Urban Exchange Fellowship

Chris Omni, MPH, affectionately known as The Health Hippie, is a multi-disciplinary, award-winning entrepreneur, scholar, and artist who exclusively and unapologetically focuses on the health and wellbeing of Black women. Chris’s life is woven in between the words of Audre Lorde, “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”

William Plummer is fascinated by the way objects can reflect culture, and by extension, a sense of place and belonging. As a gender non-binary individual with American and Taiwanese heritage, they live an experience that falls between standard lines of definition. Their most recent work concerns generational archive, using laborious processes such as beading and weaving to both celebrate lineage and mitigate cultural dissonance.

Craig Deppen Auge is an artist currently residing in Kansas City, Missouri. His works explore the relationship between material, shape, color, gesture, mark-making, site and self. He merges and flows between collage, alternative bookmaking, salvage assemblage, and impromptu public intervention. Ephemeral, formal explorations reflect through-lines of self, and potentially activate collective deja-vu. Craig previously attended the ON::VIEW Residency at Sulfur Studios in Savannah, GA. He is a 2019-2020 Charlotte Street Foundation Studio Resident in Kansas City

David Alpert is an artist and curator living and working in Kansas City. He likes interactions, connections, and exploring feelings. He believes in listening compassionately to yourself and others. Through a visual dialogue, he promotes and researches his interests and beliefs.

Chris Omni (Tallahassee, FL) | Exchange (Kansas City) | October 2021

Chris Omni explored her artist identity through found objects from North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. This piece represents her growth process of moving from a 20+ year career in public health into a new, August 2020, identity as an artist. Being * Becoming * Growing is in direct communication with her second piece, Isolation * Invitation * Inclusion; however this piece speaks to her extroverted side. A side that has been traditionally front, center, and literally on stage. Omni created this site specific installation as a reminder of how we present to others and how we even frame our identities, even if it is not who we are at the core. Through this introspective creation, Chris Omni discovered a new dimension of herself and weaved it into the piece while dancing with the energy of the sacral chakra mantra, “I love all dimensions of myself. I delight in weaving the creative tapestry that is my life.” Being * Becoming * Growing invites YOU to look at your journey and grow in the direction that breathes life to your soul. Ase.

Chris Omni (Tallahassee, FL) | Exchange (Kansas City) | October 2021

Chris Omni explored her artist identity through found objects from North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. This piece represents her growth process of moving from a 20+ year career in public health into a new, August 2020, identity as an artist. Being * Becoming * Growing is in direct communication with her second piece, Isolation * Invitation * Inclusion; however this piece speaks to her extroverted side. A side that has been traditionally front, center, and literally on stage. Omni created this site specific installation as a reminder of how we present to others and how we even frame our identities, even if it is not who we are at the core. Through this introspective creation, Chris Omni discovered a new dimension of herself and weaved it into the piece while dancing with the energy of the sacral chakra mantra, “I love all dimensions of myself. I delight in weaving the creative tapestry that is my life.” Being * Becoming * Growing invites YOU to look at your journey and grow in the direction that breathes life to your soul. Ase.

David Alpert (Kansas City, MO) | Exchange (Kansas City) | August 2021

Stained-Glass Storage furthers the aestheticization of Elsewhere Museum’s former thrift store products through visually focused storage. Artist—David Alpert—built wood shelves across one of two kitchen windows. He collected and organized stained-glass objects from the Museum onto these shelves, mimicking a stained-glass window. The majority of former thrift store objects at Elsewhere live out-of-reach from museum visitors. In essence, Elsewhere transforms these functional ephemera into aesthetic compositions. Stained-Glass Storage brings this object-use shift clearly into focus. Alpert flips jars, stacks ashtrays on plates, and balances bottles into vases. Traditionally, these items would either be used for initially intended purposes or stored for optimal space efficiency. Alpert reinterprets these domestic objects as purely sculptural, at least for a moment. Because the stained-glass items are placed instead of attached, they can be rearranged to create countless compositions. In fact, Alpert regularly pulled out the step ladder and reorganized Stained-Glass Storage throughout his fellowship, often times with the direction of the other artists who happened to be in the kitchen. In this way, Stained-Glass Storage progresses Elsewhere’s curation of out-of-use goods, inviting ongoing collaboration and enhanced visibility.

The Temporary Photographic Archive Office (TPAO) proposes new archival methods for the Elsewhere Museum. The TPAO collects, scans, and shares photographic ephemera from the Elsewhere library—Polaroids, postcards, 4x6” prints, etc. By caring for these objects through digitization, archiving, and dissemination, the TPAO justifies more permanent, interactive methods of conservation for the Museum (permanence being a relative term). At the surface, the TPAO scanned, organized, and digitally shared photographic prints. On a deeper level, the TPAO chose to subvert the Museum’s pre-existing curatorial philosophy. This is to say that the Museum has previously taken an ambivalent approach to their collection, simultaneously enforcing strict rules regarding the former thrift store objects while allowing artist creations to degrade. The TPAO shifts that focus from out-of-circulation consumer products to human interactions—both human-to-human and human-to-object. The TPAO revises the Elsewhere story or rather reinterprets their history as people-centric.

William Plummer (Kansas City, MO) | Exchange (Kansas City) | August 2021Tapping into the unseen historical and spectral forces at Elsewhere, this altered cabinet functions as a permeable screen by drawing attention to effects of light and air within the Ghost Room. Through this atmospheric exchange, the sculpture commands a theatrical presence while drawing attention to its contents; stockings, beads, and pearls that drift and sway without the help of a body. "Perennial Channels" acknowledges the items we own that are meant to feel special or inspire wonder. From playful accessories to glass marbles, these things point at a commonality--the ways objects can undeniably reveal and reflect something about the people that have interacted with them.

Craig Deppen Auge (Kansas City, MO) | Exchange (Kansas City) | August 2021

This series of 20 sculptures and interventions incorporating textile scraps, collage, metal grid form, and other various collection materials can be viewed as For the most part, the artist has committed to using scraps and parts “as found” with no additional manipulation, just a focus on composition, constructed intuitively. This series of works is the most closely connected to the artist’s current body of work outside of the museum. Within this setting, these are abstract poems honoring all who have drifted, and will drift, through Elsewhere; from previous residents all the way back to the boarding house days. In that broader sense, these may speak to our independent, yet collective, journey through this life, on this planet, and the “getting lost” elsewhere along the way. Other questions emerge, as the artist continues to think about the grid as the symbol of existing social structures, or more broadly, and the fabric as ourselves and how we navigate these systems. Then we can ask: are we dancing with the grid or fighting the grid? Are we caught in the grid or escaping the grid? The placement of these pieces and proximity to each other also begins to suggest they carry individual personalities, and are themselves transient beings, resting mostly in the Alone Zone and drifting down the hallway.

Craig Deppen Auge (Kansas City, MO) | Exchange (Kansas City) | August 2021

This series of 24 individual “sign posts” and/ or “flags” placed in the garden and spread throughout the museum explores the concept of way-finding and personal journey. Linked conceptually to one of the the artist’s other projects, Drifters, these embody the themes of the sojourner, “finding yourself,” or unexpectedly finding yourself “elsewhere.” These clusters of lean, wordless directional or distance markers are similar, but abstracted versions, to those you might find on an old, wooded footpath. The difference being that there is no explicit direction, only a formal, coded visual language speaking of what is on the path ahead, or what lies behind. These works were constructed intuitively and urgently, using only collection scraps and hardware, giving them a folksy, southern yard-art quality. The artist is interested in the concept of the nexus, and Elsewhere certainly acts as a nexus for community and creativity. But it remains open to interpretation, and its direction is ever-changing. This project suggests all of that; a sculptural play on the puzzling, multi-vocal outlooks found at Elsewhere, perhaps pointing to a multitude of other "elsewheres."

Craig Deppen Auge (Kansas City, MO) | Exchange (Kansas City) | August 2021

This work, which spans across the top of the front and back stairwells to the second floor, is an exploration of form, pattern and scale, as well as a contemplative remark. Images of these chairs were cut from a collection of 60 Italian furniture catalogs which were sourced from the Records Room Archive. They exist as remnants form the Carolina Sales Company, one of the latter day businesses here, predating the museum. The crosscut pattern itself acts as an invocation, perhaps inviting roaming spirits a place to rest, similar to the “haint blue” as a There is also a reminder here to take time and just be still with yourself amongst the dazzling cacophony of the collection, though ultimately that rest and meditation is illusive. The work also reminds us to stay aware of the many multiples found within the collection, and that, in fact, multiples of an object or image are the very definition of a collection.

Eva Wǒ is a Chinese-New Mexican multimedia artist, curator, hustler, and sex magik worker. Her work casts spells of homoerotic cultural nourishment, liberation, and self-love set in a fantasy future dream for infinite gender/sexual self-determination. Currently she is co-curating Hot Bits, a touring queer sex-positive film and arts festival. Eva is also a recipient of the Leeway Transformation Award.

During Wǒ's residency, she created Welcome.

Yixuan Pan is an artist who was born and raised in the land of fish and rice, Hunan, China.To deal with issues of translation and communication as well as reimagining the western hegemony through a global outlook, her anti-disciplinary practice merges multiple media and modes of presentation such as installation, video, performance, lollipop making, music therapy practicing, choral conducting, and more. By dislocating language from its context and form, Pan questions the linguistic structures people learn and unlearn in relation to comfort, temperature, transparency, hierarchy and power dynamics.

During Pan's residency, she created An Orchestra At Elsewhere.

Marie Alarcón is a multi-medium artist with a focus on experimental non-fiction filmmaking and performance. Alarcón has worked as a community media educator and producer in Philadelphia since 2009 and is inspired by liminality, hybridity and the way that cinema functions as collective memory. Alarcón’s art focuses on the silent historical relationships embedded in geography through sound collage, movement, & performance and use digital manipulation and animation with an interest in developing a tactile relationship to the hyper-real. They currently perform and exhibits work both as a solo artist and in collaboration with various artists and institutions.

During Alarcón residency, they created Love You To Life.

Jesse Kudler is a musician, composer, performer, and sound artist using improvisation, collaboration, and site-specificity to to examine authorship, intention, agency, ambiguous affects, and modes and practices of listening. He works with electronics, recordings, guitar, synthesizers, radios, tapes, keyboards, and text.

Kudler lives in Philadelphia, PA. Current and past projects include: solo organ performance; performance duo with dancer Christina Gesualdi; site-specific composition for church organ, guitar, and recordings, with Chris Forsyth; a commissioned sound piece for the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program; live music with film; sound installation; and various improvised music duos. He has performed across the US and Canada and presented workshops at universities and community spaces.

During Kudler's residency, He created Voicing Elsewhere (#103 & 42).

Sosena Solomon is an award winning social documentary film and multimedia visual artist from Ethiopia. Intuitively selecting subjects and stories, she is particularly interested in spaces of transition and change, acting as a cultural preservationist. Her work, whether presented as a film or an immersive 3-dimensional experience, explores cross sections of various subcultures and communities in flux, carefully teasing out cultural nuances and capturing personal narratives via arresting visual storytelling and cinéma vérité stylings.

During Solomon's residency, she created Untitled (Documentary).

April Camlin is a textile artist, percussionist, and ventriloquist born and raised in Baltimore. She is honored to have lived a very strange life thus far. She has toured the globe with music and performance projects and shown visual work both nationally and internationally. Her practices are an attempt to probe the subconscious mind and subvert the embedded forces of capitalism in whatever small way she can. She recently quit her job to focus on her creative practices and hopes to never go back.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Camlin created To Climb the Mountain.

Gina Alexandra Denton is a visual artist based in Baltimore, MD. Her sculptural practice is rooted in intuitive play, and her material index spans several craft based media, including fiber and ceramics. Viewing art making as a form of intuitive cosmology, Gina creates work that explores the concept of space, both internal and external, micro and Marco. Her interactive, modular, "playable" sculptures aim to cast the viewer in the role of the mystical child who, upon encountering foreign objects, see only potential playthings, and through exploratory play, deepen their understanding of context and empathy.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Denton created Big Girl Wanna Play Too.

Hamida Khatri is an artist, writer, curator, arts educator, community activist, and a creative arts therapist, raised in Karachi, Pakistan, and living in Baltimore, U.S. She works in a variety of mediums, from figurative drawings, to photography, to sculptural puppets, to animation. She holds an MFA in Community Arts and a Certificate in Teaching from the Maryland Institute College of Art (U.S.), Certificate in Humanistic Counseling (U.K.), and an MBA in Marketing (Pakistan). Her personal work embodies the spirit of feminist ideologies and seeks to document the uncharted memories of domesticated women, within patriarchal societies. As the Founder and Director of 'Creative Therapy Platform — A Voluntary Travel-Community Project, she helps transform space into healthy communal place where meditative art-making is practiced.

During her residency at Elsewhere, Khatri created City of Scraps.

Antonio McAfee’s work addresses the complexity of representation. Through appropriating and manipulating portraits, he engages in prescribed views of individuals and rework images to provide an alternate - more layered image and concept of the people depicted. His photographs oscillate between formal considerations (modifying appearances and prints) and imaginary potential (establishing new back stories and roles) for the portraits.

During his residency at Elsewhere, McAfee created The Break in the Game.

Beau Vasseur is a new media artist living and working in Baltimore, MD. His work has been shown at Big Law Country Club in Brooklyn, NY, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA, Terrault Contemporary in Baltimore, MD, and the Borscht Film Festival in Miami, FL. His mediums include film and immersive installation. By harnessing the power of conspiracy documentaries, advertising, and architecture, his work attempts to shed light on the detrimental effects of unfeasible expectations set by first world ambitions. These explorations are inspired by real life immersive sets such as Las Vegas, Dubai, and Disney world, and scrutinize architecture as a means to convey progress, human achievement, and utopian aspirations.

During his residency at Elsewhere, Vasseur created Department No. 1.

Emma Rosenberg is a writer and educator, creating hybrid work that investigates the limits of language. A Boston native based in Miami, she is interested in the tension between fiction and truth. Her practice draws on archival research, documentary storytelling, and the politics of narrative form. She leaves things everywhere.

Emma created A Meditation on Scatology during the Miami Goes Elsewhere residency.

Juana Valdes' artistic work is grounded in a multi-disciplinary practice that combines the process of printmaking, photography, sculpture and ceramic. An integral part of Valdes's practice elicits migration as a complex process, constructing history through a continuum that involves both the homespace of the diasporic community and their new homeland. In her current work, Valdes reevaluates the worth of artistic production once considered craft-like. She uses them as a medium to identify herself and as a means to subvert the modern conception of value in visual art. It integrates the social-political discourse within the art object to analyze relationships between contemporary and historical imagery and their connection to the social, political and economical dominance of the cultures that produce them and their impact on cultural memory. Her artwork brings into consciousness past histories (in present day experiences) and engages social justice to question economic inequalities due to race, class, and gender prejudice in society.

Juana created Those The Sun Has Loved during the Miami Goes Elsewhere residency.

Pioneer Winter is a Miami-based choreographer and performance artist – invested in physical theatre, contemporary dance, interdisciplinary collaboration, and transmedia. His collective provides a platform for risk-taking, progressive, and experimental arts initiatives. As producer, Pioneer directs LEAP (Leaders of Equality through Arts and Performance), a program for queer youth, and Grass Stains, a fellowship and commissioning program for site-specific performance.Education: B.A. Psychology (2007), MPH Epidemiology (2009), MFA Choreography (2016)

Pioneer created A Love To Last 13 Hours during the Miami Goes Elsewhere residency.

Jessie Laino fascinates on the ambiguous nature of sense-memory, symbolic acknowledgment and recognition. She attempts to evaluate a city in terms of its economy, geography, industry, residence and salvage. Through her absorption of these characteristics, Jessie salvages what she can from her soundings to examine and conceptualize a universal connection and conversation between object, material, nature and human.

Jessie created 4 MIL and Catch during the Miami Goes Elsewhere residency.

Matthew Evan Taylor is a composer, performer, and improviser. His music has been performed through the United States as well as Italy, France, and Russia. During his time at Elsewhere, Matthew will be exploring the connection between memory and music and the paradox of a concrete image representing an ephemeral sound, and vice versa.

Matthew Evan created In Living Memory during the Miami Goes Elsewhere residency.

Meredith Kooi (b. 1985, Chicago) is a visual and performance artist, editor, arts writer, and curator based in Atlanta, GA. She is a Hambidge Fellow and a recipient of Atlanta's Office of Cultural Affairs 2014 - 2015 Emerging Artist Award. Her recent performance and installation work has been presented by venues across Atlanta including Eyedrum, The Goat Farm Arts Center, MINT Gallery, and The High Museum of Art.Since 2011 she has been the editor for the Chicago-based experimental radio broadcast platform Radius, which received a Propeller Fund award for its 2014 series GRIDS. With Radius, she has curated playlists featured on WFMU's Free Music Archive (NYC) and Kunstradio (Vienna), commissioned artists' works for two series: GRIDS and RANGE, been a visiting artist at ACRE Residency, and participated in participated in the Museum as Instrument residency at Elsewhere.

Jeff Kolar is a sound artist and curator working in Chicago, USA. His work, described as "speaker-shredding," "wonderfully strange," and characteristically curious," includes cross-platform collaboration, low-powered radio, and live performance. His work activates sound in unconventional, temporary, and ephemeral ways using appropriation and remix as a critical practice. His solo and collaborative projects, installations, and public performances often investigate the mundane sonic nuances of everyday electronic devices. Jeff is the Founder and Artistic Director of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform, which participated in the Museum as Instrument residency. Since 2011, Radius has commissioned over 50 original works by artists from over 20 countries.

Jon Brumit works creatively with interactive social design, structured improvisation and multi-layered interventions. By design, his objects and public performance situations often produce unpredictable results – occasionally humorous, often sonorous, and always highly interpretable. Brumit has presented solo and collaborative works widely in the US and abroad at venues including the 2008 Whitney Biennial (as Neighborhood Public Radio), MOCAD (Detroit), SF MOMA, the DeYoung Museum (SF), Chelsea Art Museum (NYC), YBCA (SF), Novi Sad Contemporary Museum (Serbia), Cranbrook Museum of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI), the Krannert Museum (Urbana Champlain), Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago), and the Borderline Academy / Fadaiat (Tarifa, Spain).

Joe Jeffers is a co-curator of Museum as Instrument: A Sound Art Residency at Elsewhere. Joe is a musician, producer and Director of 8550 Ohio (Chicago and Chesterhill, OH).

Troy Briggs works with technology and sound and everyday objects to create subtle interventions in public and private space. These moments, ranging from audio jacks that connect the listener to far-away white noise and single, bare light bulbs that tap out morse code messages sent from across the world, speak to delicacy of human connection though the simplest of means.Briggs has exhibited widely in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, including Shane Campbell, Chicago; Rontoms, Portland, OR; A+D Gallery, Chicago; and 6018 North, Chicago, IL. He teaches in Contemporary Practices at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and sculpture, sound and new media at Cathege College. 

Michael Milano develops drawing and sound work through adapting systems of constraint as they are presented by the grid. Specifically drawing on the weaving draft as device to compose audio work, Milano explores the limits of the binary to produce conceptual “weavings.” Milano received a MFA from the Fiber and Material Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Humanities from Shimer College. He has shown at Roots & Culture, threewalls, Peregrine Program, Adds Donna, and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. He recently co-curated the exhibition duckrabbit with Jeff M. Ward at Adds Donna.

David Moré is a sound artist, experimental musician and sculptor. His current projects include listening to weak electromagnetic waves from (maybe) Jupiter using a home built radio telescope. In the past he has collaborated with an elephant-nose fish named Alex Halsted on the creation on biomusic.

Shannon Stratton is a founder and Executive Director of threewalls, a Chicago based not-for-profit for the presentation of contemporary art and ideas. Established in 2003, threewalls has grown from a start-up exhibition space to a vital visual arts organization supporting contemporary art through solo exhibitions, residencies, grants, publications, conferences and commissioning programs. With Green Lantern Press she founded and published (via threewalls) PHONEBOOK, a guide to contemporary independant and artist-run projects, now in its third volume, and The Artists Run Chicago Digest, a companion, appraisal and extension to the exhibition of the same name at The Hyde Park Center. Along with Roots & Culture, Document and The Public Media Institute, she co-founded (as threewalls) the MDW Fair in Chicago, a gathering of artists and independent visual arts platforms. She is a co-founder of FIELD: Artist Projects and Spaces, a national alliance of and advocacy group for small-scale visual arts platforms and their producers.