Current and Upcoming Visiting Artists
Ruby Que
In Residence: September 3 through October 16, 2024
Ruby Que is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on site-specific intervention and expanded cinema performance. In their work they open portals and create hauntings. Many projects grapple with absence: the missing person, the deserted homeland, the obsolete media, the traumatic memory. With video, sculpture, and writing, they attempt to give shape to what lies within and beyond the perceived emptiness. Drawing on their lived experience as a queer, itinerant immigrant, they meditate on yearning and find home in transit. They believe in the power of collective myth-making, and engage collaborators and/or viewers as co-conspirators towards liberation.
They have exhibited and performed at Kavi Gupta, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Elastic Arts, Roman Susan, Comfort Station (Chicago, IL), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, NY), SOLOS (Karlsruhe, Germany) amongst other spaces nationally and internationally. They have been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, and are currently a HATCH resident at Chicago Artists Coalition. Their work has been featured in the Chicago Reader, Performance Review Journal, Sixty Inches from Center, and Newcity Magazine named them a 2023 Breakout Artist. Que holds an M.F.A. in Film, Video, and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University.
Lecture: noon, Wednesday, September 25 at University Galleries, Uptown Normal.
Alberto Rigau
In Residence: October 28 through November 1, 2024
With over 21 years in practice, Alberto Rigau crafts and conceptualizes brands, exhibits, wayfinding systems, publications, photographic projects, and environmental graphics. Today he serves on the core team of the People’s Graphic Design Archive as Education Liaison. As a former co-chair of AIGA’s Design Educators Steering Committee, he collaborates with nationwide design educators in developing content and programming to further academic research, teaching practices, and conversations within the field. Alberto has a master’s degree from North Carolina State University College of Design and currently engages the field from his home studio in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Lecture: "I confess, I don’t know what I’m doing, butt I’m doing it anyway"
noon, Wednesday, October 30, 2024 at University Galleries, Uptown Normal
In a world where uncertainty often feels like a personal failure, the talk “I confess, I don’t know what I’m doing, butt I’m doing it anyway” embraces the unknown as a vital part of the creative and professional journey. This presentation explores the power of taking risks, making mistakes, and moving forward without all the answers. It is a candid reflection on how the fear of not knowing can be transformed into a driving force for innovation and growth. A session that celebrates courage, resilience, and the surprising benefits of embracing uncertainty.
Andy Slater
In Residence: January 21 through January 29, 2025
Andy Slater is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and disability advocate/loudmouth. Slater has master's degree in sound arts and industries from Northwestern University and a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2022 United States Artists Fellow, a 2022-2023 Leonardo Crip Tech Incubator Fellow, and a 2018 3Arts/Bodies of Work Fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Users’ Sensory Shift program.
Slater's current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, alt-text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design.
Slater was featured on an episode of BBC Outlook in 2023. In 2020, he was acknowledged for his art by The New York Times in their article, “28 Ways To Learn About Disability Culture.”
His research on Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination was published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern volume 61. Slater's audio description production for Alison O’Daniel’s film The Tuba Thieves was featured at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. He was music director for the 2022-2023 Lit y Luz festival in Mexico City. His sound description of Molly Joyce’s, “Side By Side,” was commissioned by Carnegie Hall in 2022.
Slater has been published in Array: The International Computer Music Journal, Curating Access: Disability Art Activism And Creative Accommodation, English Studies in Canada, the Chicago Reader, There Plant Eyes (Godin 2021), and Jane magazine.
He has exhibited and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Fonoteca Nacional, Mexico City; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; American Writers and Publishers conference; Transmediale Festival, Berlin; Kinetic Light’s “Wired”; Technosonics Festival, University of Virginia; Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne; Meyer Sound Lab, San Francisco; Critical Distance, Toronto; Gallery 400, Chicago; Experimental Sound Studios; the Art Institute of Chicago; and Inclusive Dance Festival.
Slater is a member of the 3Arts Disability Culture Leadership Initiative New Art City accessibility board, and the founder of the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists. And last but not least, he is a member of the acid-soul band, the Velcro Lewis Group, and performs solo as electronic melting pot, Calculator Font.
Lecture: noon, Wednesday, February 5, 2025 at University Galleries, Uptown Normal (in conjunction with his solo exhibition)
Libbi Ponce
In Residence: February 18 through 28, 2025
Libbi Ponce (they/them, she/her) is an Ecuadorian artist born to a family of musicians. Ponce explores themes of Latinx-Futurism through a sculptural practice of world-building incorporating an ambitious range of materials including steel, bronze, resin, polyurethane, mortar, grout, terracotta, and glass. Inspired by the zoomorphic motifs from ancient Andean ceramics, Ponce constructs tactile sculptural objects which probe discourse on grief, intimacy, and historic folklore.
They have attended the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Oxbow Artists' Residency, Yale Norfolk Undergraduate Residency, and ACRE. Exhibitions include terciopelo at Selenas Mountain, BASE REMOVED at the Museo Antropológico y de Arte Contemporáneo, and Skyway 20/21 at the Tampa Museum of Art. They hold a B.F.A. in studio art and B.A. in philosophy from the University of South Florida. In 2021, Ponce completed a Fulbright Creative Research Fellowship in Ecuador. In 2023, they completed an ArtTable research fellowship at the Chrysler Museum Of Art. Ponce is the founder/director of galeria juniin in Guayaquil, Ecuador and co-director of Coco Hunday Gallery in Tampa, Florida. Ponce is currently an M.F.A. candidate in sculpture at UCLA on the Graduate Opportunity Program Fellowship. Ponce lives and works in Los Angeles.
Lecture: noon, Wednesday, February 19, 2025 at University Galleries, Uptown Normal
Sean Tatol
In Residence: March 4 through 7, 2025
Sean Tatol is an art critic based in New York City. In 2019, he started the blog The Manhattan Art Review, whose novel approach to criticism of contemporary art was described in a 2023 article in the leading publication artnet as "remarkable" and "something to be excited about." Aside from his blog, Tatol's writing has appeared in Artforum, The Point, and The Baffler, among other publications. He has lectured at the University of Florida, the University of Washington, New York University, and other institutions, and is currently leading a class on short-form criticism at The New Center for Research and Practice.
Lecture: noon, Wednesday, March 5, 2025 at University Galleries, Uptown Normal
Julia Arredondo
In Residence: March 18 through April 26, 2025
Julia Arredondo is a traveling Tejana with working-class roots, navigating the changing landscape of creative economies within the United States. She holds a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an M.F.A. from Columbia College Chicago, with additional study at the Edna Manley College of Visual Art in Kingston, Jamaica, and Vysola Skola Umeleckoprumyslova in Prague, Czech Republic. Over the past decade, Arredondo’s work has taken her across the United States, where she has held appointments as the Residential Fellow at Colby College’s Lunder Institute for American Art, Artist-in-Residence at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts in Florida, and Indigo Arts Alliance in Maine. Recently, she received a Maine Arts Commission Artist Project Grant, the ENVISION Grant (Thoma Foundation and Chicago Artist Coalition), and regularly collaborates with organizations like the Chicago Printers Guild, Tender Table Maine, and 309 Punk Project.
Formally trained in printmaking, Arredondo specializes in independent publishing, having self-published over twenty zines in the past decade. Her work is collected by institutions such as the Joan Flasch Collection at SAIC, the MoMA Archives and Library, Tisch Library at Tufts, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Arredondo’s practice examines narratives of alternative empowerment, reimagining business and spiritual structures as playful, experimental platforms. Her DIY aesthetic, rooted in analog design, was developed while designing for DIY spaces, and now explores archives (such as public libraries) as divinatory and transformative spaces.
Lecture: noon, Wednesday, March 19, 2025 at University Galleries, Uptown Normal
A Career in Zines: Tracing her journey from punk houses to institutional collections, Arredondo shares the highs and lows of life as a traveling artist, navigating the evolution of her career (still a work in progress) on a serious budget.