3Arts Announces Six Recipients Of $50,000 Next Level Awards For Visual And Teaching Artists

3Arts, the Chicago-based nonprofit grantmaking organization, announced the recipients of the 3Arts Next Level Awards—$50,000 unrestricted awards given to past 3Arts awardees—during the festive 3Arts Awards Celebration held last night at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance.

While 3Arts has in the past distributed five Next Level Awards, the roster this year was expanded to include one additional award for teaching artists; at $50,000, this is the largest no-strings-attached award for teaching artists in the world. Honoring the powerful work of local artists and their ripple effects in neighborhoods across Chicago, the 2024 Next Level awardees are teaching artists William Estrada, Emily Hooper Lansana, and Andy Slater, and visual artists Rozalinda Borcilă, Bethany Collins, and Riva Lehrer.

"In such a competitive field in which grants and awards for artists are often hard to access, receiving a major award is quite an achievement—but a one-time infusion of support is rarely enough to power artists' ambitious dreams. Our Next Level Award is a rare second award designed to fuel their work as their careers evolve over time, when they are ready to bring new visionary projects to life,” said 3Arts Executive Director Esther Grimm. She adds, “In 2023, we celebrated three Next Level visual artists and two teaching artists. Last night, we announced the addition of a third Next Level Award for teaching artists, expressing our enduring admiration for the artists who work across generations, in schools, neighborhoods, hospitals, prisons, elder care centers, and more. The six new awardees are truly ‘next level.'”

During the event, 3Arts celebrated ten previously announced 3Arts Awards recipients with $30,000 unrestricted grants and ten artists who were selected by past 3Arts awardees to receive $2,000 unrestricted Make a Wave awards.

The jam-packed awards ceremony featured boundary-breaking performances by three past 3Arts awardees, including Rika Lin (2023 awardee) presenting Feedback, an experimental dance work that bends conceptions of gender and genre with collaborator Takashi Shallow; Donnetta “LilBit” Jackson (2023 awardee) performing an excerpt from A M.A.D.D. Mixtape, a piece choreographed by Jackson that explores the African diasporic roots of tap and footwork with dancers from M.A.D.D Rhythms; and singer-songwriter Nashon Holloway (2022 awardee) performing the world premiere of Go Awf, an original new song from her forthcoming album. The awards were hosted by Co-Chairs Michelle T. Boone, Whitney Hill, and Candace Hunter, and a Host Committee of arts and civic leaders.

In its 17-year history, 3Arts has distributed more than $8.1 million to more than 2,300 Chicagoland artists. 3Arts awardees include 68% women artists, 73% artists of color, and 22% Deaf and disabled artists.

TEACHING ARTISTS

William Estrada (he/him/él) grew up in California, Mexico, and Chicago. His teaching and art-making practice addresses inequity, migration, historical passivity, and cultural recognition in historically marginalized communities. He is currently a faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago, a Teaching Artist at Telpochcalli School, a 2024 Mural Arts Philadelphia Strength Through Solidarity Fellow, and is collaborating with the Mobilize Creative Collaborative, Chicago ACT Collective, and Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. He has worked as an educator with Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, Hyde Park Art Center, SkyART, Marwen, Urban Gateways, DePaul University's College Connect Program, Graffiti Institute, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Estrada regularly presents on panels regarding community programming, arts integration, and social justice curricula. He was the 2016 3Arts Community Awardee, Inaugural 2017 National Public Housing Museum Artist as Instigator Resident, 2021 National Guild for Community Arts Education National Leadership Awardee, Inaugural 2023 Enrich Chicago Imagine Just Artist Fellow, NALAC Catalyst for Change Fellow, and in 2023 was named “The People's Art Teacher” by Chicago Reader.

Estrada says, “I am extremely honored and humbled to receive 3Arts Next Level award. 3Arts has changed my life and has had a huge impact on my development and growth as a multidisciplinary artist whose focus is on making art with people in the neighborhoods they call home. With this award, I plan to deepen the work of my RADICAL Printshop Project and will plan to travel to visit and learn from artists in the US and Latin America on how they make social justice art for and with their communities.”

Emily Hooper Lansana (she/her) is an arts educator, facilitator, and storyteller from Cleveland, OH, currently living and working in Bronzeville. Her work as a storyteller and community builder has helped her to develop an extensive performance repertoire featured at local institutions from the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center to the Chicago Humanities Festival, and nationally, from the Mississippi Museum of Art to the National Storytelling Festival. An Illinois Arts Council grantee, Lansana has helped cultivate stories in diverse communities, including Pre-K–12th grade students, beginning social workers, community advocates, and organizations focused on supporting those impacted by incarceration. Recent projects include curating and performing in a pop-up performance commissioned by Project& for EXPO Chicago, artistic direction and performance with SOL Collective, and Tell Open Stories, a virtual community storytelling series of classes a commissioned for the Southern Foodways Alliance. She has been honored by the E.P.I.C. Women of Color Conference, Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University, and Ox-Bow School of Art. Lansana received her BA in Theatre Studies from Yale University and her MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and currently teaches at University of Chicago.

Lansana says, “I am deeply honored and grateful to be recognized by this phenomenal organization that has done so much to uplift artists. I moved to Chicago 36 years ago to pursue a career in the arts. As an artist who works in the oral tradition, I am interested in documenting my work so that it can be shared with future generations. Chicago has nurtured my craft, and the rich cultural community here has inspired and encouraged me. I want the future of arts in Chicago to mean that this is a place where artists, like me, come plant roots and thrive.”

Andy Slater (he/him) is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and disability advocate. Slater's current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, alt-text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design. Slater is a member of the 3Arts Disability Culture Leadership Initiative (DCLI), New Art City accessibility board, and the founder of the Society for Visually Impaired Sound Artists. He is a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Users Projects Sensory Shift program. He has exhibited and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Fonoteca Nacional (Mexico City), Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Transmediale (Berlin), Kinetic Light, TechnoSonics Festival (Charlottesville), Ian Potter Museum of Art (Melbourne), Meyer Sound Lab (San Francisco),  Critical Distance Centre for Curators (Toronto), Gallery 400 (Chicago), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), The Art Institute of Chicago, and Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival. Slater's audio description production for Alison O'Daniel's film The Tuba Thieves was featured at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. He was music director for the 2022-2023 Lit & Luz Festival in Mexico City. His sound description of Molly Joyce's Side by Side was commissioned by Carnegie Hall in 2022. Andy has been published in Array, Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (Routledge, 2023), ESC: English Studies in Canada, Chicago Reader, There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness (Godin, 2021), and JANE. Slater holds a Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2022 United States Artists Fellow, 2022-2023 Leonardo CripTech Incubator Fellow, and a 2018 3Arts/Bodies of Work Resident Artist. 

Slater says, “3Arts has been a major part of my artistic career and has helped shaped my path. As a member of the DCLI and Artists Council, I have been able to contribute to the culture and direction of 3Arts especially with the development of some of the accessibility and accommodations that have been an important part of 3Arts' operations. Receiving the Next Level award has given me a feeling of accomplishment I didn't know I needed. I have recently been sculpting and doing some foundry work for the first time in my life. With this award, I could use a thoughtful person to help me… and go a little overboard with bio-luminescent moss in one of my new installations.”

VISUAL ARTISTS

Rozalinda Borcilă (she/they) is a Romanian immigrant, artist, and activist whose work explores settler colonialism as a placemaking project that involves multiple and entangled violences. Among career highlights, Borcilă developed the experimental seminar, video, and walking project Underlying Miami: Sea Level Rise and Settler Futurities for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the New Local in Brussels. Borcilă' spearheaded Meskonsin-Kansan, a book and walking project in collaboration with scholar Nicholas Brown and artist/anthropologist Lance Foster, Vice Chair of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. She is the recipient of the Arthur and Lila Weinberg Fellowship for Independent Researchers from the Newberry Library, a grant from Art Matters Foundation, an Illinois Artist Fellowship, and a MacDowell Awards Fellowship. Borcilă is a founding member of NoShelter and A Prison is No Shelter Media, activist media projects that explore the use of congregate care and social service provision as carceral structures, particularly in immigrant detention. Borcilă received her MFA from Michigan State University and has held teaching positions at Geneva School of Art and Design, University of South Florida, and Illinois state University. Her collaboration with Andrea Carlson, Hydrologic Unit Code 071200 – Nibi Ezhi-Nisidawaabanjigaade Ozhibii'igeowin 071200, is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Borcilă says, “Receiving not one but two large awards from 3Arts brings enormous advantages for me personally and financially. Still, individual recognition within the normative paradigms of art is a strange and disorienting proposition. I fit this outfit no better or worse than many people entirely shut out of the normative field of ‘art', who often collectively create radical imaginaries and socialities, opening up other ways of being in the world. I am grateful, humbled, bewildered, conflicted, and mobilized all at once.”

Bethany Collins (she/her) was born in Montgomery, AL and lives and works in Oak Park, IL. Collins is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptual practice examines the relationship between race and language. Centering language—its biases, contradictions, and ability to simultaneously forge connections and foster violence—her works illuminate America's past and offer insight into the development of racial and national identities. Drawing on a wide variety of documents, ranging from nineteenth-century musical scores to U.S. Department of Justice reports, she erases, obscures, excerpts, and rewrites portions of text to bring to the fore issues revolving around race, power, and histories of violence. She received her BA from University of Alabama and MFA from Georgia State University and is currently an Associate Instructional Professor at the University of Chicago. Collins' work is included in the sixth iteration of the New Orleans triennial Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger is Home opening on November 2, 2024, and a solo exhibition of her work, At Sea, opens at the Seattle Art Museum on November 14, 2024.

Collins says, “With more ideas than time to make, the 3Arts Next Level Award will support more dedicated studio time and more expansive, longer-duration projects--representing a significant and exciting ‘next level' for my practice. Chicago is one of the rare cities with the capacity to sustain the trajectories of emerging and established artists alike. As I had hoped when moving here, the artists, curators and institutions that knit the city's arts community together have made this city both warmly welcoming and supportive of my practice. I hope to see that sustainability continue for others choosing to make Chicago home.”

Riva Lehrer (she/they) is an artist, writer, and curator who focuses on the socially challenged body. She is best known for representations of people whose physical embodiment, sexuality, or gender identity have long been stigmatized. Her work has been exhibited in venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, National Portrait Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Yale University, United Nations, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Arnot Art Museum, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Frye Art Museum, and Chicago Cultural Center. Awards include the 2020 Ford Foundation Disability Futures Fellowship, 2017 3Arts MacDowell Colony Fellowship, 2014 Carnegie Mellon Fellowship, 2006 Wynn Newhouse Award, Illinois Arts Council Grants, and National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Lehrer's book, GOLEM GIRIL: A MEMOIR (October 2020, One World/ Penguin Random House) won the 2020 Barbellion Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. She is represented by Regal Hoffman & Associates and by Zolla / Lieberman Gallery. Lehrer was a longtime faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an instructor in Medical Humanities at Northwestern University.

Lehrer says, “I have been at the cusp of making difficult changes in my work. Conceptual changes as well as formal shifts. I wasn't sure if they would be too hard to sustain. This award has come at the exact moment of decision; with this award, the door has swung open wide.”

The 2024 Next Level Teaching Arts Award panelists are: Mark Alcazar Diaz (Associate Director of Education at Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education); Karen Benita Reyes (Executive Director of Firebird Community Arts, Chicago); Miguel Angel Rodriguez (Executive Director of the Albany Park Theater Project, Chicago); and Shamilia Tocruray (creator, facilitator, and arts educator, Brooklyn, NY).

The 2024 Next Level Visual Arts Award panelists are: Carla Acevedo-Yates (Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago); Christa Blatchford (Executive Director of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York City, NY); and Allison Glenn (curator and writer, New York, NY).

As previously announced, the 2024 recipients of 3Arts Awards ($30,000 per artist):

The 2024 recipients of the unrestricted $30,000 awards are dance artists Imania Fatima Detry and Robby Lee Williams; musicians Emily Rach Beisel and Wanees Zarour; teaching artists Rich Robbins and Stephanie Manriquez; theater artists Shariba Rivers and Levi J. Wilkins; and visual artists Cecilia Beaven and Farah Salem.
 

The 2024 recipients of the Make a Wave Awards ($2,000 per artist):

Mallory Raven-Ellen Backstrom (playwright, author, illustrator, and teaching artist): Ari Brown (musician and sincere creative); Ash Busse (teaching artist); Mike D. Chicago (dancer, choreographer, Chicago-footworker, teaching artist, and M.C.); TehRay PHENOM Hale (Hip-Hop artist and mentor); Shalaka Kulkarni (multidisciplinary dancer and choreographer); Eugene A. MALTEZ (sculptor and painter); Allen Moore (experimental turntablist, painter, mixed media artist, educator, and  illustrator); Allison Carol Schmocker (visual and multidisciplinary artist); and Tish (dancer, choreographer, mentor, and teacher).

About 3Arts

Founded in 1912, with a history centered on women artists, 3Arts is a nonprofit organization that supports artists working in the performing, teaching, and visual arts in the Chicago metropolitan area, including women artists, artists of color, and Deaf and disabled artists. By providing unrestricted awards, project funding, residencies, professional development, and promotion, 3Arts helps artists take risks, experiment, and build momentum in their careers over time.

For more information about 3Arts, please visit www.3arts.org.

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