UIC⚡️MFA

Some snapshots from the last crit of the semester and a year of amazing work. Congratulations to our graduating class, and looking forward to what's more to come!

Final event of being a student tomorrow evening at 8pm. This event is open to the public as part of @uicmfa Short Story Long Thesis show at @gallery400 .

I’m excited to announce that @claireburkedain @danielgantner_ and I will be making some sounds in the basement of 400 s Peoria this Thursday evening at 8 pm! This improvised collaboration is brought to you by train windows, car windows, highways and interchange. This is a free event in connection to UIC’s 2026 MFA Thesis programming. Hope to see a bunch of yas! @uicmfa

Catherine Lyu & Naeemeh Naeemaei: A Collaborative Reading & Unreading April 23rd 5:30-6:30pm Gallery 400 A reading of the Song - Sing - Sang by Catherine Lyu in collaboration with a reading of the White Books by Naeemeh Naeemaei. Through a series of quiet, deliberate actions, Naeemeh engages with approximately ten books selected solely for their white covers, regardless of their content. She will be using them to respond to Catherine’s reading of her translations of one of her grandpa’s poems. The echoing of sounds together with the materiality of the objects forms a language of communication between the artists and their memory objects.

🎨 For the last two years, eight students graduating this spring from UIC’s @uicmfa program have painted, filmed, built and created over countless hours in their studios above UIC @gallery400 . When the students, from around the world, weren’t making art in their UIC-provided studio space or attending classes, they were teaching art to undergraduates. Visit the link in our bio to learn more about the @uicsaah MFA cohort, and view an exhibition of their artwork opening TONIGHT from 6 to 9 p.m., now through May 9 at @gallery400 ! #ArtExhibit #Art #ThisIsUIC #UIC #Chicago

Reception Tomorrow April 17th 5:00pm to 9:00pm. UIC MFA 2026 Candidates Elias Mendel Michael Cunningham Justyna Wasįk Naeemeh Naeemaei Claire Dain Catherine Lyu Billy Tucker Erin Lynch Video director @photogruitar and @claireburkedain Filmed by @juanboscoserna Edited by Elias Mendel Music by Claire and Billy

Catherine Lyu (@cath3rine_lv ) is a Chinese artist currently based in Chicago. She is a multidisciplinary artist, and her practice explores languages as words, images, and objects. She uses bodily knowledge like memory, sensory, emotion, and thought process to guide her decisions in art making. Her works are attempts to treat language spatially, physically, and bodily.

Elias Mendel (@elimendel ) is a London-born, Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist who creates stop-motion animations, sculptures, drawings, prints, writing and performances. He deploys this multifaceted approach to investigate the intersection between dreams, roots, and the abyss, examining legibility, language, diaspora and belonging. These concerns have emerged from his investigation into a vast family history and archive that grapples with the aftermath of fascism and the Holocaust. Mendel engages with this history through mark-making as well as working with the archival, researching, cataloguing, and writing. Alongside his artistic practice, he has a workshop teaching practice, in which he leads arts, archival, and educational workshops. Mendel is completing his MFA at the University of Illinois Chicago, and studied history and politics at the University of Manchester. He spent a year in Berlin after receiving the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. The Letters to Yesterday memorial project was developed there and was exhibited as part of the Casablanca Art Biennale (2021), shortlisted for the John Ruskin Art Prize in London (2023), and exhibited during his first solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre (2022). Since then, he has exhibited in New York, Chicago, Johannesburg, Casablanca, Berlin and London.

Rescheduled- STAY TUNED For date. Second performance announced! Join us for UIC MFA candidate @erinelizlynch ’s performance activation “Holding Pattern (after “Cowpoke,” 1951)”. A live vocal performance set within the installation using real-time processing, the voice is looped, shifted, and fed back, producing layers that drift out of sync with themselves. The performance draws on the Western song “Cowpoke” (1951) as a working score. Phrases repeat and degrade through accumulation, staging a failure to pass, a failure to coalesce into the legible. The voice hovers between independence and echo, bending impossible octaves and channeling the uncanny persistence of nostalgic mythology.

Billy Tucker (b. 1980) I grew up in poverty and still struggle with connection to place. While researching the Eisenhower Expressway I’ve learned how its site embodies displacement and warmth in its material lessons through observation, collaboration, and curiosity.

Erin E. Lynch (b. 1996, Chicago, IL) is an artist and filmmaker working across 16mm film, sound, installation, and text. Drawing on film history, camp aesthetics, and psychoanalysis, she approaches genre cinema as a public archive to be translated and skewed, where the uncanny stages new configurations of desire and collective life. She was named a 2025 Artist To Watch by Comfort Station (Chicago, IL).  @erinelizlynch |

Justyna Wąsik works across film, sound & practices of everyday life. She created post-artistic festival Polish Soundtrack with Krzysztof Kaczmarek & Łukasz Jastrubczak. Her works were featured at MESS Festival in Sarajevo, Edinburgh Fringe, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Dream Factory in Ostrava. Author of lyrics for Boring Drug & cli-fi, sonic love story of Lake Michigan & Baltic.