Year: 2020

Moving around a lot as a child, I was influenced by many urban types of works from graffiti to fine art and music. My current body of work is my approach in combining all my years as an artist. After studying at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, I’ve grown to envision a different direction I want to take my work.

Focusing my approach on creating a stylized work with balance and movement, as well as unity and pattern. My art is about evolving and bridging the gap between fine art and urban art.  My work primarily consists of straightforward designs and abstract geometric compositions. They are a reflection of my appreciation for simplicity and movement.

While I use a variety of materials and processes in each project, my methodology is consistent. Although there may not always be material similarities between the different projects they are linked by recurring formal concerns. The subject matter of each body of work determines the materials and the forms of the work.

Ayesha Jaco is a Chicago based Philanthropist, Educator and Choreographer. Ayesha is the founder and Artistic Director of Move Me Soul, an internationally traveled youth dance company headquartered on Chicago’s West Side. Ayesha’s disciplinary focus is a fusion of contemporary Modern, Jazz, West African and Hip Hop dance.

 

Ayesha is an 2018 Chicago Dancemakers Lab Artist. Her premiere work the “Chississippi Mixtape” featuring Damon Locks was featured at Links Hall in celebration of its 40th year.  Ayesha has been featured in Hype Magazine South Africa, Splash Chicago and the Chicago Reader for her artistic prowess and youth work. She was recently awarded The Chicago African Americans in Philanthropy Social Justice Award for her commitment to Chicago communities.

Ayesha’s commitment to Arts in Youth & Community Development has led her to curate artist residencies with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago Park District, Jacob Carruthers for Inner City Studies and the American Rhythm Center. In 2019, Ayesha began a Rebuild Foundation Dance Fellowship and presented a myriad of community conversations, works in progress & documentary screenings at the Stony Island Arts Bank & Dorchester Artist Collaborative.

Ayesha holds a Bachelor of Science in Dance and Mass Communication from Illinois State University and a Masters of Arts Management (Arts in Youth and Community Development) from Columbia College Chicago.

My practice employs the meaning of Sankofa, a word from the Akan Tribe in Ghana. my process of creation always begins with a reflection and meditation of the best way to portray choreographic stories that highlight the struggle and resiliency of humanity. I examine music and ideologies of those who have come before me. This exploration always provide a missing piece to puzzle that I am trying to solve while seeking to chart a new course using movement as a vehicle of transformation.

All photos are by David C. Sampson

Corinne Imberski is a Chicago based dance performer, choreographer, improviser, and educator. As an independent dance artist, Corinne has presented solo and ensemble works for over thirty years, at venues grand, small, and impromptu. Most recently, in January 2020, she presented the shadow comforts the body at Links Hall, a project she created as a Co-MISSION Summer Residency recipient. In April of the same year, Corinne started the video project Roof Series 2020 as a response to life in quarantine and crisis. She has staged her choreography throughout the country, including at the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Columbia College Chicago, Grand Valley State University, University of Toledo, American College Dance Festival, RADfest, Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival, Toledo Museum of Art, Dance Art Museum of the Americas Project, Dance Dimension, and at the Cranbrook Academy.

 

As a choreographer, she finds her inspiration from music, visual art, the natural world, literature, psychology, and sociology. Endlessly fascinated by the rhythms and tensegrity of the human body and mind, her work combines physical movement with gestural narratives that illuminate the interconnectivities that dominate our individual and collective lives. Her work appears at the intersection of abstraction and vulnerability and is an exploration of duality. It is a reconciling of opposing forces in an effort to find balance and resiliency. She is a shifter of shapes. She strives to express
the melodies and rhythms of music and of one’s own body, to understand the importance of gesture, to feel the ground and the air, to range from cantilevered to centered, to find comfort and stillness, to take risks. Her choreography aims to connect with the inherent intellect of the body, to find the freedom, strength, and stamina to increase the possible range of physical response—to have the body meet the power of the imagination. She experiences dance as a dialogue or conversation, a chance for
connection—between the movement and music, between the present and memory, between the performers, and with the audience. The Chicago Tribune praised her as having “sensitivity and keen sense of weight and energy shifting through the body creating an infectious dynamic”. Her choreographic work has been called “silky-smooth, delicate and [a] detail oriented ride” and “quietly magnificent”.

In addition to presenting her own work, Corinne also performs and collaborates with Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape and RE|dance group, both based in Chicago.

Please visit her website for more information.

Candace Hunter (chlee) creates collage, paintings, installations and performance art. Plainly, she tells stories. Through the use of appropriated materials from magazines, vintage maps, cloth, 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. Her mixed media artworks are sometimes applause and sometimes rants – about the effects of politics and history mixed with a smattering of the now. She absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal story-telling is important as an act of meditation and mediation.

 

The untold stories of enslaved peoples, of women fighting for potable water, of children who never made it home for dinner and never would again, of men sitting on death row, and of the abducte daughterd of Chibok, are just some of the stories that Candace yearns to tell visually.

As plainly as the Speculative Fiction writer, Octavia Butler wrote, “I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell”, so, Candace is compelled to “write” these stories in color and shape and form. Lean in to hear the tales.

Krista Franklin is a writer and visual artist, the author Too Much Midnight (Haymarket Books, 2020), the artist book Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018), and the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012). She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, and a frequent contributor to the projects of fellow artists. Her visual art has exhibited at Poetry Foundation, Konsthall C, Rootwork Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Studio Museum in Harlem, Chicago Cultural Center, National Museum of Mexican Art, and the set of 20th Century Fox’s Empire. She has been published in Poetry, Black Camera, The Offing, Vinyl, and a number of anthologies and artist books.

– Headshot. Photo Credit: Reginald Eldridge, Jr.

– Cover of Too Much Midnight by Krista Franklin (Haymarket Books)

– Cover of Under the Knife by Krista Franklin (Candor Arts)

– Inside detail of Under the Knife by Krista Franklin (Candor Arts)

– “Axis: Bold as Love”, Krista Franklin, Mixed medium on watercolor paper, 2019

– “We Wear the Mask II”, Collage on handmade paper, 2014