Eleven faculty members from the U of I School of Art & Design will be featured in the upcoming exhibition, Another Place: Storymaking the Entangled Prairie.
Featured artists:
• Ryan Griffis
• Emmy Lingscheit
• Melissa Pokorny
• Sharath Ramakrishnan
• Stacey Robinson
• Joel Ross
• Stephen Signa-Avilés
• Blair Ebony Smith
• Nekita Thomas
• Deke Weaver
• Brooke C. White
Made possible with support from the Campus Research Board and Frances P. Rohlen Visiting Artists Fund, College of Fine and Applied Arts. Krannert Art Museum acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
The exhibition considers how people make and define place through stories, and how stories carry out a kind of labor, maintaining narratives about the places we live—and about us. Each artist will be premiering new work created for this project.
The geographic focus of Another Place is the Prairie, Chicagoland, and Central Illinois, but its chronological focus is more expansive, with works addressing past stories, historical events, and imagined futures.
A multi-authored companion text will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2027. The essays will bring writing on place-based storytelling into conversation with works from the exhibition, additional artist’s projects, and alternative forms of scholarly writing, to think about what “place” is, or can be, beyond the local, and with the goal of building solidarity between communities.
The Spring 2026 event calendar will feature artist talks in conjunction with the exhibition and a performance by Professor Deke Weaver.
Curated by Terri Weissman, Associate Professor of Art History, Director of Graduate Studies, and Associate Director of the School of Art & Design.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ryan Griffis works on large-scale collaborative projects that are focused on the ecology of the US Midwest. Combining art, pedagogy, design, creative writing, and documentary field work, his work follows the interdisciplinary field of political ecology, aiming to examine how and why economic structures and power relations drive environmental change. As an image maker and writer, he aims to produce works that produce knowledge and advocacy towards environmental justice and better relations amongst human and other-than-human communities.
Emmy Lingscheit’s research explores our enmeshments with the non-human world, from the cellular level to global economic scale, and their implications for the ecological and social challenges we collectively face. Her prints, drawings, zines, and sculptural works examine the teeming strangeness, cooperation, and competition of the biological world, and their parallels in human society. Through irony and visual pleasure these works aim to disrupt systems and imagine ways to salvage hope, shelter, and community in this time of rapid environmental change and geopolitical upheaval.
Melissa Pokorny’s sculptural installations merge lens-based images and textiles with traditional 3D materials and processes. Her conceptual sources lie in the natural world, landscape practices, and the vitality of nonhuman material life. Her process foregrounds collecting—found objects, unusual materials, nontraditional landscape images, and personal or utilitarian possessions. She combines these elements into assemblages that question how we know the world and how meaning forms through constructed relationships. The resulting formal and material interactions complicate and reveal the entangled complexities between multiple realities and worlds.
Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan’s practice explores cognitive media interfaces that expand perception through multimodal cues—particularly auditory and haptic systems that reimagine visual and graphical experience. He is also committed to community media networks, grassroot technology activism and communications technology design. As a licensed amateur radio broadcaster (callsign: VU3HPA) he extends his creative technology and media arts practice as a “transmission artist,” engaging publics through transmissions that bridge the worlds of media, science, and tech policy.
Stacey Robinson’s multimedia work addresses decolonized Black futures through collage, motion graphics, illustration, and DJing. The influence of science fiction, Black liberation politics, and comic books shape his practice and aesthetic philosophy, which emphasizes imagination, resilience, and cultural narrative. His collaborative projects include Black Kirby (with John Jennings), BLACKMAU (with Kamau Grantham), BSAM (the Black Speculative Arts Movement), and Darker Than Blue, a DJ quintet based in Champaign-Urbana, dedicated to sonic storytelling and collective joy.
Two intertwined themes run through Joel Ross’s practice: the roadside’s role in American culture, and the slipperiness of language. His interests lie in how context and form shape the way stories are understood and re-interpreted over time, and how storytelling shapes beliefs. In this way, his works can be seen as physical manifestations of true, sometimes poetic, often unflattering, and frequently heartbreaking accounts of pieces of lives lived. In the artist’s words, “We survive the day, and then we sit around telling stories about it. It is how we make sense of the world.”
Stephen Signa-Aviles explores identity formation and belonging through collaged sculptural objects. Drawing from experiences of dislocation, his work interrogates how places shape us and how social relationships foster or inhibit belonging. Using found objects, adornment, and fabrication, he remixes personal experiences with an ethic of vulnerability and openness. Collage becomes a metaphor for hybridity and a methodology to examine identity through social and historical experience. His practice celebrates resourcefulness while addressing racialized landscapes of Western colonialism and competing narratives of what it means to be American.
Blair Ebony Smith (artist alter ego: lovenloops) is a sample-based sound artist, DJ, and scholar exploring Black sound, memory, loops, and collectivity. As a member of Black girl celebratory collective SOLHOT We Levitate, she creates space for Black girlhood celebration. She also uses her lived experience and DJ/beat-making practice to take on Black (girlhood) study. She has performed nationally at institutions and venues, releasing tracks on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, making music with lovers, friends, and homegirls.
Nekita Thomas is a designer and researcher committed to design's power to address complex social issues and foster change. Her research develops frameworks, artifacts, and interventions facilitating critical thinking, creative collaboration, and futuring among diverse stakeholders at the intersection of race, well-being, and the built environment. This work manifests as placemaking solutions, public installations, and design workshops combining art, design, and social practice to empower people toward healthy environments and futures. Her work frequently explores the specific histories and futures of American Blackness on Chicago's south and west sides.
Deke Weaver is a writer-performer and media artist who weaves together storytelling, performance, and ecological urgency. His lifelong project, The Unreliable Bestiary, is a series of performances organized around every letter of the alphabet, with each letter representing an endangered animal or habitat. With choreographer/performer/director Jennifer Allen and many other trusted collaborators, he has produced MONKEY (2009), ELEPHANT (2010), WOLF (2013), BEAR (2016), TIGER (2019), and 2023’s CETACEAN (The Whale).
Brooke White’s artistic explorations are centered around the convergence of place, memory, and time. Using various photographic techniques, such as experimental, documentary, portraiture, and video, she delves into topics related to family and loss, identity and nature, motherhood, and creative expression. White’s aim is to examine how the landscape can serve as both a personal and communal environment, reflecting the dynamic interplay between our internal and external experiences as they shape our sense of self and connection to the world.
