ATP welcomes Rush Baker IV as part of the ongoing visiting artist series.
Rush Baker IV (American, b. 1987, Washington, DC; he/him) is a painter whose work explores landscapes as vessels of cultural memory, transformation, and identity. Embracing uncertainty as a central methodology, Baker works through the tension between destruction and reconstruction, using abstraction as a strategy to unsettle preconceived ideas and fixed narratives. Through experimental approaches to material, process, and scale, his paintings challenge the boundaries between abstraction and representation, inviting viewers to encounter landscape as an active, unstable participant in history.
Baker’s practice is informed by a sustained engagement with history, geography, and the ways place shapes human experience. His work often reflects overlooked or erased narratives, weaving together elements of topography, architecture, and personal memory. Employing techniques such as scraping, layering, erasure, and the use of unconventional tools, he constructs dense surfaces that evoke both natural and built environments. His process mirrors the complexities of history itself—revealing and obscuring information in equal measure, and allowing meaning to remain provisional rather than resolved.
Baker has exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Future Gallery (Berlin), Scaramouche Gallery (New York City), The Cooper Union (New York City), HEMPHILL Artworks (Washington, DC), Honfleur Gallery (Washington, DC), and Keijsers Koning (Dallas), among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Zidoun-Bossuyt (Luxembourg), The Third Line (Dubai), the Harvey B. Gantt Center (Charlotte, NC), MOCADA (Brooklyn), Bowie State University, Koki Arts (Tokyo), and Yale University.
He received a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where he was awarded the Jack Stewart Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting, and an MFA from Yale University, where he received the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award for outstanding achievement in drawing or painting from nature. In 2023, Baker was a Trawick Prize finalist, and in 2024 he was named an Artsy Foundations Prize Finalist. His work is held in the permanent collections of The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY), the International African American Museum (Charleston, SC), the University of Maryland (College Park, MD), and the Soho House Collection, among others.
Baker is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He previously served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Drawing and Painting at the University of Iowa, where he was also the 2024–25 Grant Wood Fellow in Painting and Drawing, and earlier taught in the MFA Program at American University’s Katzen School of Art in Washington, DC. He lives and works in Chicago, IL.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, March 4, 4:30pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
The 2025-26 MFA cohort welcomes guests to their studios this Thursday, November 20, 6:00 - 9:00 PM.
Lamia Abukhadra, Pegah Bahador, Gabby Banks, naakita f.k., Irina Jasnowski Pascual, Joseph Josué Mora, Gbenga Komolafe, Waseem Nafisi, Przemek Pyszczek
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, November 20, 6:00pmat LOCY HALL
1850 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
SHOW OFF: ATP Undergraduate Open House
Join us for the annual ATP undergraduate open house, SHOW OFF, which features work from our fall courses and BA studios.
Donuts from Bennison's. Cider from apples. Raffle prize from Blick Art Supply. Sounds from Gbenga. Be there!
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, November 12, 4:30pmat DEPT. ART, THEORY, PRACTICE
KRESGE HALL, GROUND FLOOR
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANTON, IL 60208
VISITING ARTIST TALK: TEMPESTT HAZEL
ATP welcomes Tempestt Hazel for a public talk.
Hazel is a curator, writer, and co-founder of Sixty Inches From Center, a collective of editors, writers, artists, curators, librarians, and archivists who have published and produced collaborative projects about artists, archival practice, and culture in the Midwest since 2010. Across her practices and through Sixty, Tempestt has worked alongside artists, organizers, grant makers, and cultural workers to explore solidarity economies, cooperative models, archival practice, future canon creation, and systems change in and through the arts.
An especially cherished moment for Tempestt was when she received the 2019 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists, which was the result of a nomination by archivists and members of The Blackivists.
Tempestt was born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, spent several years in the California Bay Area, and has called Chicago her second home for over 13 years.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, November 19, 4:30pmat KRESGE 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
Visiting Artist Talk: Jesse Chun
ATP welcomes artist Jesse Chun for a public talk.
Chun's moving images, concrete poems, scores, and activations intimately unravel the dominant compositions of language and legibility — invoking alternate semiotics and cosmologies of meaning, time, transmission, and infinitude. Chun's first solo survey exhibition 시, language for new moons was presented by the Seoul Museum of Art for the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2023, at the Seoul Museum of History. Chun's work has been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (US); Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Thaddaeus Ropac, Seoul; Nam June Paik Art Center (KR); SculptureCenter, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Queens Museum, New York; Ballroom Marfa, Texas (United States); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (Canada); Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK), among others. She was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (US), Art by Translation research fellowship (Paris); the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship at ISCP (New York), and more. Chun's work is in the collections of Seoul Museum of Art (KR); Kadist Art Foundation (FR/US); Museum of Modern Art Library (NY); Smithsonian Institution (DC) Archive of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art Library (NY), among others.
Chun was an artist in residence at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Korea (2024-25). Currently based between Seoul (KR) and California (US), Chun is represented by Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles).
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, November 6, 5:00pmat KRESGE 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON IL 60208
