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Niles Tatum is a self-taught multimedia artist. He first began creating at the age of 8, deeply inspired by the vibrancy of the cartoons in his youth. His beginnings would later foreshadow his propensity for hyper-saturation and contrast. With his emphasis on color and distortion, which often borders Afro-Surrealism, his work aims to communicate the complexities of his community, their love, their pain, and the world they inhabit. Medium of choice is acrylic, though he frequents digital creation, oil stick, and embroidery. His work conveys its whimsy through the lens of cultural nuances, centering the feelings, experiences, and relationships of the marginalized. Thus, it is juxtaposed that which is frequently repressed and an emphatic, bright display that calls both attention and serious thought.

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Sifting through spools of yarn and thread, scraps of cloth and wood, material and image, my practice searches for the components of sanctity. Asking, if sanctity is found within grandiose structures of worship, or small familial altars nestled in the corners of shared spaces. Is it grand and immeasurable, encapsulated by complex histories, time and space? And finally, can the sacred be small fragments of culture worshipped into the profane?

Indeed, art-making is a religious experience. Re-encountering the archival fragments of my family and culture not only bridges the distant present and those vast, inhabited histories, but inaugurates a confrontation between myself as an individual and the self that fails to escape the vastness of their lineage. Old film photographs, tapestry crochet throwovers, Andalusian tiles, paintings of Carthusian horses, and etchings of the Spanish countryside are woven, dyed, cut, and stitched together into sacred objects. As I navigate these remnants of immigration, I impose my individuality onto these communal histories through saturated color palettes and patterns, attempting to overcome the strictures of nostalgia through radical production. I cathect these familial images and archival materials with salience through elaborately designed wooden and cloth frames, invoking the political theory of frames as devices of treatment recommendation while contextualizing such treatment in the practice of Latin American maximalism. Revitalizing my familial archive and cultural materials through digital weaving, stitching, dyework, and frames transcends my artistic practice into ritual; I not only anoint these pieced-together histories as sacred objects for myself and my family, but I also invite my audience to recognize the sanctity of these cultural fragments and join me in their worship.

Bio: ‘Prisma’ Anna Maria Andrade is a Dallas-born and Chicago-based textile artist whose work blurs the lines between painting, photo, and textile, creating colorful imagery one can see and touch. Her work deals with immigration as an act of trauma, examining her family’s journeys between Honduras, Spain, Texas and Chicago, stitching together the remnants of familial and cultural history which the descendants of immigrants are left with. She uses cultural craft traditions of embroidery and quilting, once reserved to the domestic sphere of her female ancestors, in conjunction with modern traditions of digital weaving and dyework to confront the gender roles of the Latin American family structure. Throughout her work, Andrade reimagines her familial archive, including works of art done by her family members, as a ritual act to honor her family members across the diaspora and craft herself into place. Andrade received her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fiber and Material Studies in 2026. She is a recipient of the SAIC Presidential Scholarship (2022), SAIC Contemporary Practices Scholarship (2023), and won Surface Design Magazine’s Outstanding Student Award in 2025. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX), Bridgeport Art Center (Chicago, IL), Woman Made Gallery (Chicago, IL), Evanston Art Center (Evanston, IL), and solo exhibitions at Art City (Chicago, IL) and SAIC Incubator Gallery.

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My practice spans sculpture, installation, mixed media, and works on paper, examining the intersections of built environments, natural systems, and queer identity construction. Raised in rural New England and based in Chicago, IL, I draw from both urban and rural landscapes as shifting geographies in which questions of navigation, desire, and belonging emerge amid ecological and social precarity. I work through collecting, altering, and assembling found objects, industrial remnants, and foraged organic materials. These materials are selected not only for their physical properties and modes of construction, but also for the social, political, and personal histories they carry. Often sourced from my immediate surroundings, they are embedded within systems of production, extraction, and waste. Their reuse resists forms of disposability while addressing frameworks of environmental degradation, labor, and material excess. My process is iterative and often non-linear, shaped by acts of addition, subtraction, and spatial reconfiguration that offsets and unsettles function and meaning. Through this approach, objects and forms are transformed, and new relationships and meanings emerge. Underlying my work are intersecting concerns with ecological instability, the politics of material systems, and questions of queer representation and the social codings of desire. Through these frameworks, I explore the malleability of materials and forms as a way to think through how identities, environments, and cultural codes are constructed, disrupted, and reimagined.

Bio: Gary LaPointe Jr. ( 1991, USA ) graduated in 2016 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in Sculpture and was also awarded the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award ( 2016 ) from the International Sculpture Center. He received his BFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design and was also a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. LaPointe has exhibited nationally and internationally with select solo and group exhibitions at Roman Susan ( Chicago ) Randy Alexander Gallery ( Chicago ) Galerie B-312 ( Montréal ) LVL3 ( Chicago ) Heaven Gallery ( Chicago ) the Lunder Arts Center ( Cambridge ) Kunsthal Charlottenborg ( Copenhagen ) and at the Royal Academy of Arts ( London ). LaPointe also received a Purchase Award from the Working Artist Organization ( 2020 ) and was featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow ( 2019 ) published by Thames and Hudson and BEERS Gallery ( London ). He received a Fellowship residency from the Vermont Studio Center ( 2025 ) and also attended the Wassaic Projects Residency ( 2019 ). LaPointe currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.