Recent graduate Aidan Anne Frierson (MFA 2025) is many things: a storyteller, educator, artist, and daughter of Chicago. Her work threads together personal history and collective memory, grounded in the textures of Black life and legacy.

Frierson’s relationship with cotton and place—what she calls “a radical act of reclamation”—is as intellectual as it is intimate. “This material doesn’t have to feel like a trap,” she said. “We interact with it every day, in the same ways that I feel like I interact with my ancestors every day. It feels like a point of connection and understanding.”