Walking on an Airy Road: Guest curated by Anna Kunz and Carie Lassman

Her first book, The Slanted Life Of Emily Dickinson (Andrews McMeel) was published in 2017. Her newest book, a collaboration with poet and classicist Anne Carson, is a comic-book version of Euripides’s classic The Trojan Women, published in 2021 (New Directions). This was a New York Times “Best Graphic Novel of 2021.”

Casey Chrzan’s gestural approach to painting and collage reflects his carefree attitude in the studio. His quick, wet on wet application of vibrant acrylics lends recurring subject matter – robots, flowers, basketballs, and family members – a sense of spontaneity and lightheartedness.

Abraham Cone (b. 1998, MI) is based in Brooklyn, NY and received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include "Means of Production" at Epiphany Center for the Arts (Chicago, IL), "Thread Count" at The Hole (New York, NY), and "Shelf Show" at Sawhorse Gallery (Chicago, IL).

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.

Sam Filicky’s work embodies the romanticism of traditional landscape painting and an appreciation for the beauty found in the natural world. Filicky’s primary inspirations include landscapes, seascapes, abstraction, and the joy of the creative process. His soft, atmospheric landscapes aspire to capture a particular feeling or tone, whether that of a particular season, element of nature, or hazy memory of a terrain once visited. He routinely alternates between painting and drawing, gradually building each composition through a layering of media on the surface. Filicky’s paintings are defined by bold brushstrokes – fluctuating between quick and gestural or long and meandering – and a wet on wet mixing of vibrant or muted acrylics.“I have a routine where I do drawing in the morning, painting in the afternoon. I would say I like both painting and drawing equally. Rotating. I like using paint and graphite, those are my number one materials.”

Holly Holmes is a painter, sculptor, artist and curator. She received a BFA in painting from Southern Illinois University and MFA in sculpture from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She makes abstract work from reacting to the world around her. She is teaching at Columbia College Chicago and SAIC. Holmes is a member of Videokaffe, an international art collective spanning locations in North America and Nordic countries.
Recently she has shown her work at, Gallery Andreas, Stamford, CN; Columbia College Chicago, Il; Galerie Herold, Bremen, Germany; Heaven Gallery, Chicago: Bert Green Gallery, Chicago; Riverside Art Center, Riverside, Il; Epiphany Art Center, Chicago; Ohklohomo; Chicago; Sluice expo, Colchester, UK; Material, Chicago; The Design Museum, Chicago; and Dominican University; River Forest.

Born and raised in Chicago, Alysha Kostelny currently lives on the Northwest Side. Kostelny’s approach to art-making is driven by experimentation, curiosity, and an exploration of various surfaces, textures, and applications of paint. She enjoys researching modern and contemporary artists, gleaning inspiration from myriad concepts and processes. Kostelny has a natural inclination toward hard-edge abstraction, though her work often straddles both abstraction and representation. Drawn to simplified organic forms and geometric shapes, she translates source imagery (often referencing art history, architecture, or the natural world) through reductive, bold color fields.

Julia Klein is an artist and publisher. She has most recently exhibited her work in Chicago at Patient Info, tête-á- tête-á-tête, Roman Susan, and Hyde Park Art Center. Since 2009 Klein has run Soberscove Press, which publishes books about art and culture that often foreground archival materials, process, and collaboration.

Ingrid Yi-Chen Lu (b. 2000, Taipei, Taiwan) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores material construction, psychological fortification, and drifting. Drawing inspiration from city grids, mass-produced ephemera, and architectural forms, she creates installations and tactile painting-objects that merge paint, ribbon, cardboard, and found objects. Her work has been included in exhibitions at White Columns (New York, NY), Adams and Ollman (Portland, OR), Morgan Lehman (New York, NY), National Arts Club (New York, NY), Romance (Pittsburgh, PA), Iowa (Brooklyn, NY), and Gern en Regalia (New York, NY). Lu holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design.

The artwork of Laura McManus is both arcane and revealing. Working quietly, her artwork speaks boldly for itself. McManus frequently uses both hands simultaneously, while creating her mixed media paintings. Punctuated with a clever combination of intuition and willful choice, she combines mediums and mark making styles into expressive statements for the viewer to dive into. Each piece she creates is a product of great patience and dedication. Layer after layer is methodically applied and often stripped away, only to be replaced by something new. McManus’s soft line work flows in and out of the layers of her drawings, creating an air of playful mystery, much like the artist herself.

Aya Nakamura was born in Japan and educated in France and the United States. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown at venues in the United States and abroad with recent shows at 4th Ward Project Space and Western Exhibitions, both in Chicago. Other venues include Secrist Beach in Chicago, IL; The Hangar and Dawawine in Beirut, Lebanon; Supa Salon in Istanbul, Turkey; Monira Foundation in Jersey City, NJ; MPSTN in Fox River Grove, IL.; Heaven Gallery in Chicago, IL; and The Merwin Gallery at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, IL. She is the recipient of the DCASE Individual Artist Program from the City of Chicago, the Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, and the George and Ann Siegel Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nakamura is represented by Western Exhibitions and currently lives and works in Chicago.

As a non-verbal artist, Hubert Posey utilizes his art-making process as a tool for connection and communication with others. With the help of support staff and volunteers, Hubert builds multidimensional sculptures, amassing an array of materials collected from around the studio. His additive method of layering creates finished objects that are otherworldly. He can often be found laughing as he paints, opening himself up to the world around him and to the community of the studio. Hubert’s process is so intrinsically linked with his own personal exploration that his progress is a beautiful thing to observe. Born in Chicago in 1964, Posey’s work was recently included in Out 2021 at Galerie C.O.A. in Montreal, Do U Dig at Good Weather, and previously in In Good Company at the Chicago Cultural Center and All Well and Good at Circle Contemporary, among other exhibitions.

Born in 1972, Brian Reed’s art practice is guided by his inquisitive nature. The contemplative quality of his artwork extends a feeling of intimacy to the viewer, as we observe the result of his exploration of the people who inspire him and the animals that intrigue him. Reed experiments fearlessly with materials and continually welcomes new challenges. This is most evident in his three-dimensional works constructed with a variety of mediums. The resulting forms are at once brutal and elegant. Brian’s affinity for acquiring new skills extends to teaching. Reed is a member of the agency’s educator track, and shares art skills in a variety of settings. His work has recently been included in Perceptions of Flow: Formation at Evanston Art Center and Text(ure(al) guest curated by Matt Bodett.

Erol Scott Harris II works across painting, collage, and installation. His practice investigates the floor and the ground as sites where material histories, labor, and memory accumulate. Drawing from his family’s history in flooring and railroad work in Chicago, Harris works with layered surfaces and industrial materials to examine how built environments and infrastructures quietly shape movement, labor, and value.
Harris received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2025, where he was awarded the Dean’s Prize and the Golden Paint Award. He previously earned a BFA from Columbia College Chicago. His work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, including presentations with Perrotin (New York), Cam Contemporarie (Chicago), Chili Art Projects (London), and the Afro-American Cultural Center in New Haven.
His work has been recognized through awards and residencies including the Newcity Breakout Artist award (2023), the TSA CHI/NY Residency (2022), and the ACRE Residency (2020). He is currently developing a new body of work in collaboration with SkyART in Chicago, extending his studio practice through public programs and community engagement.
Harris is drawn to the surfaces that hold memory that often go unnoticed. This inquiry grows from his family’s history: on his mother’s side, his family migrated from Mexico, and on his father’s side, from the American South, where traditions of building, making, and care converge, shaping how lives and spaces take form and how materials are used, reused, and carried forward.

Chris Viau was born in 1977 and currently resides in the city of Evanston. Chris’ work straddles the line between abstract and representational. This is due to his planned, yet dynamic, brush and line work. Upon first glance one sees a blend of colors and textures that reveal themselves as lush landscapes or weathered coastlines. He approaches art making with a high level of enthusiasm and is eager to experiment with new techniques. Chris is also a published poet. He has published four illustrated poetry books: Chicago Seasons, Being in Harmony with Nature, My Own Ways Through This Life, and Autumn in the Northwest. Viau’s art has been featured on studio merchandise and ArtLifting. Recent exhibitions include Perceptions of Flow: Movement at Evanston Art Center and our annual guest juried exhibition Perennial Hug.

Lucy Walsh was born in Chicago in 1998. Most inspired by popular culture, her influences span television, fashion, music, fast food, and horror tropes. Particularly drawn to slasher films, she mentions It, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th as favorites. Walsh usually works quickly from memory and imagination, but will also sometimes incorporate elements from reference imagery. Accentuated by meandering lines that form organic shapes and vibrant, whimsical patterns, her paintings and drawings waver between abstraction and representational. Walsh often works in sketchbooks, preferring the portable format, with each representing distinct series of drawings. She also spends time writing fictional mystery/horror stories, citing Stephen King as an inspiration.