Since it’s been an exciting two years packed full of thoughtful interviews, tasty food and community events, we’re taking a moment to celebrate our Blogoversary. We will present photos from our visits with the very talented artists we’ve come across, and on opening night we will feature edible art created by those same artists! You, of course, will be welcome to eat it.

Inside the Artist’s Kitchen is a food and arts journal we have created where artists invite us into their home kitchens. We learn recipes from them, discuss their art practice over meals, and document the kinship between the creation of food and art. We have featured a wide variety of artists in the Chicago area, including visual artists, performance artists, and writers. We’re also taking every opportunity to champion new work, including our latest project, the Inside the Artist’s Kitchen Digital Residency program.

Our closing event at the end of the month will also mark the closing of the first round of our Digital Residency program. In collaboration with 2014 resident, Kiam Marcelo Junio, ITAK is creating a “critical cookbook” that will explore the intersections between art, food, and Filipino and queer culture. The book will be launching at the closing event, ready for you to see! We’ll also be screening videos from Junio’s web-series throughout the show.

Inside the Artist’s Kitchen is run by Co-founders Kristina Daignault and Michael Soto with Christopher Grieshaber.

Participating Artists Include:

Edra Soto
Edra Soto is a Chicago based artist born and raised in Puerto Rico. She attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she obtained her Masters of Fine Arts in 2OOO. Immediately after, she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent presentations include: Hyde Park Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, Galeria Agustina Ferreyra in Puerto Rico and Field Projects in New York City. Trough a partnership between Alliance of Artists Communities and 3Arts, Soto attended the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Residency Program in Captiva, Florida in June of 2014. Her work has been included on the international IV Trienal Poli/Grafica de San Juan, Latinoamerica y el Caribe, curated by Gerardo Mosquera, Alexia Tala and Vanessa Hernandez Garcia, opening in the fall of 2015. On 2016, Soto will be presenting her first solo exhibition titled GRAFT in New York at Cuchifritos, a non- profit project space of the Artists Alliance Inc. located inside the Essex Street Market in the Lower East Side. GRAFT will travel to Chicago and will be presented at Sector 2337 in 2017.
Edra Soto and Dan Sullivan design, fabricated and currently run operations of THE FRANKLIN, an artist-run project space located in their home’s backyard in Chicago, Illinois. THE FRANKLIN was selected one of the Top 5 New Art Galleries on 2012 and 2013 for the Newcity’s Top 5 of Everything and Chicago Magazine. This project has been funded by Northeastern Illinois University, 3Arts 3AP program and The Propeller Fund. Soto and Sullivan will be having their second collaborative exhibition at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York in May of 2015. They are currently working on the project Your New Blue , a commission to artistically renovate the CTA Western Blue Line Station.

Diana Gabriel
Colombian born, Diana Gabriel earned her BFA from Northern Illinois University and MFA from Illinois State University. She currently teaches at Harper College in Palatine and College of Lake County in Grayslake, Illinois. Gabriel is the co-founder of TheCGProject, a transmedia platform for artists and audiences with a shared vision of increasing appreciation and accessibility of Art in our culture.

Deborah Boardman
Deborah Boardman is a Chicago based artist who makes artist books, paintings, installations and community based projects that frequently include text. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include I can’t go on. I’ll go on. at Experimental Sound Studio’s Audible Gallery, Rocket Run at the University of Nebraska, Celebration of the Living Who Remember the Dead, organized by Emilio Fantin and Giancarlo Norese at the Arizona University International Artist Residency. She was awarded a residency and stipend at Oxbow in 2014 and will be in residence this summer at Ragdale.

Karen Azarnia
Karen Azarnia is an artist, curator and educator. She has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at Terrain Exhibitions, Oak Park, IL and the Union League Club of Chicago, IL; with recent group exhibitions at Comfort Station, Chicago, IL, Elder Gallery, Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, NE; Julius Caesar, Chicago, IL; and Morehead State University, Morehead, KY. She is currently Director of Exhibitions at the Riverside Arts Center, and will join the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago this coming fall. For more information visit: www.karenazarnia.com.

Renee Robbins
Renee Robbins is a Chicago-based visual artist who is known for transforming elements that range from the microscopic and telescopic. Her paintings and hand-pulled prints juxtapose hybrid flora and fauna inside a space that simultaneously evokes the deep sea and the cosmos.

Andi Crist
Andi Crist is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Chicago. In addition to creating sculptural works that range in media including wood, plaster and multimedia installation, she also works with paper and appropriated photography to create objects that investigate appropriation, function and form. Crist is also the co-founder and executive director of Autotelic Studios, a local nonprofit arts studio located in Logan Square.

Ms Mr Jr
Queen of Boi-lesque, Ms Mr Jr, is a burlesque superstar, designer and movement instructor based in Chicago, werqing to strip away the gender binary for audiences’ viewing pleasure. www.msmrjr.com

Darrell Roberts
Darrell Roberts is a multimedia artists making paintings, drawings, works on paper and wood, plaster sculptures and photography. He uses his environment, travel and resources nearby by to create his projects. He is always inventing and experimenting in his studio to discover new things.

Jessica Caponigro
Using line, geometry, and pattern, Jessica Caponigro is a multidisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues surrounding restriction, both physical and psychological. Caponigro uses specific moments as a referential foundation to create work that transcends an explicit scene and transitions into a universal experience, either of conquering or succumbing to fear. Often using abstracted but recognizable patterns, which retain accessibility through their familiarity, it is the inherent failure to reproduce by hand that informs her work, breaking the monotony of the identical with the significance of imperfections.

Jeroen Nelemans

Alberto Aguilar
There is a human touch in Alberto’s work that is personal yet has a universal end. We all live, we are all moved, we all die. In an effort to recuperate life against the passing of time he strives for immediacy and play in his work and regularly incorporates others. By shifting the creative process from being an isolated endeavor to an act of fellowship it becomes more meaningful. Alberto follows the interests of his collaborators capturing our fleeing moments of exchange with whatever tools he has at hand.

Noelle Allen
Noelle creates experimental, interdisciplinary artwork that moves fluidly between different media and processes. Her work frequently explores the body and the life-giving body as document, and its inherent possibilities and physical and psychological limitations. More recently, her work has also been influenced by nature and the abundance of natural fauna and organic materials found in her own garden.

Jaclyn Jacunski
Jaclyn’s training as printmaker informs her projects using uses print’s methods, tool and concepts—such as its populist ethic on the distribution of art with signs, posters, flyers, multiples, and zines. Her works question ideas in the field of “the commons,” and the nature of ownership and how people live together with special regard for equitable access.

Regin Igloria
Regin maintains an interdisciplinary studio practice which revolves around teaching and serving as an arts administrator. He teaches studio courses regularly at Marwen and has taught at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Rhode Island School of Design, Terra Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and various workshops throughout the Chicagoland area. Currently he serves as the Director of Artists-In-Residence at The Ragdale Foundation and also runs North Branch Projects, a community bookbinding studio and project space in Albany Park, Chicago, which he founded in 2010.

THE FRANKLIN
3522 W. Franklin Blvd, Chicago IL 60624! (312)823-3632
Hours: Saturdays 2-5pM and by appointment http://thefranklinoutdoor.tumblr.com/

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Tags: Alberto Aguilar, Andi Crist, Darrell Roberts, Deborah Boardman, Diana Gabriel, Edra Soto, Garfield Park, Inside the Artist's Kitchen, Jaclyn Jacunski, Jeroen Nelemans, Jessica Caponigro, Karen Azarnia, MS MR JR, Noelle Allen, Regin Igloria, Renee Robbins, The Franklin