neckbone: visual verses. His album booker t. soltreyne: a race rekkid engages matters of race, gender, and sexuality in America during the Obama Era.

Avery’s work in performance, visual text, and sound design has been featured in several exhibitions and theatre festivals—notably The Hip Hop Theatre Festival, The Museum of Contemporary Art, and American Jazz Museum. His theater credits include co-writing and co-producing the soundtrack for Lise Haller Baggeson’s Hatorgrade Retrograde: The Musical and during the pandemic, writing the libretto for The Chicago Lyric Opera’s groundbreaking Twilight: Gods. For more information, see https://www.averyryoung.com.