Meet our Radicle Residents and Creative Wing artists in their studios during our Summer edition of Creative Wing Open Studio Night! Connect with artists, collectors, and curators in our community over light bites and refreshments. This event is free and open to all. Radicle Studio Residents are rooted for a year at the Art Center through high-quality, free studio space where they make work, research new projects, have access to the Art Center’s broad International network of artists and resources, and connect with a dynamic public. 

Meet the Residents:

Leila Tamari

Leila Tamari’s artistic practice currently explores belonging through relationship to place, identity, and money. Her work derives meaning through the relationships she develops, which are created through collaboration and facilitation. She aspires to cultivate a culture of care; so love and play are essential ingredients in her creative endeavors. Some of her past collaborations include exchange/value, The Sistah Friends Project, Hyperopia: 20/30 Vision, and Contracts with Ourselves.

Leila carries a lineage of people who were the displaced, as well as the displacers. Her heritage spans African and Jewish diasporas, and as the daughter of immigrants, one of her lifelong quests is coming into deeper understanding and relationship to “home.” She is interested in creating pathways to reparations through place-based re-investment, and she is curious about how art will lead us there.

Leila founded This Place Works (TPW) – her creative home and consultancy – to live into the many expressions of her art practice. At TPW, she takes on various roles from artist coach, cultural strategist/advisor, organizational healer/facilitator, and more. Her professional experience spans organizing, public art production, and wealth redistribution.

Yasmin Spiro

Yasmin Spiro was born and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica and currently lives and works in Chicago. Spiro’s work is multi-disciplinary, primarily based in sculpture and immersive installations, with video, drawing and performance – exploring issues of cultural identity and socio-economic issues within the framework of urban development and social politics – often through the lens of Caribbean culture. 

Spiro’s work explores concepts related to architecture and urbanism, socio-economics, futuristic cities, and craft and culture. Research is often layered with personal narratives connected to both the landscape and culture of Jamaica. Spiro’s body of work explores materiality, and is often textile based, and also utilizes wood, rope, and cast materials – plaster, ceramic, and cement. Creating architectural elements that reference futurism and femininity in our built environments, her studio practice pulls in various aspects of personal and cultural history to build stories within the work – layered with conceptual research, and material experimentation. 

Spiro’s work has been shown at galleries internationally, recently at the Arts Club of Chicago. Her work has been covered in Art News, Interior Design, NewCity, Washington Times, Miami Herald and others. She attended Pratt Institute and has held residencies at the Dora Maar Foundation, The Kohler Arts and Industry residency, Vermont Studio Center, and the Chicago Artist Coalition.

Keith S. Wilson

Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships or grants from Bread Loaf, Tin House, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, UCross, the Millay Colony, and James Merrill House, among others. His book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry. Keith’s work in new media includes “Once Upon a Tale,” a storytelling card game designed for Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, and alternate reality games (ARGs) for the University of Chicago. He has worked with or taught new media with Kenyon College, the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, and the University of Chicago.

Natasha Moustache

Natasha Moustache is a photo-based installation artist whose work explores identity, shared histories, and familial ties within colonized spaces. Moustache’s work reflects their experience as a first-generation, Seychellois-American, examining African Diasporic ties across oceans and manmade borders. They regularly engage strangers as collaborator-participants, utilizing portraiture, and the reimagining of domestic spaces through installation. Moustache is interested in bringing the human community into a conversation with itself that transcends difference and emphasizes commonality. 

Moustache completed their MFA (2021) at Columbia College Chicago and their BFA (2004) at Simmons College in Boston, Ma. Their work has most recently been shown at the Vermont Center for Photography, the Lubeznik Center, the Hyde Park Arts Center, the Houston Center for Photography, and the International Center for Photography. They have had residencies at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and Latitude Chicago. Moustache’s editorial work has been published internationally in academic literature and periodicals. They were a 2021 MOCP Snider Prize Honorable mention and a 2020 Hopper Prize finalist.

Letaru Dralega

Letaru Dralega is a Ugandan Jamaican British artist and researcher based in Kampala. Her mixed media process-centered practice is concerned with themes of memory and belonging. She experiments across collage, painting, installation, and sound to create meditative works which probe the material/spiritual dichotomy and ponder postcolonial condition.

A social scientist by training she studied a Bachelor of Social Sciences (2014) and a Masters of International Development with African studies (2019) at Sciences Po Paris, France. There she examined global issues, through sociological, political and anthropological lenses, a practice which continues in her research-focused approach to art-making.

Letaru is an alumna of 32 degrees East Ugandan Arts Trust Kampala (2017) and Asiko Art School Praia (2022). She is a recipient of a Prince Claus seed award supported by British Council and UNDP Uganda’s creative facility grant (2022). She was selected as a Njabala Foundation artist researcher (2023) for the research project Tracing a Decade Women Artists of the 1960’s in Africa and Njabala Foundation Annual exhibition 2024.

In 2021 she co-founded Afropocene Studio Lab, an arts space in Kampala, which she currently directs along with The Capsule, an experimental exhibition space launched in 2023.

Juarez Hawkins

Juarez Hawkins is an artist, educator and curator. She received a B.A. from Northwestern University, and her M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Juarez has exhibited widely, hosting solo exhibitions at Concordia University, the 33 Collective Gallery, and the South Side Community Art Center. As Co-Curator of Gallery Programs at Chicago State University, she has organized exhibitions from the permanent collection, as well as student work and established artists, including Richard Hunt and Marva Jolly. Recent curatorial projects include Black Clay and Shirley Hudson: VisionQuest at Chicago State; The Love Affair Continues at the DuSable Museum; Intersectional Touch and Bill Walker: Urban Griot at the Hyde Park Art Center. Juarez is a member of Sapphire and Crystals, a collective of African American female artists.

Candace Hunter

Candace Hunter (she/her) is a Chicago based artist. She creates collages, paintings, installations, and performance art. Plainly, she tells stories. Through the use of appropriated materials from magazines, vintage maps, cloth, and various re-used materials, she offers this new landscape of materials back to the viewer with a glimpse of history and admiration of the beautiful. 

During the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, she began to do two things, offer free art classes on Instagram and to create what she now calls her “Brown Limbed Girls” – a growing series of whimsical brown girls enjoying their lives. She is extremely happy to share the girls with a new audiences in New Orleans and Northern California.

Candace has most recently received 3Arts Next Level/Spare Room Award, the Tim and Helen Meier Family Foundation Award, the 2016 3 Arts Award, and was honored by the Diasporal Rhythms Collective. In 2020, she served as a juror for the Kentucky Foundation for Women and was asked to speak at the Midwest Women in Ecology Conference.