Spudnik Press Cooperative is excited to announce the three Resident Artists in 2021 who will bring new research, programming, and experience to our community: Alexandra Antoine, Mara Baker, and Aaron Hughes. The Residency gives mid-career and established artists full access to our studios for the completion of new print-based artwork, along with a stipend and support from our staff of professional printmakers. Each Resident also engages our community in unique public programming that is connected to their practice, and open to all. In 2021, we are investing in our immediate community of artists and welcoming all Chicago-based artists. In addition to these three newly-awarded Residents, we will be rescheduling residencies that were postponed due to Covid-19.
Alexandra Antoine plans to investigate diasporic foodways as collages of connection and remembrance. Focusing on okra, hibiscus, black eye peas, yuca and collard greens, Antoine’s project aims to create conversation around food traditions, cultural affirmations and self-healing.
Mara Baker‘s work is an extended meditation on the intersection of impermanence and regeneration. This residency will allow the artist to use the leftover residues from her installation practice as the base material for a new series of monotypes that echo the fragility of our material systems.
Aaron Hughes will be utilizing our screen printing and letterpress facilities to create prints for Autonomous Democracy, a project that explores, archives, and celebrates the history of temporary experiments in direct democracy within liberation movements.
Resident Artist Bios:
Aaron Hughes, March/April 2021
Aaron Hughes is an artist, curator, organizer, teacher, anti-war activist, and Iraq War veteran living in Chicago. He works collaboratively in diverse spaces and media to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, deconstruct and transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, he develops projects that deconstruct militarism and related institutions of dehumanization. These projects often utilize popular research strategies, experiment with forms of direct democracy, and operate in solidarity with the people most impacted by structural violence.
Mara Baker, May/June 2021
Mara Baker is an interdisciplinary artist who combines traditional fiber processes, found materials, animation, light, and video to create multi-dimensional installations, paintings and prints. Her work is an extended meditation on the intersection of impermanence and regeneration. She reuses materials over and over, further connecting the work to the ethics of recycling and regeneration. Each project builds on the last, often deconstructing and reconstructing elements of previous installations and paintings responding to the architecture and context of each site or surface.
Alexandra Antoine, July 2021
Alexandra Antoine’s process begins with memory, photography and storytelling. She reflects on her time spent in Léogâne, Haiti, the birthplace of her parents, during her childhood and her time there as an adult. She focuses on the conversations she had with the elders in her immediate family where knowledge of lineage, wisdom and laughter were all shared with her. Traditional practices have lead her back to a familial practice she first learned through her maternal grandfather: Farming. Alexandra questions how the farm can serve as an art studio, and the greater relationship between food and art, and what that means for Black communities.