Viktor L. Ewing-Givens is a found object installation performance artist whose practice centers around the gathering and arrangement of ancestral objects to activate spaces for site specific public rituals. By connecting the material culture of his ancestors with pre and post modern spiritual theologies, Ewing-Givens hopes to extend and re-imagine the folk customs of his family. His material archive is comprised of the forgotten and discarded household items found during excavations of East Texas, Louisiana, Havana Cuba and Mexico City. Through the accumulation of these rich cultural artifacts, Ewing-Givens seeks to create spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual (re) memory. Currently Viktor’s practice is exploring the creative potential in reinterpreting the archive to produce interdisciplinary new works.

Patric McCoy is a retired environmental scientist in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (USEPA) Regional Office in Chicago. He became a national expert in enforcing air pollution regulations against the petroleum refining industry and was  the recipient of numerous awards from the Department of Justice and the USEPA for that work. He has been collecting  contemporary African-American art for 50 years and has a collection of more than 1,300 pieces of fine art, 90% produced by  Chicago artists. In 2003 he co-founded Diasporal Rhythms, a not-for-profit 501(c)3 arts organization that promotes the  collection by individuals and institutions of art from the African diaspora. He leads the organization in achieving its goals by  organizing exhibitions, seminars, studio visits and home tours of collections which showcase the artists being collected in  African American communities. In 2010, Mr. McCoy established an art trust to leave his art collection and other items from his estate to Diasporal Rhythms. This year (2023) he has had exhibitions of his photography at both Wrightwood 569 and Hyde Park Historical society.

Kahari Blackburn is a Chicago-born and based visual artist and educator who loves both analog and digital visual mediums. He works with paper collages and simple flat round children’s book-style illustrations. He is part of the Mural Moves Paint crew, which has designed and installed many large-scale murals all over Chicago, and an active part of Natty Bwoy Bikes & Boards, a free weekly youth program that leads and teaches skateboarding and basic bicycle mechanics to kids on the South Side.

Katon Blackburn is a die-hard skate rat who is passionate about photography and filmmaking. Over the past few years, his love for community building and documentation has kept him busy working on a project called Natty Bwoy Chicago, a free weekly youth skateboard lesson in Kenwood Park.

Kari Blak is an American fine artist public muralist, illustrator, and designer born on the south side of Chicago, whose artistry concentrates on socioeconomic and environmental racism issues. Through colorful, illustrative imagery he employs a variety of styles from graphic to realistic. Kari often juxtaposes conceptual ideas of social justice with a youthful optimistic aesthetic. He has worked with Mural Moves studio for the past 5 years as a lead designer and lead artist painting public and private murals throughout Chicago. He has also illustrated many children’s books and graphic novels, this year’s focus has shifted to his fine arts practice; canvas painting.

Dorian Sylvain is a painter whose color and texture explore ornamentation, pattern, and design as identifiers of cultural and historical foundations. She is a studio painter and muralist, as well as an art educator, curator, and cultural organizer.  Much of her public work addresses issues of beautification inspired by color palettes and patterns found throughout the African diaspora, particularly in architecture. Core to her practice is collaborating with young people and the community to elevate neighborhood aesthetics and foster shared understanding.

Ricki Dwyer (USA) is an artist and educator working between San Francisco and Brooklyn. His practice considers the intersections of material, industry, and the somatic. This research addresses weaving and craft in both theory and practice. He honors drapery as the negotiation that things will never fall the same way twice. In 2022 he had solo exhibitions with Anglim/Trimble in SF, and Rupert in Lithuania and participated in the Biennale de Lyon. His most recent text, Decennial, on weaving as a metaphor for mutual aid was published with the Wattis in June. He has been an artist in residence with Recology, Jupiter Woods Gallery in London, The Textile Arts Center in New York, ARTHAUS Havana, and most recently completed a residency in the foundry of Kohler Co through. Dwyer is currently on the curatorial council of Southern Exposure. He received his undergraduate degree in Fiber from the Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from UC Berkeley.

Zachary Nicol is an artist and performer based in Chicago. Their interdisciplinary work uses research in dance, movement, site, and image to unfold problems of the performing body. Their work has been presented and performed in Chicago at Links Hall, Pivot Arts Festival, Trap Door Theatre, Co-Prosperity, Lumpen Radio, filmfront, OuterSpace, Compound Yellow, the National Museum of Romanian Literature in Bucharest, and S1 Gallery in Portland. Nicol is a 2023 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist, has been artist in residence with Ragdale Foundation, Annas Projects, ACRE, and Links Hall, and co-founded the collective venue F4F.

Nicol works frequently as a collaborative and performing artist and has contributed to recent projects by Anna Martine Whitehead, Joe Namy, Mlondi Zondi, Alexandra Pirici, and Catherine Sullivan, among many others.

John Alleyne is an artist from Barbados, currently based in New Orleans, LA.  His work is rooted in an exploration of “freedom,” connecting his lived experience with an intuitive process of painting and silkscreen mark-making. Alleyne looks for perfection in the imperfect. The untraditional use of unhinged silkscreens and squeegees is utilized as mark-making tools to create painterly gestures of figurative abstraction. Within these gestures, Alleyne challenges notions of belonging, healing, beauty, manhood, and masculinity.

Alleyne graduated from SUNY Potsdam with a BFA in studio art and a concentration in digital design. He also has an MFA in studio art from Louisiana State University, with a  concentration in painting and drawing. He has been Artist-in-Residence at Ox-Bow, ACRE, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center. He has exhibited work throughout various galleries and museums in the South, including the Masur Museum, the LSU Museum, and the Ogden Museum of  Southern Art. He has also exhibited work in Savannah, New York, Los Angeles, Ireland, and Barbados. His work is featured in Issue #23 of The Hand Magazine, in addition to volumes of Studio Visit Magazine, and New American Paintings.  Alleyne is an Assistant Professor of Art at Southern University and A & M College, and Program Leader of the Visual Arts program.