Muña 2022 Cohort
Cohort Participants
Sarina Shane is a Chicago based writer, artist, and designer (who sometimes makes mixes). She’s interested in inspiring others to express themselves visually. Her work is based on a general curiosity surrounding space and context. She uses that lens to capture the world and challenge it to truly become multidimensional through documenting other black womxn, their practice (if applicable), and definitions of community in writing, photography, or through interactive installations. Community and alternative ways to disseminate information are top of mind. She aims to create resourceful content for people that take the train, for first-generation students that love alternate learning, everyday people. Written projects include profiles, reviews, photojournalism, and longer research pieces centered around new media local art history, womxn, and interiors as an extension of installation art. Using art, as a tool for social justice, her mediums help her connect and stimulate viewers to express themselves visually and inspect their power. Long-term interests include cooperative housing, visual communication, and process-based art.
Yi Chin Hsieh is a curator from Taipei, Taiwan and has been living and working in Miami since 2018. Her curatorial practice explores collaboration and artistic practice with artists. Hsieh’s research interests are in curatorial methods under the discussion of exhibition forms, collectiveness, and contemporary visual culture in response to the current time. Her practice aims to communicate the idea of blurring the line between the artist-as-curator and the curator-as-artist. Hsieh has realized several curatorial projects in the greater Miami area and institutions including the Wolfsonian Museum, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Spinello Projects, Laundromat Art Space, to name a few.
Darshita Jain is a Chicago-based poet, art critic, and arts administrator. Her work takes the shape of exhibition direction, art journalism, writing, performance, and non-profit arts administration. She has written for Chicago Reader, Newcity, The Adroit Journal, Arts Letters & Numbers, and was one of the founding Literary editors for Fnews Magazine, Chicago. She holds an MA in New Arts Journalism from the School of the Art Institute (2020) Darshita has been writing and developing tools to educate and build a critical lens to life and culture for the last 8 years. Darshita earned her Bachelor’s in Fashion and production from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, India. After studying and working in fashion for 2 years, Darshita started writing critically about the industry and labor exploitation. Darshita currently works as the Programming Lead at Woman Made Gallery, Chicago.
Published Article:
In defense of communal catharsis, whenever required: on the Foo Fighters’ “Best of You”
Rachel Dukes (she/her) investigates how art activates stillness, creating space for memories to interact with subsequent time. Through her exposure to the arts – specifically Black artists working across various modes of expression – she has explored her identity as a Black queer woman and furthered her personal understanding of her cultural history. Her creative practice focuses on writing and storytelling. Rachel is passionate about anchoring her artistic exploration of Black culture in community and accessibility. Rachel is based in Chicago and is originally from Grand Prairie, Texas. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Accounting from the University of Arkansas, with minors in African & African American Studies and Spanish. Since moving to Chicago, Rachel has worked professionally in corporate finance and has supported numerous non-profits across the Chicagoland area through volunteer work and pro-bono consulting.
Published Article:
BSA Gold on Crafting A Creative Path in Mysterious Times
Cristobal Alday (he/him) is a Queer Latinx curator and creative from the south side of Chicago. Graduated from Northwestern University with a B.A. in Latinx Studies and Art History, where he conducted his thesis project on how artists use tortillas as a form of resistance within their practice. He focuses on photography, and film particularly dealing with queerness, familial dynamics, and space. He is a current HATCH fellow at Chicago Artists Coalition, and a curatorial assistant at Johalla Projects as well as utilizing his room to curate exhibitions with works by local artists.
Emeline Boehringer is an emerging curator, writer, and art historian. She is currently the Gallery Assistant at Wrightwood 659, a non-commercial gallery in Chicago. She has previously held roles at DOCUMENT Gallery, the Smart Museum of Art, and Gallery Sabine in Chicago; CreativeTime in New York City; and the Art Museum at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She studied Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Chicago, and her work has been published in the Bowdoin College Journal of Art. She is interested in slow looking, art and labor, and images as a form of world-making. You can mostly find her cooking, reading, or walking by the lake.
Published Article:
Touch Grass: A Review of Liz’s Childhood Computer: 2003 – 2005 at Prairie
Public Program
Care & Criticism: An Art Writing Panel
Claire Voon & Barbara Calderón moderated by Kerry Cardoza
Cease celebratory write ups and myopic narratives;
Refute YT copy editing practices and style guides;
Art writing is patronage -matronage.
Watch art critics, editors, and journalists Claire Voon, Barbara Calderón, and Kerry Cardoza in conversation about the responsibility of art criticism, how to navigate art publishing, and how to approach art writing with care. From critiquing macro and micro publishing practices to encouraging more art writers in the field, watch the conversation with a Q&A at the end of the panel. This panel is the second and last public program for the Muña Art Writing 2022 Program.
Event Date: July 12, 2022
The inaugural pilot Muña season was conducted in summer 2022. Workshops and public programs were facilitated by Kerry Cardoza and in collaboration with Sixty Inches From Center. Cohort selection was juried by art writers, critics, and curators: Camille Bacon, Iris Colburn, Noah Hanna, Natasha Mijares, Wil Ruggiero, Alex Santana, Jen Torwudzo-Stroh, and Kerry Cardoza. Muña 2022 was funded by the Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund 2021.
Claire Voon is a writer and editor who has contributed to publications including Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, the New York Times, and Teen Vogue. Previously a staff writer at Hyperallergic and an assistant editor at Chicago magazine, she edits for Aperture and Borderless Magazine, a news outlet working to reimagine immigration journalism. She was born in Singapore and lives in Brooklyn.
Barbara Calderón is a writer, artist and founding member of the arts collective Colectiva Cósmica. She is currently faculty and an art librarian at the School of Visual Arts. She was previously assistant director of The Latinx Project at NYU and has collaborated with the Brooklyn Museum on Frida: Appearances Can be Deceiving and Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960 – 1985 exhibitions. Her art criticism has been published by Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, artnet, Art21, and Cultured Magazine. She was a recipient of the 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
Kerry Cardoza is a Chicago-based journalist who writes about art, culture, politics, and power. She is the art editor at Newcity, the punk columnist at Bandcamp Daily, and a member of Make Yourself Useful. She received her master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
Sixty Inches From Center is a collective of writers, editors, artists, curators, librarians, and archivists who publish writings and produce collaborative projects about artists, archival practice, and culture in the occupied lands known as Chicago and the Midwest.
