Session (51) Artist Talks

Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, (born 1996, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an interdisciplinary artist with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recently a recipient of the Drawing a Blank Artist Grant, the Leslie Lohman Museum Fellowship, the Lighthouse Works Fellowship (2022) and the Bemis Center Residency (2022) program. Jesús Hilario-Reyes has exhibited/screened both nationally and internationally, most notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Black Star Film Festival (Philadelphia, PN), Mana Contemporary (Chicago, IL), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Rudimento (Quito, ECUA) and Parasol Unit (London,UK). While situating their practice at the crossroads of sonic performance, land installation, and expanded cinema, their iterative works examine carnival and rave culture throughout the West; to take on a necessary remedial approach to the effects of ‘destierro’. Hilario-Reyes’ practice is largely concerned with the impossibility of the Black body, and the failures of mechanical optics.

Alexandra Kleeman is the author of the novel Something New Under the Sun, Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2022. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others, and other writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, VOGUE, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, Djerassi, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is an Assistant Professor at the New School and her second novel, Something New Under the Sun, named one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of 2021, was published in August by Hogarth Press and Fourth Estate (UK).

Stephanie H. Shih explores the material relics of migration and colonialism through the lens of the Asian American diaspora. Her painted ceramic sculptures examine the relationship between cultural interchange, consumerism, and identity in immigrant communities. Shih has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and at the Syracuse University Art Museum. Her work has been reviewed by the LA Times, Hyperallergic, and W Magazine, and received support from the American Museum of Ceramic Arts, Silver Art Projects, and Lighthouse Works. Activism is central to the Shih's practice, and she’s raised over $100,000 for marginalized communities experiencing instability related to home through her art and platform.

Emily Lee Luan is the author of 回 / Return, a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A former Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, Best New Poets 2019, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Newark.