About the Artists

• Participating Artists

  Michelle Grabner is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and a National Academician in the National Academy of Design. She is an artist, curator, and critic who contributes regularly to Artforum. With her husband, artist Brad Killam, she directs the artist-run exhibition spaces and residency: The Suburban (est. 1999) and The Poor Farm (est. 2008). Grabner cocurated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and was the Artistic Director for the inaugural 2018 FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial.

  Brad Killam has exhibited work in the United States and Europe since the early 1990s. He cofounded and currently codirects the artist-run spaces The Suburban and Poor Farm Exhibitions and Press. He received his MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago and is an Associate Professor of Art at College of DuPage.

  Mark Jeffery is a performance artist, choreographer, and curator. He is a Full Professor in Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). A former member of the Goat Island Performance Group, he cofounded the Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality in 2012. Since 2019, he has codirected the Living in the Play Residency at The Poor Farm.

  Kelly Kaczynski is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator working in the language of sculpture. Kaczynski is Professor, Adjunct at SAIC. Since 2019, she has codirected the Living in the Play Residency at The Poor Farm and, since 2022, the NIDO Residency in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy.

  Judd Morrissey is a writer and code artist creating poetic systems across electronic writing, internet art, and augmented reality. He is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a Fulbright Scholar’s Award. He is a Full Professor in Art and Technology / Sound Practices at SAIC.

  Kristin Mariani’s practice is an ongoing conversation between art and design. Through the craft of making clothes, she probes the historical and material underpinnings of labor. Her “Text Toiles” for this project address intimacy and language, questioning how gender is figured through fashion and place.

  James Sommerfeldt is a Chicago-based footwear design innovator and Cordwainer. His approach examines footwear as functional sculptural objects. His work has appeared at the MCA and the Guggenheim Museum Store. He is currently a lecturer of footwear design at SAIC.

  The Poor Farm is a not-for-profit art experiment and residency founded in 2008 at the former Waupaca County Poor Farm (built 1876) in Little Wolf, Wisconsin. Along with The Suburban, it serves as a critical site for supporting artists and experimental ideas. More information can be found at poorfarmexperiment.org.