On view: September 26th - November 16th
Artists: Jean Alexander Frater, Leslie Baum, Julietta Cheung, Julia Fish, Maria Gaspar, Holly Holmes, Anna Kunz, Mayumi Lake, Melissa Leandro, Cydney M. Lewis, Tish Noel, Monica Rezman, Nina Rizzo, Edra Soto, Michelle Wasson, and Gwendolyn Zabicki.
Her Space is a group exhibition that focuses on three lines of visual inquiry: the tensions between abstraction and figuration, colors and their spectrum of moods, and responses to architecture in the picture plane and beyond. The exhibition brings together a cadre of Chicago-based artists who work in different disciplines but share commonalities in these converging aesthetic interests.
Her Space spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and other media that push the limits of the pictorial surface, highlighting approaches to expressive depictions that are referential or literal, a variety of color interactions, and the poetics of space. Through their own abstracted vocabularies, the artists re-present another reality or context to create a fluid spatial experience through color or scale that reminds the viewer of the power that artistic thinking holds. We live in environments of our own construction and, by extension, art is a constructed environment that collapses the psychic power of the picture plane and the interiority of the artist. Each work represents a galaxy of its own, while the exhibition as a whole suffuses emotions and the metaphysics conveyed through a universe of internal and external worlds.
Her Space is co-curated by Holly Holmes and Teresa Silva.
Cydney M. Lewis
Cydney M. Lewis is a Chicago based multimedia artist who works primarily in collage and assemblage. Lewis's works feature an amalgamation of materials found in a variety of places; she explores the relationship between the spiritual and the natural and celebrates the depth of beauty that exists within the lived environment, pondering how humans can collectively move towards a more harmonious future despite being entrenched in a consumerist society. She studied at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago as well as L'École d'architecture in Versailles, France, receiving her BS in Architectural Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She has received the 3Arts Make A Wave Grant and the Black Creativity/Green Art Award from the Museum of Science and Industry. Her work has been featured in Newcity, NBC News, and Suboart Magazine. Aside from her practice as a visual artist, Lewis has practiced ballet & art directed films, both of which give her a unique perspective on the fluidity of her narratives, & inform the materiality she employs.
Monica Rezman
Monica Rezman is a multi-media artist who explores intimacy within abstraction through the use of traditional media and everyday found materials. She studied painting and textile design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While at SAIC, she spent a study-abroad year at the Instituto Allende in Mexico. In 1993, she studied classical drawing and painting at the Florence Academy of Art in Florence, Italy. In 1999 and 2002 consecutively, Rezman was awarded an Art-in-Residence in Gujurat, India, One of the world’s most revered craft communities in textiles. For the last forty years, she has exhibited nationally and internationally including exhibitions at the Riverside Art Center, 2019, Governors State University Gallery, 2019, Merida English Library, Mexico 2015, The Chicago Cultural Center, 2017; The Contemporary Art Gallery, India 1999, and the South Bend Regional Museum of Art 1998. From 2017-18 she was the Artist-in-Residence at the Chicago Artist Coalition’s Field/Program. She is a 2020 recipient of an Individual Illinois Arts Council Grant. Her work has been reviewed by Hyperallergic, Alan Artner (Chicago Tribune). and New City. She has recently had a one-person exhibition at 65 Grand in Chicago and a group show at Kavi Gupta Gallery. She is currently exhibiting at the Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Los Angles.
Tish Noël
Tish Noël lives and works in Chicago. Her work explores the dichotomies between what we discard versus what we treasure. Since 2020 she has been working almost exclusively on catalog pages. This printed paper, a cheaply produced material meant to be consumed and then thrown away or recycled, accumulated in her studio. The catalog pages became ad hoc painting palettes in the way artists use whatever’s at hand in a pinch. The catalog pages also proved useful in removing excess paint. Now caked with paint, they were suddenly too interesting to discard as studio debris. These pages, with their rich surfaces and textures were repurposed as the supports and underpaintings for new pieces. Slivers of their original printed images along with the traces of paint from earlier paintings form suggestions or prompts Noël intuitively responds to. Old catalogs are the very definition of scrap paper–having been torn up and used like paper towels they’ve served their purpose. Having been absorbed and recontextualized by Noël’s painting practice they’ve not only been diverted from the rubbish heap, they’ve formed the very basis for this series of abstract works. Her work has been exhibited in recent two-person exhibitions that include 65GRAND (Chicago, IL), Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Chicago Bite Club (Chicago, IL). Select Group Exhibitions have included Morpho Gallery and Butcher Shop (Chicago, IL). She was commissioned to do a public art piece, a mural, on Chicago’s southside. She participated in the Oxbow Exhibition and Auctions and BAREWALLS for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her studio and art collection was highlighted for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 150th Anniversary. Noël received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Gwendolyn Zabicki
Gwendolyn Zabicki is a painter from Chicago. She earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2012. Previously, her work has shown at White Columns, Anastasia Tinari Projects, Goldfinch Gallery, Heaven Gallery, Slow Gallery, Roman Susan, Comfort Station, the Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, and the Bauhaus Universität in Weimar, Germany. She was selected for the 2022 Midwest edition of New American Paintings, issue 161. In 2020, she was named a Breakout Artist by NewCity Magazine. Her work has been reviewed in the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, and she has appeared on the Bad At Sports podcast. She has curated exhibitions at Heaven Gallery, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, the Riverside Arts Center, the College of DuPage and the Illinois State Museum. She has taught painting and drawing at the Hyde Park Art Center, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Edra Soto
Edra Soto is a Puerto Rican-born artist, educator, and co-director of outdoor project space The Franklin. Soto instigates meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of history, and loss of cultural knowledge. Among her distinguished accolades are the Joyce Award, 3Arts Next Level Award, Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Grant, Ree Kaneko Award, and US LatinX Art Forum Fellowship. Her work is in the collection of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jean Alexander Frater
Jean Alexander Frater subverts and destroys the painterly gesture with torn-up, reassembled and scaled down reinterpretations of her color-blocked canvases. She carefully reassembles new images and forms that deliberately shift as you move around the intricate Paintings. The raw canvas becomes part of the surface, and the layering dually hides and reveals the entirety of the painting. Alexander Frater thinks of abstraction as an in-between state, where there is both something very knowable and unknowable in the image. Jean limits her materials to Paint, Canvas and Rectangular stretcher and calls her work “Paintings,” but she pushes the boundaries of this language by mixing in techniques associated with fiber arts, ceramics, and sculptural techniques. Jean is represented by Engage Projects in Chicago and runs the artist-run space Material Exhibitions.
She was a 2017-2018 Chicago Artists BOLT resident, received an MFA from School of Art the Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Dayton, Ohio. Her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as the Wexner Center for Arts, Columbus; El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe; Images Festival, Toronto; Possible Project Space, Brooklyn; Ben-Gurion airport, Tel Aviv; Kulturhuset, Stockholm, THE MISSION Gallery, Chicago; Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn and Guest Spot @ The Reinstitute, Baltimore.
Leslie Baum
Leslie Baum has shown her work nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Portland, Mexico City, Rome, and South Korea. Recent exhibitions include Here Comes the Rainbow, the Cleve Carney Gallery at the College of DuPage, IL, Excuse Me If I get Too Deep, Geary Contemporary, NYC, Ohne Titel, 65grand, Chicago IL, MOUNTAIN and sea at 4th Ward Project Space and Legends for Loose Grids, Waiting Room, Minneapolis MN. Her animation short, the Megillat Breakdown, made in collaboration with Frederick Wells, was included in the Wisconsin Union Film Committee at the University of Wisconsin 2015 experimental film series and in the 2014 Eyeworks Festival. Her drawings and paintings are in the permanent collections of the Chicago Art institute, the Elmhurst Art Museum, and the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital and Von Voigtlander Women's Hospital. Her work has been reviewed extensively including in Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and the Chicago Tribune. She is included in New American Paintings vol. 119 and 100 Painters of Tomorrow. She has received residencies from Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center. Leslie Baum lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
Anna Kunz
Anna Kunz makes luminous, vibrant paintings and installations with an emphasis on color, material, and process. Her practice considers the viewer’s experience, taking into account—with deep awareness and intentionality—how each work, each gesture, affects the exhibition space and, by extension, the viewer. Kunz’s tessellating shapes seep into and lean on one another; she calls this “compassionate geometry.”
Kunz received an MFA from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Kunz participated as an artist-in-residence in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY; The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, and the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, Edward Albee Foundation, and Roger Brown House, among others. The artist’s work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and institutions including: The Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX; The Pit, LA, McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL; Providence College Galleries, Providence, RI; and TSA Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Brooklyn, NY. Her work is included in the public collections of The Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia, PA; The Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, IL; The Block Museum, Chicago, IL; and Columbia University Teachers College, New York, NY; among others. Kunz has been honored with nominations from: Anonymous Was a Woman, 3Arts Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Emerging Artist award from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Artadia, the Rema Hort-Mann Foundation’s Individual Artists Grant, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. Kunz, a long time Chicago resident, now lives and works in the woods of Southwest Michigan.
Holly Holmes
Holly Holmes is a painter, sculptor, educator, planner and curator. She makes abstract work from reacting to the world around her. She is teaching at Columbia College Chicago and SAIC. Holmes is a member of Videokaffe, an international art collective spanning locations in North America and Nordic countries. This summer she traveled to Turku, Finland again to work with Videokaffe for an exhibition at Galerie Herold, Bremen, Germany.
Recently she has shown her work at, Bert Green Gallery, Chicago; Epiphany Art Center,
Chicago; Ohklohomo; Chicago; Sluice expo, Colchester, UK; Material, Chicago; The Design Museum, Chicago; Dominican University; River Forest, Il, Kunsthuis Gallery; Crayke, UK; ArtTeleported, CICA; Queens, N.Y.; and Riverside Art Center, Riverside, Il
Julietta Cheung
Julietta Cheung is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. Her body of work blends visual art and writing, putting sculpture, installations, photography, typography, and reading performances in conversation to explore how common terms and objects are produced, articulated, and reiterated in the public sphere. Her art and writing have been presented in publications and at venues including the Poetry Foundation; Lit & Luz Festival at the Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago and Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, MX; Chicago Architecture Biennial via Roman Susan; Chicago Cultural Center; Kenning Editions, Chicago, IL; tripwire: a journal of poetics, Oakland, CA; the Banff Centre, Alberta, CA; Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago, IL; White-Out Studio, Knokke-Heist, BE; Scheltema, Amsterdam, NL; Henry Street Settlement, New York, NY. Cheung is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Maria Gaspar
Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s body of work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. For the past decade, Gaspar has been recognized nationally for her multi-year projects that attempt to dismantle borders, transcend penal matter, and turn places of precarity into places of possibility. Formative works like “Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall” and the “96 Acres Project” include site interventions at the largest single-site jail in the country, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in her childhood neighborhood.
Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, the Latinx Artist Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar’s projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1 and El Museo Del Barrio in New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, FL.
Gaspar received her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and her MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mayumi Lake
Mayumi Lake (b.Osaka) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, whose work explores the ideas of time, memory, and floating between the real and imaginary. She integrates
photography, sculpture, sound, moving images, and installation to expand her narrative into more complex layers.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Miyako
Yoshinaga Gallery, Asia Society, Art in General, and Artists Space in New York; Chicago Artists Coalition and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst; Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City; Fotografie Forum International in Frankfurt; Cornelius Pleser Galerie in Munich; Galleria PaciArte in Brescia; FOTOAMERICA in Santiago; Witzenhausen Gallery in Amsterdam; and the Setouchi Triennale in Takamatsu.
She has published two monographs, Poo-Chi and Ex Post Facto, with Nazraeli Press. Her public artwork commissions include the City of Chicago/O’Hare Airport Terminal 5 Arrival Corridor, Argyle Station/Chicago Transit Authority, and Hyatt Regency McCormick Place. Her work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts
in Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, Asia Society, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE)/City of Chicago, the McCormick Place Art Collection/Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (MPEA), Video Art World, the Joy of Giving Something Foundation, and Facebook.
Mayumi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Website: http://mayumilake.com
Instagram: @deepfriedeast_mayumi
Melissa Leandro
MELISSA LEANDRO (American, b. 1989) is a Chicago-based textile arDst. She received an MFA (2017) and a BFA (2012) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is presently at the Institute as a Lecturer. Leandro was awarded the Creative ArDst Cohort Grant from the Center for CraR (2025), Artadia Award (2021), the CraR Fellowship Grant from the Illinois Arts Council (2020), and the Wingate ArDst Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center Residency (2021). She has had recent solo exhibitions at The University Club of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Union League Club of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Rockford University (Rockford, IL), the Wright Museum of Art (Beloit, WI), ANDREW RAFACZ Gallery (Chicago, IL), Frieze Art Fair NYC (2020+2021), Intersect Palm Springs (2023), NADA Fair Miami (2023), and Expo Chicago (2023), Dallas Art Fair (2024), Untitled Art Fair, Houston (2025). Recent group exhibitions include the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, DePaul Art Museum (Chicago, IL), and the Lubeznik Center for the Arts (Michigan City, IN). She has participated in residencies, including The Vermont Studio Center, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, Ox Bow School of Art, Crosstown Arts, The TexDel Lab, and BOLT- Chicago Arts Coalition. Leandro is represented by the Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago and serves as a Visual ArDst Board Member at the DePaul Art Museum. Her work is part of numerous public and private collections.
MELISSA LEANDRO (American, b. 1989) is a Chicago-based artist whose practice is deeply rooted in personal experience, her relationship to family and cultural heritage, and a strong connection to the natural world. She integrates imagery of landscapes, flora, and fauna into richly layered textile works that explore the ongoing cycles of growth, change, and decay—both in her everyday life and in the world around her. Leandro draws from a combination of hand-drawn and imprinted imagery, using traditional and experimental textile techniques such as needlework, quilting, weaving, dyeing, and embroidery. Through these processes, she creates textured surfaces that accumulate like residues - dyed, printed, patched, and layered - to reflect the emotional and physical landscapes she inhabits.
This dynamic of transformation mirrors her lived experiences and the ever-shifting environment of the city she calls home. The resulting works evoke lush, fictional paradises that offer moments of refuge and reflection, for both the artist and the viewer.
Michelle Wasson
Michelle Wasson’s paintings foretell a serene future. Created intuitively from memory and imagination, layers of color and light portray peaceful planes. Flowing between landscape, still life and the figurative, Wasson’s canvases reflect our shared humanity in the natural world. In glowing scenes, divine vessels spring forth life evoking Mother Nature’s power to create and destroy—and create yet again.
Michelle Wasson is an internationally exhibiting artist based in Chicago, IL. Her paintings have recently been included in exhibitions at Hyde Park Art Center, Elmhurst Art Museum, Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Brand Library Art Center (Glendale, CA). She is the recipient of several Illinois Arts Council grants and a City of Chicago DCASE grant. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, Bad At Sports, New City, and Hyperallergic. She has served as faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago and The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2016 she co-founded the artist run exhibition space Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago. Wasson received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, MO
Nina Rizzo
Nina Rizzo (b. 1974) is a Chicago based artist and Associate Professor of Painting at Northern Illinois University. She received her MFA in Painting at The University of Texas at Austin in 2004 and her BFA from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997. She has shown extensively throughout the United States including solo exhibitions such as Landscape for Lovers in North Adams, Massachusetts, Nuit Exquise, Le Lavage, and You Are Here, in Chicago, and at the Pelham Art Center in Pelham, New York. Notable group exhibitions include Perceiving Place in Alfred, NY, Malin Kong at Megumi Ogita Gallery in Tokyo and Small Gestures in Chicago. Recently Nina was an invited summer artist resident at the Alpineumproduzentengalerie in Lucerne, Switzerland where the exhibition, Site Seer, was held. This show included paintings on paper made in the gallery/studio and on site around Lucerne. Nina has completed artist residencies in many varied locations including Reykjavik, Iceland. Rome, Italy, Berlin, Germany, Banff, Canada, Paris, Marnay-Sur-Seine, and Mandelieu-La Napoule, France where the varied sights and surroundings have always had a great impact on her work. Work made at a recent artist residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France and additional travel is currently serving as source material for large oil paintings underway in Chicago. When not in the studio, Nina spends time walking her dog or enjoying a meal with friends.
Nina Rizzo’s paintings are equal part fact and fiction. Imagined objects and unseen, hybrid spaces create a practice that is full of wonder and play. Direct experience with a place, event or object as catalyst is abstracted, invented and explored in order to conjure new possibilities. Paint exists, in these images, so that its physicality becomes part of the image: flat areas and surface build-up battle hints of illusion as these combinations attempt to maintain simultaneous existence. References to structures and natural elements create tension where surface competes with depth, and image competes with abstraction. Exaggerated color, fluid brush strokes, and spatial ambiguities reveal sensual environments where interiors and exteriors collide with figurative forms and our notion of reality is questioned.
