Amber Ginsburg is a Chicago based artist teaching at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts. Ginsburg creates site-generated projects and social sculptures that insert historical scenarios into present day situations, as well as engage present day histories to imagine alternative futures. Her background in craft orients her projects toward the continuities and ruptures in material and social histories. She often works with long-term and ongoing collaborators and together they engage multiple communities and elicit working relationships with experts in the fields of botany, political activism, biology, legal scholarship and activism, and science fiction. Always interested in history, more recently, she has been drawn to imagined futures, specifically a future that includes human survival. Looking to past feminist strategies, including collective action and equity politics, she works in large-scale sculptural forms that allow audiences a role in thinking through the making or completing the work. The boundary between human and nonhuman agency is pressing thinner. Ginsburg follows specific material lineages, sometimes a tree species, sometimes porcelain, to map our varied and complex relationships. In doing so, she works in concert with objects as collaborators, agent-provocateurs, and narrative instigators.

Aaron Hughes is an artist, curator, anti-war activist, and Iraq War veteran. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, Hughes works collaboratively to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. He develops projects that utilize popular research strategies, experiment with forms of direct democracy, and operate in solidarity with the people most impacted by structural violence.