Collaborative Artists

A.Martinez (she/her) is a poet, visual artist, mother, and organizer living in Chicago. Her work explores family, rituals, nature, and the body. Alyssa’s social practice involves participatory community gatherings including those for mothers in the arts. She also works as an arts administrator for music performance organizations.

Image description: A.Martinez, a mother with light brown skin and a short curly dark brown afro in a white short sleeved linen dress stands facing to the right in front of a white bed sheet backdrop. Her five year old, Asher, with light brown skin and upper back length curly dark brown hair with no shirt and light gray sweatpants stands behind her back and wraps his arms around her neck, where they hold hands in front of her chest. Their faces touch at the cheekbone. They both have their heads turned to look directly into the camera with pleasant semi-smiling faces, their skin glowing from the late afternoon June sunlight.

Photo by Chelsea Alexandra.

Abena Motaboli is a Basotho – Ghanian Interdisciplinary artist, educator, and writer based in Chicago. She grew up in Lesotho, Southern Africa before moving to the U.S where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at Columbia College Chicago. Her practice is interdisciplinary, experimental, and deeply rooted in a love of land, nature, and storytelling through the plants.

Image description: Abena Motaboli stands in a wheat field in front of a lake wearing a yellow sweater and black pants. She smiles looking directly at the viewer with one hand outstretched touching the plants next to her. Photo was taken by Kristie Kahns for Sixty Inches From the Center.

AJ was born and raised in “D.C. proper,” and is currently based in Chicago using performance practices, sound, video, movement, theatre and writing to share experiences living in a Black body. AJ holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Bachelor of Arts with a minor in creative writing from the University of Maryland, College Park and has also studied at The New School. A.J. hopes that all the memories and histories that are said to have “too many Black people” are told and retold again.

Angel Bat Dawid is a Black American Traditional Music Composer, Improviser, Clarinetist, Pianist and Vinyl Addict. A sonic archaeologist gathering sounds and music from space, the heavens, the ether and beyond. Restoring peace, love and healing to the world using the most powerful tool imaginable — OMINI-VERSAL SOUND. Music is a language, you see, a universal language.-Sun Ra

An undisciplined creator. Amina Ross creates boundary-crossing works that embrace embodiment, imaging technologies, intimacy and collectivity in physical and digital spaces. Amina has exhibited work, spoken on panels and taught workshops at venues throughout the United States. Amina’s intention within a media-centering practice is to engage sensuality and sense-perception as modes of reclaiming the body. Amina is currently a 2018-2019 Artist-in-Residence at Arts & Public Life and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. —
As an educator Amina is currently an adjunct lecturer in the Contemporary Practices department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Co-lead artist of Teen Creative Agency at the Museum of Contemporary Art. As a curator and cultural organizer Amina is curator of ECLIPSING, a multi-media festival celebrating darkness. —

Khadijah Kysia, is a licensed acupuncturist, writer and scholar with four decades worth of experience navigating the world in a black femme body. Khadijah will share with us her (counter)narrative and strategies for cultivating internal power and moving through the world whilst actively healing herself and others. Khadijah’s narrative will be set alongside the sounds of Jared Brown, the self-proclaimed “high priest of sounds for the girls at night.”

J’Sun Howard is a master of movement, navigating the politics of desire both on and off stage J’Sun’s (counter)narrative will be set alongside the work of A.J. McClenon, a multimedia sound artist who blends archival sound bites and personal narrative that, in AJ’s own word “level hierarchies of truth”.

Multidisciplinary artist and arts educator avery r. young is a Cave Canem alum & 3Arts Awardee whose work has appeared in The Golden Shovel Anthology, The BreakBeat Poets and other anthologies. He is on the executive team of The Floating Museum. Along with mentoring Rebirth Poetry Ensemble, he performs with his funk/soul band de deacon board.