Community Talks
Community Talks is a free public program hosted at Mana Contemporary Chicago to introduce its community to a new guest each month.
Meet the guests:
Jordan Martins is a Chicago based visual artist, curator, educator and musician. He received his MFA in visual arts from the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) in Salvador, Brazil in 2007, and is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University. He is the executive director of Comfort Station, a multi-disciplinary art space in Chicago. Martins’s visual work is based in collage processes, including painting, photography, video and installation, and he has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Goldfinch, The Mission, Evanston Art Center, LVL3, The Franklin, The Museu de Arte da Bahia, Zeitgeist, and Experimental Sound Studio. He was artist in residency at Latitude in 2022, a WARP resident at The Weaving Mill in 2017, and a resident in the Chicago Artists Coalition’s HATCH program in 2013. Martins is co-director of the Perto da Lá <> Close to There, a multidisciplinary project with international artists in Salvador, Brazil and Chicago funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund
Janine Mileaf, Ph.D., is Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Arts Club of Chicago, a cultural hub for the city since 1916. An art historian, she has worked to emphasize the educational and community missions of The Arts Club, expanding its public arts programming and connections to local artists, while bringing evocative exhibitions to its gallery. Mileaf is a champion of challenging art, commissioning new work from a broad spectrum of practitioners including composers, choreographers, and architects, in addition to visual artists. Mileaf has served as interlocutor, critic, or juror for such institutions as the Executive Service Corps, University of Chicago, Chicago Humanities Festival, Terra Foundation for American Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 3Arts, and the Chicago Artists Coalition. She is the author of Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the Readymade, and co-editor of The Arts Club of Chicago at 100 and A Home for Surrealism: Fantastic Painting in Midcentury Chicago, as well as numerous articles, interviews, and essays on interwar and contemporary art. At The Arts Club, she has curated monographic exhibitions with such artists as Hurvin Anderson, Kamrooz Aram, Kerstin Brätsch, Suzanne Jackson, Jennie C. Jones, Hannah Levy, Sharon Lockhart, Josiah McElheny, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Amy Sillman, and Simon Starling. Currently on view is Jessi Reaves: All possessive lusts dispelled.
