Intimate Encounters

Jarvis Boyland navigates intersectional black identity through portraiture. Based on photographic images that Boyland reconfigures to create compositions, his paintings focus on queer men of color within intimate spaces, sensitively highlighting the nuances of these complex interpersonal relationships, identities and locales. Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Boyland earned his BFA from the University of Memphis.

William Camargo is a Chicanx, Latinx visual artist, educator and organizer raised in Anaheim, California and now residing in Chicago. His work is inspiredfrom his family’s immigration from Mexico and his working class upbringing in a Mexican/American barrio, touching issues of assimilation, identity, gentrification and immigration through photography. In his most recent work, he uses his rasquache aesthetics to bring awareness to issues of gentrification as a social justice issue that has plagued many communities of color across Chicago and the United States. Camargo received his BFA from California State University, Fullerton.

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, working primarily with the body in performance and using film, video, photography, installation, public interventions and sculpture. Rojas utilizes his body in a political and critical way as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Rojas holds a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s performance department and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in film, video and integrated media. Galeria Jose de la Fuente in Santander, Spain and Gallleriapiú in Bologna, Italy, represent his work.

Darryl DeAngelo Terrell is a BLK queer lens-based artist, digital curator, and teaching artist currently based in Chicago. He is also a recent MFA graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied photography. Terrell’s work is centered on the philosophy of “For Us By Us” (F.U.B.U.) He is interested in how his work can add to a larger conversation about blackness and its many intersectionalities. His work explores the displacement of black and brown people, femme identity, strength, the black family structure, sexuality, gender, safe spaces and personal stories, all while keeping in mind the accessibility of art.

Titus Wonsey is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and musician that often makes collaborative work. Known for making exercise videos with familial collaborators, Wonsey also utilizes home objects in his sculptural work and doeslive improvisational performance. Wonsey earned his BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and his MFA from Northwestern University.

Felicia Mings is the Academic Curator in the Department of Academic Engagement and Research at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the core of Mings’ practice is a focus on the intersections between curatorship, community-based arts education and contemporary art of Africa and the African diaspora. As a Canadian-born and US-based curator and educator Mings earned her MA in visual and critical studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her honors BA in art and art history from the University of Toronto and Sheridan College.