Artadia Announces 2017 Chicago Artadia Awardees

Artadia has announced the 2017 Chicago Artadia Awardees, Rashayla Marie Brownand Claire Pentecost, with a presentation of their work at EXPO CHICAGO.

The Awardees were selected through Artadia's rigorous, two-tier jury review process and each received $10,000 in unrestricted funds. The five Finalists also included Alex Chitty, Cameron Clayborn, and Faheem Majeed.

This year's jury was composed of a distinguished group of leaders in the arts: artist Rashid Johnson; Omar Kholeif, Manilow Senior Curator and Director of Global Initiatives, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Megha Ralapati, Residency and Special Projects Manager, Hyde Park Art Center; and Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

The Awardees join a prestigious group of more than 300 artists working in cities throughout the United States. Artadia currently holds annual Awards cycles in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.

"Rashayla Marie Brown's practice critically explores modes of production and display. Working as a true interdisciplinary artist, her work encompasses photography, installation, and performance, and brings together these fields in new and discursive ways," Kholeif wrote.

"Claire Pentecost has spent two decades evolving a practice, which ardently interrogates the cumulative impacts of climate change on our planet and all its life forms. Her work reminds us of the great urgency of this issue, to science and art in equal measure," said Ralapati.

Image details, left to right: Rashayla Marie Brown, Credibility, Viability, Accuracy/Maya Angelou as a Sex Worker/Can't Knock the Hustle, 2016, archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches; Claire Pentecost, The Library of Tears, 2016, petroleum coke, Baken crude, Texas sweet crude, Alberta tar sands, Athabascan River mud, Calumet-Saganashkee Canal algae, sulfur, copper, zinc, asphalt, aluminum, clay, wax, paper, glass,wire, gauze, glue, string, feathers, fur, snakeskin, egg shells, seeds, shredded US currency, scaffolding, miscellaneous, 72 (l) x 31 (w) x 144 (h) inches.