UNDER QUIET LIGHT, WHISPERS FADE TOGETHER

Emiko Akiyama Tahara is making through collage, cooking, sculpture, film, collaboration, sound, photography, and mark-making. Using archival images and objects, they describe the perimeter of the spiritual~ancestral world they share collectively. Their practice captures meditative reflections on nature using assemblages from their personal history to collage something collectively liberatory. They are constantly discovering what it looks like to participate in our collective responsibility to hold communion and what it means to be both an observer of a community and part of one, pertaining to Nikkei identity especially. 

They currently live in Chicago and are earning their Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an emphasis in film-video.

Daniel Villalobos is a Chicago-based graphic designer and printmaker specializing in editorial and branding design. His practice is guided by a deep appreciation for storytelling, typography, and composition, using design as a tool for communication and cultural expression. 

Through screenprinting, he explores themes of family, heritage, memory, and identity, often drawing from his upbringing as the child of Mexican immigrants. By blending design principles with printmaking traditions, Viillalobos creates intentional, impactful work that sparks dialogue, amplifies voices, and fosters connection across audiences.

Angie Darianna (b. TX), currently based in Chicago, is an interdisciplinary artist working within the realm of printmedia, writing, and fiber. Their artistic practice explores and archives intimacy through personal relationships and histories, ritual through acts of offering and collecting, and notions of mundanity.

Drawing from their personal experience, Angie pieces together fragments from memories however subtle that speak to a cultural context and/or set up an intimate environment that is amplified by their ritual-like making process. The intimacies of their work is reflected on the surfaces their hands touch during creation– graining, spinning, papermaking, collecting. This act of repetition and dedication allows the works to act as an offering, placing a certain sanctity to subtle gestures and intimate memories.

Ashlee Bonilla is a recently graduated Chicago based graphic designer and sculptor who creates visual shortcuts to understanding. Her work is diverse in nature, moving through styles that best fits each project. While she explores the constant shift in design, she also explores her own heritage being a biracial American, who feels disconnected and culturally lost from both sides of her identity.

Aurelie Atowo is a painter and textile artist whose work focuses on her Cameroonian identity, feminism, as well as the intersectionality between Blackness and counter-culture. Born to two Cameroonian immigrant parents in Ypsilanti, Michigan, she is based in both Detroit and Chicago, currently pursuing her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mixing media such as crochet, painting, quilting, and printmaking, she relays the Black experience; both joyful and despairing. The symbols relayed in cultural textile patterns further in this story of love, grief, and familiarity.