11 Artists To Know in 2022: IPMM’s Curated List

As curators of our own apartments and Instagram feeds, we’re always looking for new artists to follow and appreciate! Whether it’s a simple social media follow, watching an interview, visiting an exhibition, or even buying a new print to hang in your living room, it’s thrilling to discover a new artist whose work inspires you. 

The following list is jam-packed with amazing artists to keep an eye on in 2022 and beyond, and many of them are featured in exhibitions going on right now in Chicago!

Qais Assali 

Qais Assali is a multidisciplinary artist and designer from Palestine. His work deals with themes of identity, belonging, and displacement, as well as the trauma and loss experienced by Palestinian people on a daily basis. Assali is based between Palestine and the US, and is currently a teaching artist at Vanderbilt University. He often deals with space and distance in his pieces, often working with the strange connection between his home country and the town of New Palestine, Indiana, drawing connections and lines of convergence between the two wildly different places. 

Qais Assali currently has a piece exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center, which is viewable for free. 

Allana Clarke

A multidisciplinary artist, Allana Clarke is based in Detroit. Her work is generally concentrated in the mediums of video, sculpture, painting, and performance, and often focuses on the way blackness is objectified and signified in American culture and politics. Clarke’s most recent series of work are sculptures shaped from hair bonding glue, the material which is used to affix hair extensions to the scalp. She pours hair bonding glue onto panels and manipulates it with the force of her entire body, with the action and force symbolizing her complicated relationship with the pain and shame that surrounded childhood hair rituals. She also incorporates text into many of her pieces, weaving poetry into her visual practice. Clarke is currently a professor at Wayne State University. 

Allana Clarke was just featured in the 2021 Miami Beach Art Basel Exhibition. You can still view some of her sculptures and featured pieces in Art Basel’s virtual viewing rooms. 

Silvia López Chavez 

Silvia López Chavez is a muralist and painter, whose bright, enchanting work inspires and connects anyone who passes by one of her projects. Based in Boston, Chavez has a Dominican-American background. She’s planned and executed murals all over the country and internationally, working with businesses, cities, and activists to realize these large-scale works. Chavez’s art often features motifs of flowers, geometric patterns, and scenes of community joy and solidarity. She also leads art workshops and classes. 

Check out Silvia López Chavez’s website to find the closest mural to you! Hopefully you’ll get to see one of her stunning murals for yourself. 

Matthew Angelo Harrison 

Matthew Angelo Harrison is an installation and sculpture artist based in Detroit. His sculptures include found objects and industrial materials that create contemporary assemblages examining technology and black identity in America. Harrison worked for Ford Motor Company in Detroit after earning his BFA, where he modelled clay for automobile prototypes. This background is evident in many pieces of his work that reference deindustrialization, the collapse of organized labor, and large-scale manufacturing. Another important theme in Harrison’s art is the intersection and tension points between black identity and African identity. In many pieces, traditional African masks and sculptures are suspended in resin, protruding out from the resin casing in certain areas. Harrison’s sculptures explore the cultural conversation and distance between black Americans and black Africans. 

Matthew Angelo Harrison was just featured in the 2021 Miami Beach Art Basel Exhibition. You can still view some of his paintings and featured pieces in Art Basel’s virtual viewing rooms. 

Ester Hernandez 

Ester Hernandez is a renowned visual artist who works in screen printing and painting. As a San Joaquin Valley native and daughter of Mexican farm workers, Hernandez became politically active and involved with the Chicano and Farm Workers Movement as a young teenager. Her work usually represents Latina and Native women as politically powerful feminist icons. She’s been exhibited throughout the US and internationally over the course of her career. 

Hernandez often uses her artwork to raise money for political causes or to inspire activism in her community! Ester Hernandez is currently exhibiting her work at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, alongside Shiza Saldamando. You can see the show for free! 

Malika Jackson 

Malika Jackson is a painter and sculptor based on the Southside of Chicago. Her colorful work depicts emotive portraits of black people in Chicago and references African culture and history. Jackson’s sculptures and paintings often feature black women experiencing joy or pain. Her work is influenced deeply by her personal experiences with motherhood and being a woman. Jackson also draws inspiration from her role as a teacher. She has taught extensively in CPS schools. 

Malika Jackson just finished a residency at the Hyde Park Arts Center and is featured in an upcoming solo exhibition, which opens on January 31st! 

Hayv Kahraman

Hayv Kahraman is a painter and sculptor based in LA. She paints surreal images of women in shades of beige, black, white, and brown, who often dissolve into patterns or empty space. Kahraman was born and raised in Iraq, but her family fled during the Iran-Iraq War. She became a refugee, an identity which figures heavily in many of her works. Kahraman’s paintings are usually done on linen panels and draw from many areas of art history including the Italian Renaissance paintings, Persian miniatures, and Japanese prints. She focuses mainly on the role of women in diasporic communities and refugees, and the complex web of identities and social dynamics that they have to navigate. 

Hayv Kahraman was just featured in the 2021 Miami Beach Art Basel Exhibition. You can still view some of her paintings and featured pieces in Art Basel’s virtual viewing rooms. 

Candice Lin

Candice Lin is a LA based multidisciplinary artist, whose work is a celebration of sensations! She invites visitors to touch, climb through, listen to, and handle her works, in addition to simply looking at them. Lin’s work is often informed by history and a critical reassessment of legacies of colonialism and slavery. Her art makes use of many varied materials, including things like indigo, tea, or corn, which she uses to represent the history of the Atlantic slave trade and colonial destruction. Lin also explores themes of feminism and the experience of being a woman, traversing through the subjects of sexism, medical access for women, and sexual violence. 

Today, Lin is a professor at UCLA, as well as an exhibiting artist. Her imaginative, boundary-pushing, and sensory installations and video pieces are a thought-provoking must-see! Candice Lin is currently featured in a solo show at the Walker Art Museum. 

Christina Quarles 

Christina Quarles is a LA based painter and visual artist. Her colorful, strange, and surreal paintings invite you in–and sometimes freak you out! They often include disjointed, melty, or contorted human bodies, though they tend toward the abstract. Quarles was born in Chicago, and grew up struggling to find her place as a light-skinned mixed-race person. She says that her artwork represents and reflects this sense of displacement and futility of fixed categories of identity. Through explorations in color and form, Quarles explores her place in the world. 

Christina Quarles is currently featured in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Chicago. Visit the MCA for free, or however much you are able to pay, with their pay-what-you-can ticketing policy. 

Shiza Saldamando

Shiza Saldamando is a painter, printmaker, video artist, and tattooer. She is based in LA, but was raised in San Francisco by Japanese and Mexican parents. Saldamando’s art work focuses on the genre of portraiture, sketching friends, family, cultural icons, and people living in her community. She also loves to capture alternative subcultures that push social or cultural boundaries through her intimate portraits. Saldamando often works with ballpoint pens on fabric or paper, inspired by arte paño, a style of art where one draws friends or passersby on a napkin with a ballpoint pen. 

Shiza Saldamando is currently exhibiting her work at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, alongside Ester Hernandez. You can see the show for free! 

Jessie and Katey 

Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn make up the mural power-duo, Jessie and Katey, who travel the country adding bright color and fun to public spaces. Their geometric, abstract, and pattern heavy murals transform any building or wall into a canvas. They are inspired by architecture and the unique history of each location that they are commissioned to create a mural on. Jessie and Katey are based in Baltimore and began creating murals together in 2011, inspired by textile design and board games. Their playful murals allow boring or mundane spaces to become joyful and fun, a mission they take seriously! 

Visit their website to locate the closest mural to you and get a peek at a Jessie and Katey original in person! 

We hope that you found a new artist (or several) to get inspired by in 2022. Make sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with Chicago artists, free art events, and how you can get involved in bringing high-quality arts programming to Chicago Public Schools. 

Additionally, if you’re interested in redesigning your office or corporate space with new and interesting art, check out IPMM’s art consulting services. Our consulting team takes their sharp eye for curation and works with you to find the perfect creative match for your space. Sign up for a free art consulting intake call today.