Andrea Carlson (2021 Awardee)

Andrea Carlson (b. 1979) is a visual artist currently living in Chicago, Illinois. Through painting and drawing, Carlson cites entangled cultural narratives and institutional authority relating to objects based on the merit of possession and display. Current research activities include Indigenous Futurism and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the British Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. In addition to receiving the Artadia Chicago Award in 2021, Carlson was a 2008 McKnight Fellow and a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant recipient. In 2020, Carlson helped form the Center for Native Futures, the only Native art center in Chicago. She is currently represented by Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

For Artadia’s booth, Andrea will be debuting two pieces from her new series L’Assomption Sash for Carrying Things That No Longer Exist, representing the L’Assomption sashes once used in the fur trade between the French and Anishinaabe people that are now a contemporary signifier for Metis identity. These paintings stage colonization as an ongoing historic analog process and decolonization as an imaginative process.

Melissa Leandro (2021 Awardee)

Melissa Leandro (b. 1989, Miami, FL) is an artist who works between the media of drawing, painting, and textiles, currently based in Chicago, IL. Leandro’s work is a mirror into the mundane and routine moments of daily life, utilizing components that manifest thoughts of family history, remembered childhood fantasies and nostalgic ephemera. Bringing together processes of heavy embroidery, stitch work, appliqué, dye, her highly tactile works are all specific to her hybrid culture as a first-generation US citizen. Leandro is the recipient of various awards including the Craft Fellowship Grant, from the Illinois Arts Council (2020), the Wingate Artist Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center Residency (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include ANDREW RAFACZ (Chicago, IL), The University Club of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and the Union League Club of Chicago (Chicago, IL). Recent group exhibitions include University of Nebraska (Omaha, NE), DePaul Art Museum (Chicago, IL), and MCC Art Gallery (Mesa, AZ). Leandro received her MFA in 2017 and her BFA in 2012, both from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery.

For Artadia’s booth, Melissa Leandro will share two pieces titled Rainbow Dew (2021) and Azureus Jungle (2022), which demonstrate her vibrantly layered aesthetic, incorporating the traditional and non-traditional processes of stitching, quilting, weaving and batik dyeing.

Eliza Myrie (2020 Awardee)

Eliza Myrie is a visual artist who lives and works in Chicago, IL. She is committed to examinations of dimension, volume, and representation. Through various media that spans sculpture and printmaking, Myrie’s work explores site and labor through generational inheritance, gender, and authorship. In her own words, “Subjectivity can be lost/gained through physical and conceptual processes and the defining patriarchal model of authority is something to unravel.”

Eliza will debut two new prints titled Survived and Compete Compare, developed in the past year as part of her ongoing forays into labor and gender issues referencing her personal intergenerational history.

Nate Young (2021 Awardee)

Nate Young is a multidisciplinary artist currently working in Chicago, IL. Working across media in a manner that challenges traditional modes of artistic production, Young creates works that engage with issues of race and racialization. He explores the systems and objects that impact one’s beliefs. Often in his work, Young addresses theological themes through text, diagrams, or architectural elements. Young strips away any specific content, however, leaving behind a universal lexicon of primordial signs and symbols– arrows, circles, grids, and negative spaces– that strongly suggest meaning without in fact conveying it; a profound void, at once empty and full, that invites the viewer’s activation. His works contain a quiet gravitas and austerity seemingly at odds with their meticulously hand-crafted nature, prompting a post-minimalist interrogation of authority, material, and the artist’s hand. 

His work is in notable collections, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; Young received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and his B.A. in Visual Arts Education, Northwestern College, Saint Paul, MN. He is currently represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, where he will have a solo exhibition opening on April 23.

For Artadia’s booth, Nate will be sharing two drawings from the series Casting, which are quiet translations of a family myth through the artist’s own experience, body, and memory—by employing the ritual of divination through the casting of bones.