To Be Continued… introduces a series of narratives yet to unfold by the 12 HATCH 2023–24 artists-in-residence. A prologue offering glimpses of what is to come, the survey exhibition sets the stage for the ongoing development of their diverse practices as well as the individual and intertwining stories these artists will present over the next year.

The exhibition highlights works by:

Youree Kim, Alex Kostiw, Ruby Que, Armando Román, Vince Phan, Nicole Leung, Shonna Pryor, Sungho Bae, Michelle Chun, Molly Blumberg, Sophia Karina English, and bARBER.

The show is curated by:

Denny Mwaura, Sophie Buchmueller, and Sofía Sánchez Borboa.

Image: Armando Román, “Gabriel Over the Kitchen Table”, 2023, 58 x 42 in., Inkjet on Canvas

This event is free and open to the public.

About Curators
Denny Mwaura
Denny Mwaura is a curator and writer based in Chicago. He is the Assistant Director at Gallery 400, UIC. Exhibitions and public programs his curatorial research has supported include, A Species of Theft (2022) and Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art at Gallery 400; Malangatana: Mozambique Modern (2020), Naughty Nymphs in the Courtyard of the Favorites (2022), Igshaan Adams: Desire Lines (2022) at the Art Institute of Chicago; Wong Ping: Digital Fables (2021) and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Speculative Archives (2021) at Conversations at the Edge. His writings on artists including Kapwani Kiwanga, Daniela Rivera, and Senzeni Marasela appear in the Boston Art Review and Africanah.
Mwaura was the 2021 recipient of the Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Critical Architectural Writing, an award granted by the Department of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. He received his MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sophie Buchmueller
Sophie Buchmueller is a Chicago-based arts worker with experience in curation, collections management, and museum education. Currently, she is the Registrar at Corbett vs. Dempsey. She is driven by the potential of contemporary art to serve as a framework for knowing and understanding the world—not just as a reflection of reality, but as a mode of active engagement with our often-precarious surroundings. She holds a BA in American Studies and French from Carleton College and MAs in Art History and Arts Administration & Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sofía Sánchez Borboa
Sofía is an art historian and Chicago-based independent curator. In her curatorial practice, she works with ideas of kindness as a form of labor to make art more accessible and horizontal. She often works in a participatory environment. In her research, she focuses on issues of ethnicity, identity politics, postcolonialism, and feminism and how these are told through history and storytelling.
Sofía Sánchez Borboa has held exhibition-making roles in the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, the Sullivan Galleries, and the Field Museum in Chicago. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History from Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm and a master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Visual and Critical Studies. In 2021, she wrote a book, Anyone who has never been bored cannot be a storyteller, which will be published in May 2023.

About Artists
Youree Kim
Youree Kim (they/them) is an interdisciplinary disability artist, activist, and researcher based in Chicago. Youree’s works seek to navigate the complicated realities of how disabilities are produced, perceived, and represented in the face of critical sociopolitical issues. Their process involves intricate research on disability history, representation, and narratives, and conversations with various entities and collaborators. They have Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master’s degree in public policy and human rights at Adler University. Their writings were shared at Truthout, AK Press, Riksha magazine, Spork!, and more.
A black and white image shows a group of people holding balloons before releasing them to the sky. The bottom text reads, “At Truman College. During a vigil for victims of police violence. July 12th, 2016.”

Alex Belardo Kostiw
Alex Belardo Kostiw is an artist, designer, and educator in Chicago. Her practice deals in poetic, adapted, and iterative elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms. Through storytelling, Alex frames nebulous moments in familiar experiences, making room for perceptions to shift and transform. She is most interested in how knowledge takes shape in and relates to imagination. Themes in her work include the hidden parts and possibilities within the self; human connections defying time and space; the limits of language; and the interactivity of reading.
Alex holds an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at the Evanston Art Center, Co-Prosperity in Chicago, and Carlow University Art Gallery, among others.

Ruby Que
Ruby Que is a Chicago-based installation artist and experimental filmmaker who occasionally performs, carves, and weaves. In their work they open portals and create hauntings. They engage with celluloid film both as a medium and as a material, with a specific interest in the vulnerability of film as a metaphor for the cycle of life. They’ve attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, and No Nation Art Lab amongst others. Their works have been exhibited at Kavi Gupta, Comfort Station, Mana Contemporary, and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. They hold a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Armando Román
Armando Román is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in the Midwest. He received his BFA in Studio Arts from Denison University and his MFA in Visual Arts from The Ohio State University. His drawings traverse themes of religion, homosexuality, community, and the self. The Mexican landscape, both cultural and literal, is of particular interest to him. He creates work to better understand his own relationship with Mexico, which is simultaneously familiar and foreign to him. Familiar, in that countless stories have been retold to him of this place, where his mother and father were born. Foreign, in that he has no permanent relationship with it. Hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration are used in his practice as tools of resistance.

Vincent Phan
V, a.k.a Vincent Phan, et al. (Valienese, b. 1992 A.D.) is an earthly-alien collective. Their works are systems-oriented investigations of chaos in nature and the nature in the chaos. V et al. adopts furniture and composts organic materials to create a hybridized existence of humans and nature. These creations are then traded for soil in human-occupied territories in order to create a new terra of possibility. Hybridizing objects and materials, V et al. re-naturalizes the man-made back into a natural ecology that once was its birthplace but has now become foreign.
V et al. trades earthly-alien creations for the soil of colonized territory. This accumulated soil then builds Valien, a new continent that exists within colonized continents. As long as V et al. lives, this terra expands as the soils are added. As long as Valien exists, V et al.’s reality exists as do the earthly-alien creatures that constitute Valien.

Nicole Leung
Nicole Leung approaches their practice with a fascination for adaptation, particularly in how we (consciously or unconsciously) choose to internalize, process, and interact with our surroundings. Through their process of collecting, accumulating, and arranging neglected objects, Leung takes an interest in the habits we adopt and the delusions we construct to feel safe amidst irrepressible fear and uncertainty.

Shonna Pryor
Shonna Pryor is a conceptual artist, art programs producer, and an educator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her interdisciplinary art practice is inspired by references to food theory and its peripheral objects and concepts as a lens through which to critically engage the politics of identity, memory, power, and play. Afrofuturist aesthetics underscore the visual language of these expressions via reclaimed objects, installation, painting and public programming. Pryor’s work has been exhibited in major cities such as Chicago, Detroit and New York, with esteemed artist residencies at Hyde Park Art Center; High Concept Labs; and Chicago Council on Science and Technology, respectively.

Sungho Bae
Sungho Bae (b. Seoul, Korea 1988) is an artist working primarily in sculpture, video, and installation. He focuses on re-rendering the visual domain, considering images as mediators, consumption as a strategy, and humans as mutants. This is to navigate the mechanism of the image-making system and how an individual processes such images as superficial data. The symbiotic but dissonant relationship between the visual status of collected images and their context has been the driving force behind an act of repurposing. He received a BFA from Seoul National University and an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Above all, he is an avid toy collector.

Michelle Chun
Michelle Chun (b. 1993) is a painter and visual maker. Born and raised in Southern California, she is shaped by experiences of cross-cultural realities and interdisciplinary practices. With a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a MAR in Visual and Material Culture from Yale Divinity School, she approaches her practice both as embodied meditation on the sacred ordinary, acute emotions, migration and home while also a theological practice of incarnation, redemption, and liturgy.  In 2022, she was a resident at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist’s Residency receiving the Longform Scholarship and participated in the Black Arts Movement School Modality taught and facilitated by artists and scholars such as Fred Moten, Sonia Sanchez, and Romi Crawford. She has shown at Helen J Gallery in Los Angeles, The Yard: Williamsburg in New York, and Gelman Gallery in Rhode Island among other exhibitions.  She also makes music with the collective Miso Peanut Butter.

Molly Blumberg
Molly Blumberg is an artist based in Chicago, IL.  Her sculptural practice sits in the spaces between our human bodies and the materiality of lived environments, imagining their potential permeabilities.  Trained as a sculptor and a papermaker, her work is grounded in an extreme engagement with materiality.  Through a playfully physical studio practice and a dedication to process based exploration, she explores how it feels to be a body.
She earned her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in fiber & material studies in 2020 and her BFA from the Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts in sculpture in 2012.

Sophia English
Sophia Karina English (they/them) is a latinx crafts person, sculptor, and performance artist from San Francisco,CA and based in Chicago,IL. Presented with a series of eradicated cultural and personal histories due to colonization, poor record keeping, and family secrets, English uses their work to ask questions and keep track of what feels important at the time. Working from their home studio English uses beadwork as reference to the Latin American tradition of storytelling through beaded textiles.

bARBER
bARBER (b. 1982, US) lives and works in Midwest America. He uses his art practice to articulate various testimonies within and surrounding Black culture. Inspired by the quotidian of cultural customs, he repurposes everyday materials, such as junk mail, found objects, etc., for his collages and three- dimensional constructions. bARBER received his MFA from the University of Iowa and BFA from SCAD. Personal recognitions, aside from collaborations with Propelled Animals, a site adaptive art collective, include Graduate Cum Laude at the University of Iowa, 2020 Biennial Artist Research fellowship at Sam Fox Island Press, and New American Painting entry issue #150. Please learn more at www.PropelledAnimals.org and @BarberPaintsPeople.

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Tags: Alex Kostiw, Armando Roman, Barber, Chicago, Chicago Artists' Coalition, Michelle Chun, Molly Blumberg, Nicole Leung, Ruby Que, Shonna Pryor, Sophia Karina English, Sungho Bae, To Be Continued…, Vince Phan, West Town, Youree Kim