ARC Members
Our Members work in all media, including performance and installation
Granite Palombo-Amit
Granite Palombo is an interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally in places such as Chicago, New York, Paris, Edinburgh, Washington, Toronto, and Hamburg. Her work has been widely reviewed in various journals such as the Chicago Tribune.
Jane Stevens
As an artist/photographer, I work with light. Photography is about light and photosensitive materials. The process itself is magical. The landscapes in the photographs are visual metaphors for the artist’s transformative process and journey of reclaiming a sense of self and connection to the world/community. Stevens has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including the Los Angeles Photography Center; Galeria Tonalli, Mexico City; University of Arizona, Tucson; Alexandria Museum of Art, Alexandria, Louisiana; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas.
Cynthia Vaicunas
Cynthia Vaicunas lives and works in Chicago where received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cynthia moves across a painting surface exploring themes of flatness, transparency, intuitive gesture and direction. Layering of paint and the variation of its application represent the differences we see across the landscape of everyday life. She has lived and shown in France for a number of years. She has been on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Women's Caucus for Art, the Chicago Artist's Coalition and ARC Gallery where she exhibited work in a solo show in 2017. She is also affiliated with Dialogue Chicago and teaches abstract painting at Lill Street Studios in Chicago.
Chiyeko Yuki
Chiyeko Yuki is an ARC affiliate member living in Niigata, Japan. Her oil paintings have enjoyed great success in many international exhibitions, combining modern expressionistic process and painting techniques with Japanese sensibilities. Yuki applies layers and layers of colors on canvas through a labyrinth of slurs, scumbles, scratches , scrubs, scraps and her own calligraphy. Yuki’s every moment and movement on canvas is fluid and spontaneous as she captures the fleeting moment of life: joy, hope, suffering, sorrow, agony, conflict, peace, and serenity.
Amy Zucker
Amy Zucker is a Chicago artist whose installations confront and challenge our cultural notions of what happens to us when we grow old and what it is like to be old. This body of work is informed by a nursing practice with older adults. Amy worked as a registered nurse on an inpatient geriatric psychiatry unit for sixteen years and most recently for four years as a geriatric case manager in the community. The art work integrates patient care experiences with the incongruous one dimensional picture that our culture paints when describing the elderly. It is the absurdities of these ideas that fuel the art work.
Laura Cloud
Laura Cloud has traveled to Brazil, Australia, Japan, Europe and across the USA over the past few years. She has documented each trip in an ongoing series called The Travel Journals. This work has been shown both nationally and internationally. She has also attended residency programs located in Vermont, Ireland and Japan. Recent work was exhibited at the Museu Historico de Santa Catarina, in Florianopolis, Brazil and in the Sidney Yates Gallery, Chicago Culture Center.
Abigail Engstrand
Art for me is about learning, expressing emotions, points of view, identity, and stories, visually. It is the ever shifting concoction of work and play. I am a woman, a wife and mother, known to slip into a dreamy appreciation of a composition I see in a face or space before me.
Cait Hardie
Cait Hardie works in water based media on paper, with an approach that could be described as an intersection of drawing and painting. Her work was exhibited at Morpho Gallery in Chicago in 2018 and 2019.
Diane Jurado
I am a painter exploring both the physical act of painting and how meaning is created on canvas. Process is essential part of my painting practice. I work primarily with oil paint for its physical richness and manipulative quality. I make a lot of changes to a painting over an extended period of time by layering, scratching, drawing on and rubbing out the paint until I feel the work is finished.
Elyse Martin
Elyse Martin was born in Chicago and has lived there most of her life. With breaks for chasing down celebrities and enjoying disco, Elyse was immersed in art all her life, including a 7th grade Saturday Scholarship class at the Art Institute. Elyse thrived, and fueled her artistic expression with a love for art supplies, and spend hours at art stores with her father.
Randi Shepard
Randi Shepard is a photographer and printmaking artist from Chicago. After receiving her B.F.A in Visual Communications from The Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1983, she immediately broke into the commercial photography scene in Chicago, working with people photographers, such as her long-time mentor Jean Moss (as well as Steve Ewert, Joann Carney and Marc Hauser).
Michelle Williams
My work reflects an ongoing inner dialogue with myself and my materials. I am attracted to the reflective qualities of the glass beads, the interaction of materials and the historical implications of the materials. Due to the nature and slow process of beading there is much time during the art making process to reflect and let feelings surface. As a result of my process I am interested in the layers that compose each of us. Thus there are many layers within my sculptures.Each sculpture is thickly encrusted with beads.