Hail Mary: Guest Curated by Margaret Crowley and Tim Callahan

Omar Abulsheikh’s works develop slowly as he carefully layers paint to achieve his desired effect. As a result, his paintings are identifiable by saturated pigments, heavy linework on a textured surface. “I like to draw. I like myself. Happy going.” Abulsheikh’s most recent works feature nebulous, spray-painted backgrounds that are reminiscent of star fields. He then layers narratives upon them, pulling from a rich sense of humor that shines through his artwork. “It’s a painting. It’s about something. People who fight and dance.”

Marcelo Aguilar makes paintings and works on paper that utilize a myriad of references. The things, people, and places he visits in his daily life; become imagined landscapes where scale, pictorial space, and representation are upended by dynamic figure ground relationships and thick passages of brightly colored paint to a surreal effect.

Born in 1994, Renata Berdes’ persistence and focus in pursuit of her artistic outcomes is indomitable. Themes, or what she often calls “obsessions,” are pursued with much intention. When viewed collectively, her sculptural works suggest the assemblage of a new space that plays with scale and permanence. Individually her sculptures are imbued with the magic of what is possible; first there was nothing, and now by Berdes’ hands and imagination the object exists. Found objects are unified through an intimate connection with the sense of touch that manifests in rich textures. Berdes invites us to see the world from her perspective and delights viewers with her reinterpretation of what is. Berdes’ work has been exhibited at the Outsider Art Fair in NYC, Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin, and is in the permanent collection at the University of Wisconsin Waisman Foundation. “I really like art because you can see everything through art. I got plexiglass for the door because I can see through it. I can see stuff in there. I really like what I made. I was using some string for that water. I like that box that you gave me. It was a good idea, using that box”

Veronica “Ronnie” Cuculich was born April 4, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up in Dixon, Illinois with two sisters, her mother, and father. As a young woman, Ronnie attended Dixon State School. After living in state-operated institutions for many years, Ronnie finally got to live in the community with her friends. She worked in a sheltered workshop, but art-making was her true calling. Ronnie had been drawing and making crafts her whole life. She was the inspiration behind the Arts of Life studio and helped open it in January of 2000. While Ronnie was an untrained artist, she worked with various media and was always drawn to experimentation, creating mixed media works, drawings, and paintings in both oil and acrylic. In Ronnie’s words, “The studio is perfect because I get to paint!” After practicing as an artist for 10 years, and working to open two studios, Ronnie passed away in 2010. Watch the 45 min documentary about Veronica and the founding of Arts of Life on our youtube page.

Danny Frownfelter continually maintains a zealous and independently driven art practice. Inspired by dramatic narratives, his subject matter often explores dichotomies of religion and the destructive forces of super villains. His flair for the theatrical is realized using high contrast, bold brushstrokes and subjects gazing directly at the viewer. “I am making art 6 years. My heart. It’s good and ticking.” Frownfelter’s sketching practice continues to thrive, and he consistently creates lush and detailed sketches prior to embarking on a final piece. His marks are frequently visible in the finished piece, offering clues about the enthusiasm of his making practice. “Lots of people love my art. People look at my paint. Make me happy. Your art [is] supposed to make you happy. My life.” Frownfelter is also a singer for the studio band, Van Go Go.

Amanda Gantner possesses a tenacious dedication to expanding her art practice. Experimentation and risk taking in her artwork has paid off in dividends as witnessed by the broad level of success she has attained across mediums. “The Mind. It takes time. When I first came here my voice was down. Now it is better. A lot better because the voice is loud.” The subtle nuances of light and meticulous blending inhabit her impressionistic drawings, while her lively abstract paintings burst with energy through vibrantly contrasting hues. “Get messy. More splatter. I don’t care. I want to do that. It wakes you up.”

Born in 1984, Ted Gram-Boarini is at once a visual artist and musician, and his preferred modes of artistic expression are mutually influential. This is witnessed in the mesmerizing rhythm of his brush strokes, and in the artistry of the lyrics he has written as a member of the North Shore studio band, Van Go Go. Gram-Boarini reimagines music and movie references into acrylic paintings on canvas. Distinctively, his introspective nature and personal connection to the reference always shine through. Gram-Boarini allows us to see him through his work, while leaving space for the viewer’s personal reverie. Ted is also a member of the agency’s educator track and has given artist talks in other community spaces. His work has been included in Spirits Spirits guest curated by Eli Greene and Devin T. Mays and Perceptions of Flow: Movement at the Evanston Art Center. “The weirder the better. I like being out there with the titles I do. I want all these images I use as reference to show who I am as a person and where I get ideas from. I use the image and then kind of abstract from that. It’s how I hold on to the image in my head and then make it as abstract as I can.”

Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and a curator based in Chicago and Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has also held teaching appointments at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art; Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts—Bard College; Yale University School of Art; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine.

Grabner is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2018 National Academician in the National Academy of Design, a 2024 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters Fellow, and a 2025 Nohl Fellow. Major museum exhibitions curated by Grabner include the 2014 Whitney Biennial and the inaugural 2018 FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. In 2021 she co-curated Sculpture Milwaukee with Theaster Gates. In 2024 she curated 50 Paintings, a survey of contemporary international painting at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Her work is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MUDAM - Musée d’Art Moderne Luxembourg; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA; Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, WI; Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, NY; Bates College, Lewiston, Maine; The John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; Art Omi, Ghent, NY; among other public collections.

Grabner, along with artist Brad Killam runs the artist-run project spaces, The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI (est. 1999) and The Poor Farm, Little Wolf, WI (est. 2008).

Ellen Hanson (b.1992) is an artist from Chicago, IL. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA in 2021 and BA in Painting and Art History at Bennington College, Bennington, VT in 2014. Her recent solo exhibitions include Swimmers, Care of Gallery, Winnetka, IL, Battle of the Carmens, Smart Objects, Los Angeles, CA, and Kiss and Cry, Naranjo 141, Mexico City, MX. Hanson currently lives and works in Mexico City, MX.

Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1949, Stefan Harhaj joined the Chicago Studio in 2007. As an artist driven by process, repetition, and an interest in the natural world, Harhaj layers color and form to create idyllic landscapes populated by decoratively stylized imagery - chirping birds, perky tulips and daisies, ruffly clouds within clouds, and singular almond-shaped leaves that appear to float mid-air. Working across painting, drawing, and collage, his compositions are usually anchored by arches, multicolored grids, or radiating square patterns he describes as boxes, and given charmingly descriptive titles like Trees + Flowers + Leaves + Birds or Box Box Box Box Box Box Fence. He also often incorporates elements typical of classic Americana such as stars, American flags, county fairs, and picket fences. Using these recurring motifs, archetypal symbols, and patterns, he has devised an easily recognizable aesthetic reminiscent of folk art, and artists like William L. Hawkins and Morris Hirschfield. Previous exhibitions include Spirit Spirits guest curated by Eli Greene and Devin T. Mays, Cordially Invited VII at Make Studio in Baltimore, With a Little Help from My Friends guest curated by Megan Foy and Julian Van Der Moere, Bouquet guest curated by Noel Mercado, and If a Mountain Could Love guest curated by Cody Tumblin, among others.

Anna Horvath. I was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1954. I immigrated to the US in 1974, completing BFA, 1979 and MFA, 1981, degrees at The School of The Art Institute. I participated in various group shows over the years and had 3 solo shows during the past seven years. I maintained my studio practice while working mostly full time till retiring in 2020. My objects tend to have a dada-Bauhaus inspired minimalist, modular sensibility bordering on geometric abstraction. Drawing feeds my work. Meditation and a childhood spent in Hungary influence my approach and vision. My painted wood sculptures divide and enclose space in a dynamic fashion.

Aaron Kleeblatt (b. 1974 Poland) is a prolific artist whose portfolio is both sharp and vibrant. His work can be identified by his minimalist approach to portraits- many being of American musicians or celebrities. “Musicians and politicians, those are my favorite kind of people to draw. I just like them. They are my favorite personalities—vibrant personalities. Drawing the figures. Painting them.” His artworks are minimal by design and then energized with color palettes reminiscent of pop art. A movie buff, Kleeblatt has been known to say “movies are my life”. This cinematic influence is witnessed through dramatic contrast and the deliberate character building in his works. “It diverts me away from everyday life. Because then I don’t have to worry about racism, politics and all of the other stuff going on in the world.” Kleeblatt has been a member of the North Shore studio’s curating team since 2018. Aaron was the North Shore Studio Artist of the Month in August 2018, and his artwork appeared in our 2019 agency calendar.

Rebecca (Becky) Kubica’s artwork is a reckoning with personal life and fantasy. A natural storyteller, she creates artistic narratives of herself alongside friends, family and fictional characters from the silver screen. Postures and expressions are carefully constructed and emphasized to support her narratives. “I love it. I can make any drawings I want. I love that I make the own names from my life. I made it my own.” Kubica has a methodical sketching practice in which she works out all of the details in advance of her final piece to construct her ideal composition. Fields of tightly fitted, angled shapes fit together to form a quilt-like background of highly saturated pigments. “I do this well. It’s my favorite and my feeling.”


Harry Kuttner (b. Chicago, IL) Artist living and working in Chicago. Knee-high in a marsh. Hands on wood and clay.

Born in 1969, Christianne Msall has been a member of Arts of Life’s Chicago studio since 2008. Always a strong self-advocate, she’s dedicated to both her personal and professional development. Msall’s meticulous graphite and colored pencil drawings are a vibrant marriage of intuitive shapes and symbols, primarily inspired by her spirituality. Using a kaleidoscopic array of colors, she spontaneously articulates the detailed patterns and recurring motifs that appear across her work – crosses, drooping flowers, hearts, wine glasses, and candles. Recent exhibitions include Wake Me Up, Pantheon, and Dance Dance Dance at Circle Contemporary. “When I look at my work, I see how happy I am, my positivity. When others look, they see how wonderful I am, that I have good ideas and good techniques. I’m very proud of myself.”

Operating from his studio in Chicago, Ed Oh (b. 1992) is a visual artist from Los Angeles. Oh’s work concretizes terminals between material and virtual spaces. His drawings, paintings, and sculptures carry mystic tones found in today’s abstract orthodoxies of interfaced technology, language, and image. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Riverside.

Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1966 but spent most of his childhood in the Philippines. Pfeiffer relocated to New York in 1990, where he attended Hunter College and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Pfeiffer’s groundbreaking work in video, sculpture, and photography uses recent computer technologies to dissect the role that mass media plays in shaping consciousness.

In a series of video works focused on professional sports events—including basketball, boxing, and hockey—Pfeiffer digitally removes the bodies of the players from the games, shifting the viewer’s focus to the spectators, sports equipment, or trophies won. Presented on small LCD screens and often looped, these intimate and idealized video works are meditations on faith, desire, and a contemporary culture obsessed with celebrity. Many of Pfeiffer’s works invite viewers to exercise their imaginations or project their own fears and obsessions onto the art object. Several of Pfeiffer’s sculptures include eerie, computer-generated recreations of props from Hollywood thrillers, such as Poltergeist, and miniature dioramas of sets from films that include The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror.

Pfeiffer is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and was the inaugural recipient of the Bucksbaum Award, given by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2000). In 2002, Pfeiffer was an artist-in-residence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. In 2003, a traveling retrospective of his work was organized by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s List Visual Arts Center and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Andrew Sloan is a Detroit native known for his elaborate drawings of muscle cars, urban architecture, and sports icons. Often informed by an extensive knowledge of the auto industry and aspiration to capture the “Motown spirit”, his vision and style remain cohesive across his body of work while referencing disparate interests and subject matter. Sloan’s distinct aesthetic is one of incredible detail and careful execution, with thoughtful compositions often breaking the borders of his substrates. Relationships found in nature or within urban landscapes are depicted with subtleties deduced through contemplative observation. Alongside the dynamism and compelling distortion unique to his work, each drawing evokes a diligent, meditative quality reflecting the patience and attention invested in his creative process. Sloan was recently featured in Hyperallergic. “I did a lot of drawings when I was in elementary school, maybe around 1985 or ’86. I read about cars in magazines, Hot Rod and Petersen’s 4-Wheel and Off-Road. I made art a bit in vocational school, but really didn’t get into it until coming to Chicago. I’ve also been a fan of building model cars since I was a kid. I definitely like General Motors cars. They have a lot of hard torque engines and beautiful looking designs. I look at pictures in magazines, old commercials on YouTube, movies, or TV shows. I don’t work on a drawing real fast, just take my time to get the body design right while looking at the picture. I put ideas and details together from my mind, kind of like a photographic memory.”

Tim Stone was born in Park Ridge in 1973, where he grew up living with his family. Over the years, Stone has created an expansive and cohesive body of work across media, including graphite, watercolor, and acrylic. For the past few years he has focused primarily on grayscale drawings of loose grids in graphite, with titles that hint at personal inspirations. Focused and methodical in his practice, he maintains a diligent studio routine and steadfast artistic vision informed by concepts of abstraction. Stone’s process is driven by labor-intensive, repetitive mark-making that burnishes the graphite and slowly wears away the surface of the paper over time. He’s also an active member of the curatorial committee, assisting guest curators with exhibitions at Circle Contemporary featuring studio artists alongside artists from the broader contemporary art community. “I start drawing squares with a B pencil. Then I keep drawing over them until they become glossy and thick. The B pencil helps the graphite become bolder and shinier, then some of it fades away.”

Candace Turner is one of the West Town studios newest artists, having joined since 2024.

Mary Eleanor Wallace is an artist/nurse/organizer based in Chicago.

Born in 1970, Maria Vanik is a lifelong Chicagoan. While she has an extensive background in experimenting with fiber and sculpture materials, she’s currently focused on a prolific studio practice based in drawing. Vanik expands on references ranging from found imagery to pop culture to personal memories through the inclusion of patterns and vibrant colors, paired with a distinct approach to symbolism and mark-making. She has been a member of Arts of Life’s Chicago studio since 2017.  “I like to make artwork. The colors are very very bright. I like to use markers to draw raindrops, a rainbow, a tree. Next time I will do it different. I like to start with a white blank background. I like to use bright colors with dark colors. I like to use a lot of them, and mix them together.”