Brendan Fernandes is an internationally recognized artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan's projects address issues of race, queer cultural, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan's projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dancer floor, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity.

Design Director at The Chase, formally at Pentagram

An artist working primarily in photography, Laura Letinsky’s ideas and work are formed through a perspective that avails, perhaps insists upon, a particular kind of attention to the act of looking and of picturing. While materially different, in her photographic work, as with materials including porcelain and textiles, she wrangles with the personal and the intimate as it is visually, experientially, and quantitatively defined- and thus, confined-- by the social and the public. Along with making and thinking about art, teaching, designing (clothes, household items), growing (mostly vegetables), endorphins (running), and being a mom, she wonders what to eat for dinner tonight. A Professor at the University of Chicago since 1994, she’s received numerous awards including, recently, the Canada Council International Residency, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. She's numerous publications including six monographs, her most recent book is Time's Assignation, Radius Books, 2017.

Chris Ballantyne’s work focuses on vernacular architecture and observation of the American landscape.  Banal features of suburban and industrial zones are sources for paintings that highlight the quirky and absurd.  Ballantyne states that, “Growing up in a military family and moving to different parts of the country, there was a certain familiarity to the kinds of houses and neighborhoods. They were a series of suburban developments built in separate regions of the country, always on the outskirts of larger cities, at the exit ramps of interstate highways, and all very similar in age and design.  My own notions of space developed out of this cultural landscape which was striving for an indidvidual sense of personal space,  consciously economic, and somewhere between urban and rural.” Dysfunctional structures are flawless in their strangeness, made beautiful through symmetry, simplified lines and flat, subdued colors. Ballantyne eliminates detail to emphasize the subtleties of the way we experience space and our attempts at containment. He extends these concepts further by expanding the imagery of his paintings beyond the picture plane and onto the surrounding walls. “Most of my works involve combinations of various places, drawn from memory. As well, my own interests in skateboarding and surfing altered how I saw  the use of these structures ranging from empty pools, sidewalk curbs, to ocean jetties in a way that tied in to my sense of this larger push and pull between culture and nature.” With shrewd restraint, Ballantyne accentuates the antisocial effects of our built environment with a hint of humor and plenty of ambiguity. A curious emptiness permeates the work of Chris Ballantyne. Graphically rendered buildings, pools, parking lots, and fences take on new meanings and amplified significance, isolated on flat fields of color.

Artist making architectural fabric sculptures based in Richmond, VA.