SAIC Community Members Receive Chicago 2024 Artadia Awards

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alums Nour Ballout (MFA 2022) and Yuge Zhou (MFA 2015) and faculty member Jefferson Pinder received the 2024 Chicago Artadia Awards. Every year, Artadia awards six million dollars in unrestricted funds to three visual artists from seven cities across the U.S. for their foundational role in shaping society. Chicago applicants must be living and working in Cook County for a minimum of two years and go through an extensive two-tier jurying process. Ballout, Zhou, and Pinder were selected out of 304 applicants for their innovative practices.

Ballout is an interdisciplinary artist and curator whose work deals with archives and histories that have been erased as a result of colonialism. They are also the founder of Habibi House, a neighborhood-based community art space and social engagement residency in Detroit. Zhou is a video artist originally from Beijing, China, who uses the camera as a tool of understanding her personal and the geopolitical relationships between her homeland and adopted country. She has recently taken part in Override, a Billboard Project put on in collaboration with Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and EXPO Chicago. Pinder is a performance artist who uses sound, video, and object-making to explore race, ethnicity, and class in highly polarized urban spaces. His work has been featured in museums across the world and he was recently a 2021 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow where he exhibited Transcendence, a video work engaging with Smithsonian archives.