Events

view times

REGISTER HERE

An ecstatic evening of varied performances animating the generational legacy of Pros Arts Studio in Chicago’s art scene.

Six voices from the UIC Choirs breathe life into exhibiting artist Leticia Pardo’s whimsical Exquisite Corpse text, a work coauthored by Pros Arts Studio members as part of her plaster cast. Alberto Aguilar and three of his students, Ieva Maria Tersigni, Saoirse Ahumada Furin, and Nico Valentina Mairesse, perform a puppet show that blends body contortion, a fiddle, a clown song, and copyright laws. Jean Carlos Claudio of La Vuelta Ensemble presents Desempacando Identidad, a set of poetry, acrobatics, and bomba music that reflects on his migration from Puerto Rico to the continental US.

With Colbie Cook (MA 25) and Ivanka Suska (MA 25) as masters of ceremony.

ACCESS INFORMATION: This program is free and open to the public. Seating is limited. For questions and access accommodations, email gallery400engagement@gmail.com.

ABOUT

Alberto Aguilar is a Chicago-based artist who uses whatever material is at hand in an attempt to make a meaningful connection with the viewer. He does not distinguish his art practice from his other various life roles, which allows him to make work wherever he is. He has shown and presented his work at various museums, galleries, storefronts, homes, and street corners around the world. Some of these include the Queens Museum, El Torito Supermercado, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the corner of Cesar Chavez Ave and North Broadway in Los Angeles, CA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museo Del Jamón in Madrid, Spain, among others. Along with some members of his family, he collectively organizes Mayfield, a multi-use space which operates on the grounds of his home. He is the recipient of the 3Arts Award.

UIC Choirs is a mixed voice soprano, alto, tenor, and bass ensemble that welcomes all singers on the UIC campus.

Jean Carlos Claudio is a multidisciplinary performer from Caguas, Puerto Rico. They have been performing, teaching, and creating in Chicago since 2016, where they have been established since completing the Actors Gymnasium’s Professional Circus Program.  His years of training in Puerto Rico, Chicago, and Argentina have given him a unique and versatile performance style. A skilled tumbler and physical performer, he can easily shift from a quirky clown apt for all ages to an experimental performer fitting for theatre and/or cabarets. Their passion for performing has made them a fixture in the Chicago theatre scene, where they’ve performed with Goodman Theatre, Teatro Vista, Chicago Shakespeare, Midnight Circus, UrbanTheater Co., and Filament Theatre, among others. Claudio is the co-founder of La Vuelta Theatre Lab and a proud member of the Teatro Vista Artistic Collective. In 2018, he got into the Cirque du Soleil database as a clown and physical performer.

Maya Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound performance and diasporic making. She gathers speech fragments, urban recordings, body movements, migratory routes, sounds imitating nature sounds, and videos of daily life into open-ended compositions. These often take the shape of performance lectures, sound installations, movement works, and videos. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago and an M.F.A in Sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown work with Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (Hanoi), UCLA New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles), Manzi Art Space (Hanoi), Berlin Art Week 2024 (Berlin), World Forum For Acoustic Ecology 2023 (Florida), Internationales Digitalkunst Festival 2022 (Stuttgart), Terrain Biennial 2021 (Chicago), and Watershed Art & Ecology (Chicago), among others. She was an artist-in-residence at Berlin’s Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, a winner of the Karl Sczuka Radio Art Research Prize 2024, and an Arts Club of Chicago Fellow 2025-26.