ARTISTS
Juan William Chávez
Juan William Chávez is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts and an artist, organizer, and native beekeeper of Indigenous Latinx and Irish descent. His interdisciplinary practice spans painting, installation, sound performance, knowledge-sharing workshops, and zines. His work is grounded in a holistic understanding of ecology, ritual, craft, and ancestral heritage. He frequently collaborates on social-practice art projects focused on environmental stewardship, food sovereignty, and decolonization.
Fernando Saldivia Yáñez
Fernando Saldivia Yáñez is a filmmaker based between Puerto Williams, Chile, and Chicago, USA. He obtained his BA from Carleton College and his MFA form the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His practice explores the politics and poetics of the quotidian through an intimate observational style. His work has been shown at different festivals and spaces such as the Chicago International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, L'Alternativa Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, Santiago International Film Festival, the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, and the Gene Siskel Film Center. His latest short film, Your Tomorrow Will Be my Song, premiered at the 61 Chicago International Film Festival.
Érika Ordosgoitti
Érika Ordosgoitti (b.Caracas) lives in Chicago, Illinois. A performance, audiovisual, and poetry artist, Ordosgoitti holds a degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in New Media from the Instituto Universitario de Artes Armando Reverón in Caracas. For the last 25 years, her research has focused on studying the concept of freedom in relation to art. Ordosgoitti is known for her site-specific interventions in public space, which she calls "photo-assaults" ("fotoasalto"). These are performative declarations of freedom intended to bear witness to her fleeting existence and inspire new acts of disobedience. Risk is a significant element in her artistic practice. Her work explores the mechanisms of power that operate on behavior, using her own body as the fundamental signifier and a space of contention, recognizing it as power's primary target and, therefore, the sole vehicle for freedom.
Layla Zubi
Layla Zubi (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator of Palestinian and Uzbek heritage. They have presented solo and group exhibitions across select regions of the United States, Jordan, and Turkiye. Influenced by spatial living environments of their youth and art history, they make experimental displays using building materials found in suburban design houses as an act of resisting homogeneity. Visual explorations that inform their multicultural, spiritual experience in their work include aerial layouts, bodily presence, communal gathering, and cultural resistance symbols. Zubi earned their BA in Studio Art from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2014 and an MFA in Creative Visual Art from Cornell University in 2022.
Joni P. Gordon
Joni P. Gordon (Manchester, Jamaica) received a BFA in photography from The Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, Kingston, Jamaica, in 2019, and completed an MFA at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis, MO, in 2024.
She is a multimedia artist and educator who is always seeking suitable avenues and platforms to learn and expand her artistic skills and influence. Her expansive practice dissects and challenges established narratives of the African diaspora, more intimately her home country. She reveals hidden histories, unspoken truths, and public secrets, challenging colonial frameworks of Black history.
Joni is a Catapult awardee (2021), a Prince Claus Seed Awardee (2021), and a McDonnell Scholar (2022-2024). She was selected as the Summer Resident at New Local Space in Jamaica, culminating in her solo exhibition Textured Lines in 2021. Joni has participated in multiple group exhibitions, including Roots & Reckoning: Juneteenth and the 1917 East St. Louis Commemoration at the historic ESTL Sunshine Cultural Arts Center (2025) and The Spirit of Trees at The Red Gate Gallery (2026).
Her recent projects have involved West African textile techniques and symbolism. She is currently the Resident Teaching Artist at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, teaching a class on art activism. Joni continues to push boundaries, using art as a tool for dialogue, resistance, implication, and transformation.
Aida Lizalde
Aida Lizalde’s work explores the interplay between the physical and psychological, the natural and artificial, and the potential for harmony and collapse within these relationships. Born in Mexico and raised in California, Lizalde immigrated to the United States and has since lived a semi-nomadic life before settling in St Louis, MO to teach Ceramics at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University. They hold a B.A. from the University of California, Davis, and earned an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2023. Lizalde has received numerous awards, including the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship, the William and Dorothy Yeck Award, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and the Herb Alpert Scholarship. Their work has been exhibited at venues including The Torggler Art Center, Personal Space, Hiestand Galleries, Alfred University, Axis Gallery, Southern Exposure, the Torrance Art Museum, and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.
quinn antonio briceño
Briceño’s art, a reflection of dualities shaped by two countries, languages, and cultures, explores the perpetual pressure to choose between them. Consciously integrating Americana with Latinx influences, Briceño constructs a visual language bridging cultural gaps. His creations carve a unique space, offering solace to those burdened by societal expectations, and through painting and collage, he weaves a tapestry celebrating identity. Briceño's work is a dual exploration, sharing his personal struggle and narrating a journey towards acceptance, inclusion, and empowerment for the marginalized and forgotten.
abraham diaz
His project for Mangrove is a work of speculative fiction that imagines a proliferation of militarism so severe as to impact the behavioral patterns of migratory birds of the Rio Grande Valley.
