Artists First Conversations Program Booklet (October)

ARTISTS FIRST CONVERSATIONS

Artists First: 25 Years of Studio Art at Thresholds presents the range of practices engaged by artists connected with Thresholds, a community-based mental health services program that “provides home, health, and hope” for Illinoisians with mental health and substance use conditions.

This exhibition focuses on the diverse creativities, talents, capacities and capabilities Thresholds affiliated artists exemplify and connects their work within the breadth of contemporary arts practices currently found in the U.S. Midwest today. It further celebrates the donation made to support artist programs in 1997, and afterward, by the Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner Foundation, helping build forward creative making and professional art practice as opportunities for Thresholds’ artist members.

Artwork credit: Krishaun Williams, Self Portrait, 30” x 20” Color pencil on illustration board

All panels will be held in-person at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater from 10 a.m.–12:30 p.m. and via livestream from 10:30 a.m.–12 p.m. (noon) Central Time.

The Relationship Between Art Making and Mental Health

PANELISTS

Dr. Scott J. Hunter (moderator)

Kathy Osler, LCPC, ATR Kenneth Williams Nina Katschnig Andrew Brower

Dr. Scott J. Hunter (moderator)

Dr. Scott J. Hunter is the curator of Artists First: 25 Years of Studio Art at Thresholds, the exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center concurrent with this symposium series. Hunter is a clinical and developmental psychologist specializing in pediatric neuropsychology and is an expert on the development and support of persons with neurodevelopmental disabilities and persistent and chronic mental illness. An avid collector of contemporary artworks, chair of the advisory board for the DePaul Art Museum and an independent curator, Hunter has a deep engagement with art making by persons with neurodiversity, about which he has been published in popular and scientific publications.

Kathy Osler, LCPC, ATR

Kathy Osler has been working in mental health for 30 years, consistently developing new ways to utilize creative expression in her mental health practice. In her art therapy and counseling practice, through contracting with behavioral health organizations and private practice, she has consistently provided individual art therapy, group art therapy and opportunities for individuals to connect with the greater art community in Chicago.

Kenneth Williams

Kenneth Williams believes his gift as an artist gives him the opportunity to be an agent of positive change. He uses his artistic talents to reimagine some of Chicago’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods on the South and West sides of the city. Williams receives inspiration from vacant lots or boarded up neighborhoods, from which he projects a world of beauty, intricacy and vibrancy.

Nina Katschnig

Nina Katschnig studied education science and psychology at the University Klagenfurt, Austria, and graduated in 1997. Three years later, she became managing director of gallery gugging. Specialized on the “Artists from Gugging” and art brut, she is curating exhibitions, giving talks and publishing articles internationally.

Andrew Brower

Andrew Brower is celebrating his 15th year at Thresholds. Although having no education in art, Brower has found creative expression as a means toward recovery and as an outlet to build resiliency, both personally and professionally. In his earlier days at Thresholds, Brower encouraged the development of wellness activities at the agency for staff. In his work today, Brower finds himself overseeing a select group of therapists practicing Art Therapy at Thresholds.

The Ethics of Exhibiting Artists with Neurodevelopmental and Mental Health Disabilities

Savneet Talwar (moderator)

Irene Haynes Katherine Jentleson Laura Bickford

Savneet Talwar (moderator)

Savneet Talwar is a professor in the graduate art therapy and counseling program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her current research examines feminist politics, critical theories of difference, social justice, craft cultures and questions of resistance. Using an interdisciplinary approach, she is interested in community-based art practices; cultural trauma; and performance art and public cultures as they relate to art therapy theory, practice and pedagogy. She is the author of Art Therapy for Social Justice: Radical Intersection and has published in Arts in Psychotherapy, Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association and Gender Issues in Art Therapy.

PANELISTS

Vincent Uribe

Irene Haynes

Irene Lenore Haynes is a team player that looks to other artists for inspiration. She admired artwork before she started making her own. Haynes is 44 years old, and she is from Chicago, Ill. She also writes poetry.

Katherine Jentleson

Dr. Katherine Jentleson is the Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art and Co-Executive Editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Since joining the High in 2015, she has overseen eight exhibitions—including the Nellie Mae Rowe exhibition currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum—and strategically grown the collection by more than six hundred objects.

Laura Bickford

Laura Bickford is Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, where she oversees the Art Preserve and related exhibitions at the Arts Center. She has had a lifelong love of all things handmade, embellished, encrusted, fried, miniature and oversized, which has led to her professional pursuit of the vernacular, the extraordinary every day, and objects created on the margins of culture.

Vincent Uribe

Vincent Uribe is an artist and creative community builder based in Chicago, Ill. He is the Founding Director of LVL3, an artist-run exhibition space and online publication launched in 2010. In 2013, Uribe joined the team at Arts of Life to help expand opportunities for artists with disabilities. His work includes shows with the Chicago Cultural Center, Art on the MART, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, among many others. Uribe serves as a founding board member for Equity Arts.

How Artists with Disabilities Fit into the Greater Art World

PANELISTS

Faheem Majeed (moderator)

Cherylle Booker Leslie Baum Mary Trent

Tom di Maria

Faheem Majeed (moderator)

Faheem Majeed (American, b. 1976) is an artist, educator, curator and community facilitator. He blends his unique experience as an artist, non-profit administrator and curator to create works that focus on institutional critique and exhibitions that leverage collaboration to engage his immediate and the broader community in meaningful dialogue. As its former executive director (2007–2011), Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center serves as Majeed’s primary muse. Majeed also serves as a co-director and founder of Floating Museum. Majeed received his BFA from Howard University and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at UIC.

Cherylle Booker

Cherylle Booker is a ceramic artist and painter. Booker takes inspiration from her personal and emotional life, as well as Greek mythology. Combining these vast and expansive ideas and emotions, Booker translates these ideas into her pieces to create a discussion around universally shared experiences. Booker describes her work as a therapeutic process.

Leslie Baum

Leslie Baum is a Chicago-based painter and educator. She works with artists at the Thresholds Bridge South location, founding its Open Art Studio 25 years ago with support from The Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner Foundation. Her painting practice is invitational in nature and is informed by her 25 years as a museum educator at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mary Trent

Mary Trent is an Assistant Professor of Art and Architectural History at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Her research focuses on issues of identity in American and African American visual culture, including ways marginalized figures have used art and media to critique dominant visual norms to better represent themselves and their worlds.

Tom di Maria

Tom di Maria has served as Creative Growth Art Center’s Director since 2000. As Director, he has developed partnerships with museums, galleries and international design companies to help bring Creative Growth’s artists with disabilities fully into the contemporary art world. Prior to this position, he served as Assistant Director of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, at UC Berkeley. Tom contributed a chapter on the history or art and disability centers in Non-Conformers: A New History of Self-Taught Artists from Yale University Press. In 2019, he was awarded the Visionary Award by the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

ABOUT INTUIT

Founded in 1991, Intuit is a premier museum of outsider and self-taught art, defined as work created by artists who faced marginalization, overcame personal odds to make their artwork, or who did not, or sometimes could not, follow a traditional path of art making, often using materials at hand to realize their artistic vision.

Above: Installation of the exhibition Roman Villarreal: South Chicago Legacies at Intuit. Photo by Cheri Eisenberg.

SPONSORED BY KIYOKO LERNER & THE NATHAN AND KIYOKO LERNER FOUNDATION WITH ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FROM THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS AND INTUIT: THE CENTER FOR INTUITIVE AND OUTSIDER ART • HELD IN TANDEM WITH THE CHICAGO CULTURAL CENTER EXHIBITION ARTISTS FIRST: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF STUDIO ART AT THRESHOLDS • CO-PRESENTED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS AND SPECIAL EVENTS