Past Residents: Women's Center

Past Residents

2023 - 2024 Fellow Kyrin Hobson

In the foreground is Kyrin, slightly turned left but looking into the camera. She is a Black women wearing a black turtle neck, silver hoop earrings, red lipstick, black framed glasses and a white, brown and blue scarf over her hair. In the background is blurred artwork hanging on a white wall. Kyrin Hobson is an interdisciplinary artist and museum professional. Her practice proposes counter-visualities to explore feminist histories of Black and multi-racial women. In paintings, performance and multi-media installations, the artist draws upon practices of southern midwifery and healing to vigorously advocate for the idea of birth as a common and for safe, healthy un-forced birth as a human right. Visual storytelling and the design of "spaces of encounter" frame inquiries about how personal family histories and explorations of the aftermath of the trans-Atlantic slave trade can be guideposts for the challenges of the here and now. Through the lens of motherhood as an unbroken through-line of our survival, the work centers bodily movement, ecologies of care, the search for kinship and the ways in which women aggregate, transfer and utilize power.

Hobson holds a BA in Visual Art from University of California, Los Angeles, a Master's in Arts Administration and Museum Studies from New York University, and an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Chicago.

2022 - 2023 Fellow, /womenscenter/feminist-in-residence/current-resident/jireh l. drake

/womenscenter/feminist-in-residence/current-resident/jireh l. drake

/womenscenter/feminist-in-residence/current-resident/jireh l. drake (they // them) is an unapologetic queer, black, trans non-binary baddie & abolitionist organizer, who has been reimagining life in Chicago for the past 8 years. they are a mixed media drawing and sculpting artist & writer, who is often laughing, chanting or freestyling healing hymns.

/womenscenter/feminist-in-residence/current-resident/jireh uses art to tenderly unearth trauma & imagine new worlds where we strive to put things as right as possible to heal. their work has a strong sense of texture & movement, while utilizing earth-based materials. /womenscenter/feminist-in-residence/current-resident/jireh works in collaboration with radical grassroots organizations and creates public installations to ensure their work is rooted in community.

their work has been featured in Gallery 400, Depaul Art Museum, Hairpin Arts Center & numerous Chicago grassroots abolitionist campaigns & actions, on top of being archived at the Newberry Library.

/womenscenter/feminist-in-residence/current-resident/jireh at the June 2022 Garden Party:

/womenscenter/feminist-in-residence/current-resident//womenscenter/feminist-in-residence/current-resident/jireh-atgp

2021 - 2022 Feminist in Residence Fellow,
Je Shawna Wholley

/womenscenter/feminist-in-residence/current-resident/jeshawna-wholley.jpg

Je-Shawna is an artist, independent scholar and community organizer.

Je-Shawna is a black, queer feminist who was born in the south (North Carolina) and spent most of her life in Prince George’s County, Maryland. She joins us with a wealth of experience, including her roles as the co-founder and lead facilitator of the Critical Consciousness Reading Group (CCRG) for staff, faculty, and postdocs at Brown University and the Editor in Chief of the graduate journal Undone: a legacy of queer (re)imagnings. Drawing from her considerable talents as a critic, leader, scholar, and community builder, Je-Shawna has proposed the cohort program Earthseed - Building Communities of Healing around Black Mothering. In her own words, “this project is an intellectually artistic exploration of transgenerational healing and future world making. What’s possible when people intentionally build a community to grapple with questions of healing and building generative possibilities for ourselves and the communities we are a part of? Earthseed seeks to follow in the tradition of Black feminist literary influence (Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower) and Black feminist action (Combahee River Collective) by building intimate spaces of care, mutual aid, and political education around questions of transgenerational healing and liberation.

Je-Shawna is a graduate of Minnesota State University and Spelman College and a recent transplant to the Chicago area. We hope you will join us in welcoming her this fall.

We want to express, also, our gratitude for the incredible FiR search committee of graduate students, staff, and faculty and the talented pool of applicants who proposed a variety of exciting possibilities for a feminist residency.

Je Shawna returned in fall of 2022 for the event Earthseed Family Archive Project: Roots and Reflections.

Feminist in Residence 2020-2021

We are pleased to welcome Hankyeol Song as the inaugural fellow in our new Feminist in Residence program.

Hankyeol Song is an artist-filmmaker, writer, scholar, and community organizer. Her research interests include film/media, postcolonialism, feminism, and Queer Theory. Song is the co-founder of the Ana Cha collective, a coalition of scholars, artists, and filmmakers who interrogate the cultural world through a critical feminist lens. She was politically activated through campus anti-rape activism and is currently active as a member of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (). Hanky is involved with the campaign to free incarcerated CPD torture survivors (CFIST) and to stop police crimes (SPC/CPAC).

Song joins our community with a wealth of ideas for working with student activists and building ties between the Women’s Center and spaces of “feminist collectivity and liberation politics” across Chicago. Song also will be engaging the communities through film and capturing the experience in documentary form.