Chris Perzan is currently Vice President, Environment and Sustainability at a Chicago manufacturer and has also worked at the city, state and national level as Environmental Counsel. He has a wealth of experience working with Chicago arts based, non-profit organizations and became familiar with Spudnik helping with their strategic plan and, as a result, in 2022 he joined the Spudnik Board of Directors. In his spare time, he is an amateur visual artist in painting and sculpture.
My artistic practice is a tool to process and attempt to understand the world around me utilizing repetitive action as a form of meditation. I have an academic background in philosophy and a professional background in journalism, and both of those influences are evident in my visual work. Pieces typically start as questions about or attempts to understand a place I’ve been or experience I’ve had. Image and text are then combined and layered into a visual meditation, and serve to catalogue the experience and whatever feelings it evoked without attempting to make any solid determination about what it meant.
Mariah joined Spudnik Press as a teaching artists in our inaugural 2022 Teaching Artist Cohort.
Serena Hocharoen is experimenting with installations, meals, mixtapes, zines, and toys for curiosity and storytelling. Her practice is about diasporic restlessness: harnessing the destabilization powers of dreaming, care, and gathering for survival and healing.
She holds an MFA in Printmaking from Tyler School of Art and Architecture, and a BA in Studio Art and Chemistry from Grinnell College. Her work has been exhibited at venues like Cherry Street Pier, Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, and Public Space 1 in Iowa City. She likes to bike, carve spoons, attend potlucks, and sew quilts.
Serena joined Spudnik Press as a teaching artists in our inaugural 2022 Teaching Artist Cohort.
Millicent Kennedy’s art practice collaborates with materials and time through performance, fiber, and print. The themes explored in her work often pivot on the tension between labor, and impermanence.
Kennedy serves as the Curator of Exhibitions at the Fine Arts Center Gallery in Northeastern Illinois University and teaches classes and workshops in and around Chicago, where her studio is located.
She received her MFA from Northern Illinois University where she was awarded the Helen Merritt Fellowship. She’s received solo exhibitions from Belong Gallery, SXU Art Gallery, Roman Susan and Parlour and Ramp.
Millicent joined Spudnik Press as a teaching artists in our inaugural 2022 Teaching Artist Cohort.
Adriane Herman studies accumulation and release in our physical and emotional landscapes.
She has had solo exhibitions at Adam Baumgold Gallery (NY); Western Exhibitions (Chicago), Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art; Center for Maine Contemporary Art; Interlochen Center for the Arts; Kiosk Gallery in Kansas City; Rose Contemporary in Portland and Ocean House Gallery in Cape Elizabeth. Group exhibition venues include The Dalarnas Museum (Falun, Sweden); Portland Museum of Art; The Brooklyn Museum; Chapel Street Gallery at Yale University; The Ulrich Museum (Wichita), The H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute and Paragraph Gallery (both Kansas City), Mount Airy Contemporary (Philadelphia), and the International Print Center New York.
Herman’s work is in collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; The Progressive Corporation; The Walker Art Center; The Ulrich Museum, and Sprint, Inc., and been written about in publications including: The New Yorker; Art on Paper; Art in Print; artforum.com; The Kansas City Star; The Portland Press Herald, and New Art Examiner, as well as the following books: A Survey of Contemporary Printmaking; Printmaking at the Edge; The Best of Printmaking; and Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall.
Herman holds a B.A. from Smith College, an M.F.A. from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Level II Wilton Method Cake Decorating certificate. She has been an artist in residence in Varanasi, India; Weymouth, Nova Scotia; Yarmouth, Maine; Kansas City; and Coatepec, Mexico, and has lectured at over fifty institutions.
Born in New York City, Herman currently lives in Southern Maine, where the local recycling center offers her inspiration in forms such as waxing and waning piles of discarded wood scraps that she likens to a compost pile rife with manifestations of human intention, aspiration, accomplishment, procrastination, and all the other stuff of life, including its completion.
Susy Bielak is an artist and writer who draws upon encounters in daily life to speak to larger human concerns including history, migration, displacement, and the relationship between domestic life and disaster. With a practice centered in drawing and language, she works across media including installation, performance, photography, printmaking, and video. Bielak’s work has been collected and exhibited widely, including by the International Print Center, Museo Tamayo, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and Walker Art Center. Her artwork and writing have been published in Art Papers, Poetry Magazine, and New American Paintings. She was a 2020-21 BOLT artist-in-residence at Chicago Artists Coalition, and is a 2022 Spudnik Press artist-in-residence and Ragdale Fellow. Together with Fred Schmalz, Bielak is an ongoing artist-in-residence at Grand Central Art Center, with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Jordan Martins is a Chicago based visual artist, curator, and educator. He received his MFA in visual arts from the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) in Salvador, Brazil in 2007, and is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and North Park University. He is the executive director of Comfort Station, a multi-disciplinary art space in Chicago. Martins’s visual work is based in collage processes, including painting, photography, video and installation, and he has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Goldfinch, The Mission, Evanston Art Center, LVL3, The Franklin, The Museu de Arte da Bahia, Zeitgeist, and Experimental Sound Studio. He was a resident in the Chicago Artists Coalition’s HATCH program in 2013. Martins is co-director of the Perto da Lá <> Close to There, a multidisplinary project with international artists in Salvador, Brazil and Chicago.
Cameron Mankin makes prints, artist’s books, and sculptural installations that investigate the role of reason and rhetoric in the arrangement of public space and personal identity. Working primarily from found archives (news site banner images, apartment floor plans, and grainy security camera footage), he employs traditional print and bookmaking techniques to approach delicate systemic problems with a tongue-in-cheek rigor. The material properties of paper and ink set measurements and catalogs to collapse under their own unwieldy weight. The resulting projects vibrate between love letter and biting rebuttal – both addressed to vernacular image-making that goes unquestioned in our day to day lives.
Mankin received his BA in Studio Art (Printmaking) from the University of Virginia in 2016 and his MFA from the University of Chicago in 2020. He currently lives in Chicago, IL, where he teaches in the Media Arts and Design program at the University of Chicago.
My practice as an artist begins with the study and research of parallel places and ecosystems. My work emphasizes ecological patterns shared globally across continents, regions, and landforms. I am interested in how connections between disparate sites can reveal similar habitats which have subsequently receded or shifted over time, informing us about changes occurring in the past and present.
Referencing my own experiences traveling through altitudinal zones to alpine areas, and across latitudinal lines, I create work which connects geographically disconnected landscapes focusing on their shared ecologies: how each site is connected through climatic shifts, soil qualities, and habitat range. I repetitively rework traditional copperplate matrices, often in combination and collage with photo-lithography, and photography to extract observations, uncovering cultural and natural histories.
Collage and techniques of transference are integral to my multidisciplinary practice. As an immigrant female artist, my work deals with acculturation, hybrid identity, and ideas about gendered labor. Using solvent photo transfers, painting, embroidery, and crochet, I create colorful compositions where figures and ornamentation intermingle to complicate identity, formal domination, hierarchy, and the value assigned to women’s work. Influenced by Islamic ornamentation, my visual language references a mixture of coded symbolism such as oya (lace edging that traditionally contained meaning in the patterns on a headdress) and kilim rug symbols.
Through interdisciplinary, research-based projects such as guided walks, installations, and printed books, I tell stories about ways in which the imagined landscape and the physical landscape co-occupy ordinary spaces.
Each project originates with a curiosity about an unseen element of a place (think: the idea behind the built forms, the room behind the closed door, the wind patterns over the land). I then repeatedly observe the place, walk it, research it, attempt to reach it. Through this process, I develop a narrative linking together pieces of history, the perception and experience of the place, and the ideas of power and identity that shape our understanding of the landscape.
Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience while exploring networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal in cut-up collages, artists’ books and immersive installations. A photographed plant, interlaced vine, woven topography merge into fields of color and pattern and back again expanding the ever more complicated sensations of reading a photograph and experiencing nature. Beaubien’s work has been included in national and international exhibitions including Demo Projects, Springfield, IL; Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY; The Pitch Project, Milwaukee, WI; Virus Art Gallery, Rome, Italy. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Aimée Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997.
