Selva Aparicio (The Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation Artadia Award 2022 recipient)

Selva Aparicio was born and raised in the natural park of Barcelona, Spain, where she found solace in nature from a young age and cultivated a profound interest in the ephemeral, as inspired by the natural world around her. 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 in solo and group exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago; Yale Center for British Art; Can Mario Museum, Spain; CRUSH Curatorial, New York; The Kyoto International Craft Center, Japan; Instituto Cervantes, New York; and the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona. 

For Artadia’s booth, Aparicio will be debuting three recently finished pieces she began in 2021. During the beginning of the pandemic, Aparicio would roam cemetaries in Chicago, collecting materials along the way. In addition to the natural elements she found, she came across a teddy bear that had been discarded, once used as an offering at a child’s grave. Now, she covers the discarded items in dandelions – as a reminder of the delicacy and decay of life.

Azadeh Gholizadeh (2022 LeRoy Neiman and Janet Byrne Neiman Foundation Artadia Award recipient)

Azadeh Gholizadeh is an artist and educator, born in Tehran, Iran. Gholizadeh explores the relationship between light, landscape, and different perspectives in her artistic practice. Her focus lies in the connection between memory and the natural environment, which can lead to new discoveries and explorations instead of being a mere reflection of what has been lost.

For Artadia’s booth, Gholizadeh will share three new works inspired by photos she took in Wisconsin and Michigan. In this series, she explores monochromatic color palettes in an effort to examine how colors can interact and shift in different contexts, much like our own perspectives.

Maryam Taghavi (The Joyce Foundation Artadia Award recipient 2022)

Maryam Taghavi is an artist and educator. She was born in Tehran and currently resides in Chicago. Taghavi’s work on language and abstraction in recent years has coalesced with research on Islamic occult practices. Unlike the traditional hierarchies of the belief system, the female agency conjures magic and steers the imagined invisible.

Sigils are forms which have spiritual but no linguistic resonance, intend to tap into the hidden knowledge of the world by arranging Arabic letters and numbers. Taghavi will present two works made at the beginning of her exploration of Simya, the practice of making sigils. Taghavi reincarnates sigils in a range of disciplines such as painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, publication, and installation to release the movement withheld in these forms.