Year: 2025

Deb Sokolow (b. Davis, CA) moved in 1997 to Chicago, where her parents were born and raised, and works in a studio in an industrial pocket on the near west side. When she’s not there, she’s trying to write and draw in a tiny room on top of the building where she lives, but spends more time keeping tabs on the McDonald’s parking lot next door. Sokolow’s drawings, books and installations speculate, both comically and critically, on scenarios in which architecture, design, psychology and social engineering overlap.

Sokolow’s work has been included in the 4^th Athens Biennale (Athens, Greece), the 5^th Chicago Architecture Biennial and in exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), Drawing Center (New York), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford), Sun Valley Museum of Art (Ketchum) and Northern Illinois University Art Museum (DeKalb). Collections include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sokolow received an MFA from School of the Art Institute in Chicago, a BFA from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is a recipient of an Artadia award (Chicago cycle) and two Illinois Arts Council visual arts fellowships. She is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago.

 

 

 

 

Czr Prz is an urban contemporary artist working in sculptural fabrication, large-scale aerosol murals, and all manner of design. Born and raised in working class Chicago, Prz’s 20 year creative career has spanned America all the way to Europe. Across their multifaceted media, Prz’s artworks tell stories in the folklorico tradition instilled by his Latino-Caribbean upbringing.

 

Galina Shevchenko is a Moscow-born Chicago-based, multimedia artist, educator and mother. Formerly a refugee and a legalized alien; currently a naturalized citizen and a college professor.

Galina‘s multimedia practice explores post-feminist & post-Soviet identities through mediation, digital materiality and augmented reality. Galina orchestrates fluid, elusive and illusory videoscapes, creates site-specific installations and virtual worlds.

The cornerstone of her practice, exploration of female grotesque, has gone through multiple iterations, from being purely emotional, expressive gesture, to systematic attempt of articulating the language of the grotesque graphically and poetically, visualizing stanzas and endurances, the liquidity of perpetual transformation of the body. Her grotesque bodies engender new ideas through their nature of being intermixed, unresolved, and impure. Her grotesque fantasy is mythological, but also muses with science and politics providing more avenues for inquiry.

Galina has exhibited her work and performed live video, nationally & internationally.

The highlights of Galina’s features include:
Red Shift film festival (NY, NY) 2005;
Media Forum at Moscow International Film Festival (Moscow, Russia) 2007;
Director’s Lounge video festival (Berlin, Germany) 2008;
Lucciche: Simposio di VideoArte (Carrara, Italy) 2016;
Aqua Miami International Art Fair (Miami, FL) 2019;
Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL) 2020;
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow, Russia) 2021;
CADAF Paris 2021 (Paris & virtually);
Hamilton MAS (Felixstowe, UK) 2021;
The Franklin (Chicago, IL) 2022;
International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago, IL), 2023;
Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery (NY, NY) 2023;
Ignition Projects Space (Chicago, IL) 2023;
Lubeznik Center for the Arts (Michigan City, IN) 2024;
Antichita de Alina Malova (Firenze, Italy) 2024;
Venezia Contemporanea Association (Venezia, Italy) 2025. 

Galina holds BA in Psychology from the University of Chicago and MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an Associate Professor of Art and Digital Multimedia Design at Harold Washington College.

Sherwin Ovid is a visual artist born in Trinidad who earned his bachelor’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a Lincoln Fellow in 2013 at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he received his MFA. He currently teaches as an Assistant Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University. His work in painting and drawing aims to create visual spaces that confront the assumed neutrality of seeing, experience and the colonial histories that regulate who or what belongs in designated spaces. While he makes use of rationaL geometry with multiple stencils, he upends it with improvisational gestures of poured slow drying liquid mediums that create surprising, unexpected results. These contrasting mixtures create their own vortexes and undulating waves using references based on recurring visual patterns in architectural walls, and ocean currents.

His commercial endeavors include collaborations with Lee Daniel’s Netflix feature The Deliverance, Lena Waithe’s Showtime drama The Chi, and Jordan Peele’s Monkey Paw Studio remake of Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta. Ovid has exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, University of Illinois Springfield Visual Arts Gallery, 6018North, Agitator gallery, Randy Alexander Gallery, Goldfinch Gallery, Gallery 400, Prison Neighborhood Arts Project, Humboldt Park Boathouse Gallery, University of Wisconsin, Cleve Carney Art Gallery at College of DuPage, Julius Caesar Gallery, Iceberg Projects in Evanston and the Haitian American Museum of Chicago. He was published in 2020 listed as one of New City Magazine’s breakout artist, New American Painters in 2016 and 2021 as a noteworthy feature, and published in The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film in 2025.

Maryse is the author of the story collections Heartbreaker, and Rag, (FSG Originals), and the novels Northwood (Black Balloon) and The Seventh Mansion (FSG Originals). Her work has been named a NYT Editor’s Pick and has won The Meridian Fiction Prize and been longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Fiction Prize and the Chicago Review of Books Prize for Fiction. Her stories and nonfiction have appeared in Inque, LitHub, The Washington Square Review, The Indiana Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Paper Darts, and elsewhere. She currently serves as a Resident Dean at the University of Chicago.

Photo Credits:
Author Photo: Lewis McVey
Rag cover design by Na Kim

Vanessa Filley is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Evanston, IL. She is interested in the energetic threads that orient and connect us, ground us in place and time yet tether us to our ancestral past and future, the lines that bring us home. Her work ranges from large scale sculptural installations to tiny embroidery pieces to poems, photographs, and drawings in watercolor, pinprick and thread. Filley was voted one of Photolucida’s Top 50 in 2018 and has shown work nationally and internationally including the Sonoma County Museum of Art, Berlin Photography Week, the Lishui International Photography Festival, FOCUS PhotoLA, Stricoff Gallery, Galerie Joseph Turene, Western Michigan University, The Nashville Public Library, The Harold Washington Library, Arbor3Arts, Secrist Beach and the US Consulate General in Saudi Arabia.

Artist Statement
The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer, said Marie Mitchell, the first woman astronomer in the US who came to believe that the skills of observation and repetitive practice in sewing could possibly equip a woman with the patient observational skills of an astronomer, one who could see into the vastness of space and detect pattern and understanding in the inquiry into stars, planets, moons, comets and galaxies.

Although I am not an astronomer, I am curious to explore galaxies on the page, by pricking holes in paper metaphorical stars are brought closer into view, a vastness becomes proximate. I have always loved the scientific premise that we are all stardust ever shifting and sloughing off, constantly being remade, a galaxy in miniature. This notion that matter slips off and travels along an infinite grid dispersing and cohering at varied intervals beyond anything immediately perceptible is eternally enchanting. As we are that, and every work on paper is that, the transference of energy and matter from one form into the next.

My work in thread, watercolor and colored pencil on paper attempts to explore some aspect of existence that is beyond the sense of being an individual, it reaches for something collective, synthesizing and cohering disparate parts, massing stardust. Beyond capturing a single moment, this work seek to bridge time and expand an understanding of the present.

In many ways it is the women who came before me, my artist foremothers, not necessarily by blood but those who trod indelible paths, whose footsteps wore a pattern etched now in time, who so often capture my attention. In most cases these women have been little recognized, particularly in the collections of large arts institutions and none have been valued in the way that their male counterparts have been. And so, as I have quested to develop a vocabulary of expression, a way to soothe and grapple with our national and planetary era, I have at the same time sought to be in greater relationship with these women whose creative voices cultivate a sense of meaning and home, their needles, fibers and brushes bisecting stars.

A powerful communicator renowned for her musical scope and versatility, Brazilian-American Clarice Assad is a significant artistic voice in the classical, world music, pop, and jazz genres and is acclaimed for her evocative colors, rich textures, and diverse stylistic range. A prolific Grammy Award–nominated composer with more than 70 works to her credit, she has been commissioned by internationally renowned organizations, festivals, and artists and is published in France (Editions Lemoine), Germany (Trekel), Brazil (Criadores do Brasil), and the U.S. (Virtual Artists Collective Publishing). An in-demand performer, she is a celebrated pianist and inventive vocalist who inspires and encourages audiences’ imaginations to break free of often self-imposed constraints. Assad has released seven solo albums and appeared on or had her works performed on another 34. Her music is represented on Cedille Records, SONY Masterworks, Nonesuch, Adventure Music, Edge, Telarc, NSS Music, GHA, and CHANDOS. Her innovative, accessible, and award-winning VOXploration series on music education, creation, songwriting, and improvisation has been presented throughout the world. Sought-after by artists and organizations worldwide, the multi-talented musician continues to attract new audiences both onstage and off.

Named the Chicago Tribune’s 2020 Person of the Year in Jazz, Tammy McCann is an internationally recognized Jazz Vocalist and is currently Artist in Residence for the Music Institute of Chicago. Her powerful, sultry, and emotionally charged voice paints pictures and tells stories by merging Classical vocal technique and Gospel esthetic with Jazz to create a sound that is completely her own. Chicago Tribune’s Arts Critic, Howard Reich says McCann has, “A voice that soars in all registers, at all tempos, on all occasions… a voice that inspires wonder!”

Tammy is a storyteller who draws emotion from and makes connections with her audiences world- wide. Her warm delivery allows her audience to go on the musical journey with her and her engaging personality imprints the memory of her performance on their hearts. Inside Jazz Magazine Music Critic, Nora McCarthy says, “She came bearing natural gifts and with raw talent in hand, she stepped up to the mic and into the hearts of everyone in the room.” 

As an educator, Tammy has shared her expertise with Jazz lovers young and old. Lecturing for Jazz at Lincoln Centers, Swing U, as well as Princeton University. She believes singing is a part of every human community; bringing us together and helping us to interact with one another. McCann says, “There is a pedagogy to Jazz vocal instruction which requires an approach that can combine the classroom and the bandstand in a seamless way.” Her teaching style meets the vocal student where they are and all instruction has a classical foundation with a focus on Jazz. All lessons help to develop a natural technique and allow the student to progress at their own pace. Through which the students gain the confidence they need to audition and perform.

Tammy McCann has performed with such luminaries as Chicago’s own NEA Jazz Masters Ramsey Lewis & Von Freeman. As well as John Clayton, Branford Marsalis, Charles McPherson, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and toured as a ‘Raelette’ with the great Ray Charles. McCann has thrilled audiences in festivals and clubs world-wide from Bangkok, Thailand to the to the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Greece. As well as the nation’s premier concert and Jazz venues, Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Birdland, The Blue Note, Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola and Chicago’s own Jazz Showcase. Cultural & Jazz Critic Stanley Crouch says, “Her pitch is superb…clear on the top and startling at the bottom, while all of the steps in between are polished with swing.”