Students

Maya Skarzenski is an interdisciplinary artist and curator working between Toronto, Canada, and Chicago. Through the use of textiles, she creates bodily imagery with installations, sculptures, and paintings. Her work is sensual and fragile, yet playful and ambiguous. She holds her BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University, with a minor in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. In 2020, she was awarded the Mrs. W. O. Forsyth Award for excellence in painting and in 2023 she was selected for the CIBC C2: Create and Curate award.

Skarzenski’s art attempts to salvage beauty from the fear and unease surrounding the human body. Intimacy, contradiction, and material exploration in her work allow her to embrace ambiguity and dialectical thinking. Skarzenski’s obsession with ambiguity is rooted in trying to make sense of her experiences surrounding trauma, living with OCD, and the universal experience of inhabiting a body. Oscillating between play and mutilation, she investigates the body dismembered and reconstructed as landscapes, new creatures, and ecosystems. Amorphous creatures and fragmented people inhabit her work occupying contradictory roles. By being harmless and insidious, anxious and excited, symbiotic and parasitic, they become manifestations of fluidity in sexuality, physical health, and identity. They are the unformed body(ies) in flux.

Nia Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and journalist from Milwaukee, WI. Her work explores interwoven themes about identity, spirituality, transformation, language, time, race, and human emotions. She is interested in the dialogues about the societal (collective and individual). Motifs regularly used in her work is the golden pattern which is an embodiment of the manifestation of the inner voice and interconnectivity to the world around her. Also, the use of body prints which is an introspective practice that allows her to create more intimate mirrors of the self, and enables the sensation of freedom when creating onto the surfaces. 

Wilson holds a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art and Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

Beronica Gonzales is a fiber artist from San Antonio, TX. In her work, she chronicles the exploration of her sense of self through moments, objects, and environments, while engaging with the passage of time. Objects and spaces are treated as vessels for ever-evolving personal sentiments. She often uses found materials—hand-me-down clothes from family or second-hand bed sheets—that draw out and lay bare the personal yet often unknown histories of the previous owner and the journey of the items themselves. By repurposing found items and reproducing her personal effects in her work, she preserves her subjects and creates memorials to the mundane that express and resist the erosion of time on these objects/spaces and her connections to them. Throughout her work, the primary themes and subjects are translated across mediums and recontextualized in various blends of materials and methods. Quilts are typically associated with the home; viewing the home as one’s place of comfort, she reinforces this sense of care through the plush forms and materiality of her work.

Gonzales earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing & Painting with a double minor in Art History and Psychology from the University of North Texas. In 2023, she received the Clare Hart DeGolyer Memorial Fund Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings and has been exhibited in various spaces throughout Texas. Most recently, she was an artist-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany.

Echo (Qinyu) Huan (b.1997 Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of fiber, painting, installation, and digital media. Her work is rooted in personal narrative, and childhood memories. She approaches her practice as a therapeutic exploration of identity and self-awareness. She focuses on the characteristics of ready-made materials, transforming them into abstract forms and structures to express subtle emotions and tensions.

Bishal Manandhar is a visual artist who sees the value, potential, and richness in the unseen and discarded objects around us. Anything that is overlooked in people’s lives and is treated as “waste” becomes the starting point of Manandhar’s art practice. As a Nepali immigrant, Manandhar was in shock when he moved to the USA and saw how much stuff people use and throw away. While growing up, everything was used until it stopped functioning or was used up. Reuse was a survival strategy, not just an environmental concern. Coming from this background, Manandhar came to see “trash” as something full of beauty and life. He does not see them as lifeless objects, but objects with a voice and a new hidden use; the ability to be something that brings us aesthetic pleasure.

After seeing the waste produced in the US, Manandhar was compelled to use it in his art rather than consuming new materials. He recycles existing materials, including discarded burlap rice bags, tea and coffee packaging, plastics, tea bags, soda cans, and milk cartons into visually captivating art works. Another part of Manandhar’s practice is the act of collecting all these objects either from his own home, friends, or the restaurants he has worked at. Once he has obtained the materials, everything is sent through various transformations, a process which brings great joy. His artistic practice creates new art pieces through repetition, juxtaposition, and the building of unusual textures by layering, melting, stitching, sewing, and stacking materials together.

Sophie deJesus is a fiber artist, who primarily works in soft sculpture. Their work is an exploration on being Filipino-American through the language of textiles and tattoos. They completed their Bachelors of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently pursuing their masters degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. deJesus studied textiles/fibers at both institutions, but uses the skills and techniques they learned there in unconventional ways.

An integral part of my practice has always been repetition, repetitive actions to be precise. It is my safe space and my therapy, whether it’s hours of meticulous embroidery or drawings of different, but also very similar things. Originating as a therapeutic outlet, my early work was an instinctual and emotionally driven compulsion, predominantly expressed through embroidered canvases. But through my education, I learned how to put more intention into my still repetitive actions. Testing the boundaries of embroidery, a traditionally feminine craft now breaking free from confinements, I delved into the complex tapestry of social landscapes—a topic still shrouded in taboo within my cultural context. Embroidery, once marginalized, now emerges as an unorthodox form, challenging preconceptions.

Annelise is an Afro-Latina designer and textile artist. Her practice is based around her mixed race/ethnicity as an African-American and Latina woman, implied stereotypes, and how the history of both cultures influences her work and life. She focuses on textile as publication, material histories, and communal interaction.

She received her BFA in Graphic Design from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Sofía Paredes Vélez, artist from Bogotá, Colombia. 
My work focuses on the construction of individual or collective spaces through the exploration of diverse materials and the creation of momentary, fleeting installations. These woven spheres intend to accentuate transitions: physical as well as emotional, and culminate in building a terrestrial place, not only for me and those around me, but also for those who are absent, for what no longer exists, what has been lost or has changed. To try to catch and contain what is gone without, at the same time, denying those endings.
 

Kately Towsley makes work about the human experience. She is interested in memory, collective and individual narratives, and our connection to one another and the places we inhabit. Towsley frequently utilizes fiber, ceramics, and botanical matter in her performances and installations, allowing the concept to guide her material decisions. 

Towsley's work is a product of personal learning and exploration. Her work is an investigation seeking to educate and commemorate: a making in response to questions she has, musings, reflections, convictions, or realizations that she does not know enough about a critical history, or current event. There are times Towsley makes in order to document, others to help her spiritually or emotionally process, and others still where her work is a ritual—an act of making inspired by grief, mourning, awe, remembrance, appreciation, joy. 

Towsley treats the process of making as a time of contemplation, sometimes worship. Her work shares personal inspection while provoking the viewer’s own thoughts, experiences, knowledge, or lack thereof on a subject. She favors methods that are detail-oriented, tedious, and involved in order to imbue the work with a greater sense of intention and presence. 

I'm an interdisciplinary artist from Toronto (Tkaronto), Canada living in Chicago. Currently, I am experimenting with fibrous textures and a chaos of colours to explore escapism, destructive calm, coping gone awry, energy and stasis, comfort, fun, and anxiety.

Cat Bowyer is an multidisciplinary artist who has been working and living in Chicago for almost 10 years. Her work utilizes a variety of materials where the body is usually included in the foundation of ideas. She holds a BA from Purdue University in Fine Art & Visual Art Education.

Lauren Stichweh (they/she) is a multidisciplinary fiber artist from northeast Georgia whose practice embarks on an exploration of identity, connection, and community. Intertwining personal experience and emotion with supplemental research, they weave (and destruct) narratives that delve into the complexities of human relationships. Their work is driven by the idea of the existence of threads that we share throughout our lives and metaphorically weave together, leaving behind inextricable connections. Through slow, repetitive processes such as weaving, knitting, wrapping, and stitching, their work seeks to tangibly explore and test the limits of the interactions between these intangible threads of connection. 

From quantum entanglement; the phenomenon of two particles remaining linked regardless of the distance between them, to unbreakable relationships that exist across the world, the premise of a “loose end” is a practical fallacy when we examine the context of each part of ourselves. The particles found in quantum mechanics are mimicked in human behavior, we can never fully separate from those with whom we have been intertwined. We may break ties, but the impression left upon us never fully fades. There may be endless space between us, but the link remains, ultimately removing us from ever fully becoming a solitary entity.

Tommy Ballard is an artist, writer, and educator from the Ohio River Valley. Text/textile processes are utilized as research for topics including contemporary and manufactured material culture, ontology, art education, critical craft, commodification, mechanical reproduction, sentimentality, print media and the US Rust Belt region. 

Ballard has an MA in Art Education and BFA in Creative Writing from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and has collaborated with organizations and institutions including the Contemporary Art Center, Dayton Art Institute and the Cincinnati Art Museum. They lead an artist-run space, Material Culture Collection, in Newport, Kentucky and work as an educator in community and academic environments for students of all ages and abilities. 

Beizar Aradini is a fiber artist whose practice centers on themes of home, displacement, collective memory, and storytelling. Her work reveals the intricacies of the immigrant experience, often shaped by the lingering impacts of imperialism and colonialism. Through intimate depictions of family, shared memory, migration, and liminal spaces, she highlights the interconnectedness of these experiences, shedding light on stories that are too often neglected or erased.

Dagny Chika (they/she) is an artist, writer, and educator from the Pacific Northwest. She uses fiber processes such as knitting, book-making, sewing, quilting, and tapestry weaving to create playful, whimsical, and ethereal objects. They engage with materiality and the moment-by-moment processes of making to explore mixed identities and vast emotional landscapes. 

Her practice is often guided by reflection and intuition, and thus they often find greatest inspiration in deeply personal materials: journal entries, clothes handed down by family, and other artifacts from childhood. With an educational background in literature and creative writing, she often utilizes text—poetry and memoir—as material as well. They are left-handed and have a sweet tooth.

Kristin Field is a textile artist, natural dyer, and gardener based in Chicago, IL. Her practice is rooted in research, sustainability, and honoring the craft of artisan natural dyeing traditions. She is interested in the intersection between art and science and inspired by the wonder found in the micro to the macro, from cicada wings to black holes. Her work is largely process and materials based, and she grows much of her own dye plant material in Chicago. She cherishes the slowness that is required to notice the intricacies and small beauties in the ephemeral, routine, or discarded, and seeks to give attention and recognition to the overlooked. Her work values and expresses curiosity, truly noticing the details in the world around you, and an understanding that there is always more to know.