GRAM & Ox-Bow Summer Lecture Series: Brendan Fernandes and Soo Shin

Brendan Fernandes is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest…always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant.

Brendan is also the recipient of the Platform Award (2024), the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020) and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montréal); among a great many others. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. Recent and upcoming projects include performances and solo presentations at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; The MCA Denver, Denver, Colorado; The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, PA; Remai Modern, Saskatoon, CA; and Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway.

Soo Shin is an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary artist based in Chicago, IL. Shin employs a diverse range of materials — ceramic, brass, concrete, wood, and seawater — to evoke themes of connection, spatial displacement, and longing. She is the recipient of the fellowship at Djerassi Artist Residency, Woodside, CA; the individual artist grant at the Illinois Arts Council; and the Vilcek Foundation fellowship at MacDowell Artist Residency. Shin’s work has been presented at The Luminary, St. Louis, MO; PATRON Gallery, Chicago, IL; Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago, IL; Chicago Manual Style, Chicago, IL; LVL3, Chicago, IL; and Chicago Artist Coalition, Chicago, IL among others.

She has completed residencies at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Vermont Studio Center; Art Farm, Marquette, NE; and Ox-box, Saugatuck, MI. She earned a Master’s in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master’s in Fine Arts, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea.