Announcing our
2024-25
First Ten Artists
Selva Aparicio
Sophia Chai
Christina Forrer
Janna Ireland
Linda Nguyen Lopez
Pauline Shaw
Selva Aparicio
Selva Aparicio is an interdisciplinary artist working in installation and sculpture to explore memory, intimacy, and mourning. Born just outside Barcelona, Spain, she found solace in nature from a young age, inspiring her interest in the ephemeral. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 and her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2017. Aparicio’s work has been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Art and Design, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Yale Center for British Art; and the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona, among others. She was awarded the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights in 2016, the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize in 2017, and the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation Artadia Award in 2022. In 2023, she received the Burke Prize from the NY Museum of Art and Design. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the DePaul Art Museum. Aparicio recently completed her first public permanent art commission for the Beaufort Triennale in Belgium. She is currently working on a permanent outdoor sculpture for the Heraclea Archeological Park in Italy and also serves as an Assistant Professor in the Sculpture Department at Alfred University, NY.
Sophia Chai
Sophia Chai (b. Busan, South Korea, 1973) lives and works in Rochester, MN. With her most recent body of studio-made photographs, Chai references the phonetic alphabet of Korean, her mother tongue, and enacts three key ideas of language, optics, and photography. Chai has presented her work widely at sites including Luhring Augustine Gallery, the A.I.R. Gallery, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Knockdown Center, Marinaro Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Hyde Park Art Center, among others. Solo exhibitions include 106 Green Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (2016), Rochester Art Center in Minnesota (2020), Hair+Nails Gallery in Minneapolis (2020, 2023) and Light Work in Syracuse, NY (2024). Recent press includes Artforum, MUSEÉ Magazine, and Document Journal. Her first permanent public outdoor art project, commissioned by the City of Rochester and Destination Medical Center was completed in summer 2024. She received her BA in chemistry from the University of Chicago and earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Chai is a recipient of a 2024/25 McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists.
Linda Nguyen Lopez
Linda Nguyen Lopez (b. Visalia, California) is a first-generation American artist of Vietnamese and Mexican descent. Her abstract works explore the poetic potential of the everyday by imagining and articulating a vast emotional range embedded in the mundane objects that surround us. Her works have been exhibited in Italy, New Zealand, England, South Korea and throughout the United States including the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Museum of Art, Washington DC; Red Arrow, Nashville, TN; R & Company, New York; The Hole Gallery, New York; David B. Smith Gallery, Denver and Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami. Lopez was the recipient of the 2023 Material Exploration Fellowship through the Center for Craft and the 2024 USA Fellowship through United States Artists. Lopez lives and works in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Janna Ireland
Janna Ireland lives in Los Angeles, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. Her photographic work is primarily concerned with the themes of family, home, and the expression of Black identity in American culture.
Ireland’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, SFMOMA, the Nevada Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. She is the recipient of the 2023 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, a 2023 City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Program (COLA-IMAP) grant, and is a 2024 runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize. Her work has been the subject of articles in publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, Harvard Design Magazine, and Aperture. She holds an MFA from the UCLA Department of Art and a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU.
Christina Forrer
Animated by an interest in fables and folklore, Christina Forrer’s vibrant weavings and electrifying works on paper explore the depths of human emotion. Depicted in her signature representational style of fantastical characters with cartoonish features, her work is rendered with a keen attention to boldness of color and richness of pattern. While many of her works showcase dramatic moments of explosive conflict, they also provide the viewer access into smaller, more personal terrors: private anxieties, internal tensions, and irrational fears. Her weavings are often enormous in scale, tableaux of psychological space populated by characters that may be human, animal, or vegetal. Retaining the figurative elements of her tapestries, Forrer’s drawing practice is more widely varied, ranging from quick sketches and notations to fully articulated, discursive paintings on paper.
Pauline Shaw
Through a diverse set of labor-intensive techniques, Pauline Shaw (b.1988) laces together shared histories, personal experiences, and belief systems into large-scale textiles and installations that speak to experience and perception. Shaw’s felted landscapes draw from vastly diverse pools of knowledge, such as Western-drawn borders, MRI scans, and ancestral weave patterns to reflect on the intersection between scientific technology, spiritual belief, and the natural environment.
Shaw received her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, and MFA at Columbia University, School of Arts, New York, NY. Most recently, she has exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Frost Museum, Miami, FL; and a mural commissioned by the Queens Museum, Queens, NY. Recent solo/duo exhibitions include Chapter NY, New York, NY; In Lieu, Art Basel Hong Kong, HK, Naranjo 141, Mexico City, MX; and forthcoming at Micki Meng Gallery, New York, NY; and Each Modern, Taipei, Taiwan. Other exhibitions include Grimm Gallery, New York, NY; Half Gallery, New York, NY; Newchild Gallery, Antwerp, BE; Almine Rech, Paris, FR; amongst others.
