Professional Practices Artist Lecture by Kacie Lees

Join teaching artist Kacie Lees for a lecture on their work and free Professional Practices presentation covering living documents, types of funding opportunities, record keeping and digital organization, resources, and application tips to break into the world of exhibitions, residencies, and grants.

Lees is currently an Artist in Residence at Spudnik Press, developing a new body of printwork that brings together thermally responsive inks and high-visibility reflective fabrics. Drawing from the visual language of early 20th-century pseudosciences—such as Rorschach inkblot tests and Thought Forms—the work takes on a nebulous, expressive quality that reflects early attempts to make the invisible visible. These prints are both intuitive and investigative, evoking shifting conditions and inviting engagement with ambiguity, pattern, and perception.

Kacie Lees is a Chicago-based neon artist, printmaker, and metalworker whose interdisciplinary practice explores light as both subject and material. Grounded in craft and informed by research into optics and chaos theory, the work combines fire and electricity to create luminous forms that exist between natural phenomena and human perception. Lees teaches neon fabrication nationally and is the author of Neon Primer: A Handbook on Light Construction, a hand-silkscreened technical manual supporting contemporary neon practice.

Programs at Spudnik Press are partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Driehaus Foundation, and the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.