Spudnik Press Cooperative is proud to introduce our next Studio Fellowship cohort:
Kianni Bey
Riley Brady
Rachel Jackson
Nicolette Lim
Esmeralda Reyes
Sara Sukhun
Eight months of complimentary studio access is a foundation benefit of the program. Additionally, through the course of their fellowship, these artists will receive professional, artistic, and technical support that specifically addresses the needs of printmakers. Through working in our shared studio and monitoring weekly Open Studio sessions, fellows engage with our community of printmakers and benefit from ongoing support and feedback from staff and peers.
Established in 2013, this program to date has supported 55 artists with unfettered studio access to support the creation of a new body of print-based artwork, as well as a variety of other resources and opportunities.
Studio Fellow Bios:
Kianni Bey
Kianni Bey’s work investigates the construction of identity in a methodological way, through exploration of personal and familial histories, collaborative world building, and emergent methods of survival from Black women and femme-identified people. Her practice aims to uplift, empower, and exist as a safe space for Black and femme bodied people, driven by a desire to expand the narrative surrounding marginalized lives. Kianni’s practice consists of lens based bodies of work that visualize liberated futures and aesthetics by creating thresholds or portals to other realities.
Riley Brady
Riley Brady is a Chicago-based graphic designer and interdisciplinary artist. Her work centers around loneliness, memory, and mental illness.
Rachel Jackson
Rachel Jackson graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in the spring of 2019 with a degree in Communication Design. Her practice is largely guided by principles of collectivism and accessibility, and reflects a personal attempt to decentralize the elitism she feels is ever-present in Western design aesthetics. Rachel is most interested in the application of design when it comes to democratic, household objects, including t-shirts, zines, and mass-produced prints. She’s often drawn to appropriating imagery from found materials, dually as an investigation of what factors led to its disposal and as an effort to reinvigorate visual languages of the past.
Nicolette Lim
Nicolette Lim is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus in installation and a core in drawing. Originally from Malaysia, she moved to the states in 2014, and graduated in the Fall of 2018 from the University of Kentucky with a BFA in Studio Arts. Working across different mediums such as printmaking, animation and sculpture, her work depict queerness in the context of her home country Malaysia, where violence is an inherited norm from its colonizers. She investigates these affects on the queer experience today and the false norms that have been taken as inevitable. Nicolette currently resides in Chicago.
Esmeralda Reyes
Esmeralda Reyes is a Mexican-American artist born in Grand Haven, Michigan. She is a printmaker focused on intaglio and lithography. Esmeralda graduated from Kendall College of Art & Design in 2020 with a BFA in Printmaking and a minor in Illustration. Esmeralda’s printmaking style is informed by her illustrative background. Her work focuses on human relationships, traits, stereotypes, and combining humans with animals that share physical and metaphorical similarities. Her work that was featured at the Fresh Looks Exhibition at Eastern Michigan University made her a Windgate Fellowship nominee for her precise craft.
Sara Sukhun
Sara Sukhun is an artist and designer with a BFA in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut and an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has worked with the Palestinian Museum, Dar el-Nimer art gallery, and the Social Justice in the City program at the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy. She is the recipient of a New Artist Society Award from SAIC and the First Prize Areen Projects Award for Excellence in Graphic Design from AUB.