to live and be loved // to have and to hold
December 6 - January 3, 2026
No Longer Peter Cohen’s Property #16, 2020
Michael, 2022
Alayna N. Pernell (b. 1996) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator from Heflin, Alabama. In May 2019, she graduated from The University of Alabama, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art with a concentration in Photography and a minor in African American Studies. She received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2021. Her work reflects the shared experiences of Black women, particularly those shaped by the Deep South. Through photography, text, and sourced materials, she explores the mental, physical, and psychological toll of sustained exposure to visible and invisible injustice, discrimination, and violence in both literal and metaphorical spaces.
Billie Carter-Rankin is a visual artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She experiments with photography, darkroom processing, and archived images to explore loss within personal and collective memory, and the new possibilities that arise from that loss. Her work has been featured in TIME Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian US, and Oxford American. Her commission work has been featured on “The Most Memorable New York Times Illustrations" lists for both 2022 and 2023, as well as The Guardian US’s Best Illustration list in 2022. She graduated with an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020 and her BA in Media, Journalism, and Film from Howard University in 2018.
We are thrilled to announce our first Artist in Residence with Diana H. Chu
Diana H. Chu (b. 1990) is a first-generation Chinese American artist based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Chu deconstructs and reimagines her subject matter in colored pencil, arranging familiar objects next to ancient relics and imagined creatures on paper. She merges incongruous timelines to introduce a mythic perspective. Her cut-and-paste aesthetic develops her ideas of shifting selfhood, using the vernacular of collage to put her identity directly in conversation with time, belonging, and representation.
Chu’s compositionally dense images were developed from living in Hong Kong for ten years (1998–2008). By what she leaves out of an image, Chu questions how personal history is erased. Chu’s drawings are arranged in sequential narratives and Risograph printed in limited color palettes of 1–4 colors. Her prints are hand-bound into visual art books. Chu employs the Risograph to help blur the line between canonical fine art media and ones co-opted from corporate environments.
Sudden Death (1, 2, 3), 2018
Sudden Death (1, 2, 3), 2018
Sudden Death (1, 2, 3), 2018
Like A Summer With 1000 Julys
October 25 - November 22, 2025
Eun-Ha Paek, Melissa Pokorny, Sahar Khoury
Pain Stuck Under Soles
August 30 - October 5, 2025
Sara Caron
White Noise
August 30 - October 5, 2025
White Noise
August 30 - October 5, 2025
Alayna N. Pernell and Billie Carter-Rankin in conversation with Symphony Swan-Zawadi