ATP welcomes Esteban Cabeza de Baca as part of the Visiting Artist Series.
Cabeza de Baca (b. 1985, San Ysidro, California) is an American painter of Mexican and Native American heritage who lives and works between Queens, New York, and the Southwest United States. He numbers among his influences San Ysidro, the liminal border town of his youth, and his parents, whose intersectional political awareness and respect for human dignity led them to shelter undocumented migrants during his youth. Cabeza de Baca’s work entwines layers of graffiti, landscape, and pre-Columbian pictographs in ways that confound Cartesian single-point perspective. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Art, Cooper Union (2010) and Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University (2014). He has had solo exhibitions at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (2025); Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2023); Boers-Li Gallery, New York (2019); Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany (2019); and Kunstfort Vijfhuizen, Amsterdam (2019). He has participated group exhibitions at the Drawing Center, New York (2019); Royal Palace of Amsterdam (2018); Yale Institute of Sacred Music, New Haven (2017), and Leroy Neiman Gallery, New York (2015, 2014). Cabeza de Baca’s works are part of the permanent collections of Harvard University, the North Dakota Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Parrish Art Museum; Phoenix Art Museum; and Williams College Museum of Art. He is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery and Parker Gallery.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, April 8, 4:30pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL 1515
1880 CAMPUS DR
EVANSTON, IL 60208
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
ATP welcomes Leslie Hewitt for an artist talk as part of the 2025-26 visiting artist series.
Hewitt, born in 1977 in New York, New York, lives and works between New York, NY and Houston, TX. Working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations, Leslie Hewitt addresses fluid notions of time. Her work oscillates between the illusionary potential of photography and the physical weight of sculpture. In her photographed arrangements, she isolates personal effects and the residue of material culture to consider the fragile nature of everyday life. Her approach to photography and sculpture revisits the still life genre from a post-minimalist/civil-rights perspective. Her geometric compositions, which she frames and crystallizes through the spare assemblage of ordinary things, suggests the porosity between intimate and sociopolitical lives. Whether discreetly arranged in conceptually entangled layers or presented plainly, Hewitt often includes or is inspired by mementos such as family pictures, as well as books and vintage magazines that reference the Black literary and popular-cultures of her upbringing. Her practice as an artist points to the mechanisms of the construction of meaning and memory through decisively challenging both by unfolding formal, rather than didactic, connections in her contrapuntal compositions and distinctive take on spatiality.
Hewitt studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Yale University School of Art, and at New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow in the Africana and Visual Culture Studies programs. She was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the recipient of the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands. A selection of recent and forthcoming exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Artists Space in New York; Project Row Houses in Houston; and LA > < ART in Los Angeles. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany amongst others.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, February 26, 4:30pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
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
