CAC Announces Recipients of the 2022 ENVISION Grant

Chicago Artists Coalition is thrilled to announce the recipients of the 2022 ENVISION Grant for Chicago-based artists working in the field of time-based digital and electronic art: Erica Gressman, and Bun Stout. Gressman and Stout have been awarded unrestricted grants of $2,500 each for their demonstrated artistic excellence. The ENVISION Grant, now in its third year, is made possible by a partnership with the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. 

CAC would like to thank Claudia Hart, Artist and Associate Professor in the department of Film, Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Tiffany Funk, Editor-in-Chief of the Video Game Art Reader, Visiting Assistant Professor and Co-founder of IDEAS (Interdisciplinary Education in the Arts) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, for their work as this year’s jurors. CAC is also grateful to the Thoma Foundation for their vision and generosity in supporting Chicago artists.

Erica Gressman is a Miami-born, mixed Latinx queer artist working in Chicago who fuses sound art with performance. She received her BA from New College of Florida and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Performance in 2012. She has performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Royal Danish Art Academy, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Pittsburgh’s VIA: video/music festival, New York’s Grace Exhibition Space, Defibrillator Gallery and Miami Art Center. Her work ‘Wall of Skin’ has been featured in Performance Matters journal, Barbed Magazine, and Emergency Index Vol. 2. In 2019, they received Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for their work, ‘Limbs’, debuted at the Krannert Art Museum.

Bun Stout is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist engaging social technologies and Chicago’s drag club scene. Their art is centered in handmade augmented reality wearables, intentionally misusing software designed for social media. Combining fashion, photography, AR and poetry, they transform themself and other artists into otherworldly storytellers who appear IRL and hidden within technological spaces.

Their work explores dynamics of beauty and power and is focused through experiences of queer community and survival in the American midwest. Stout’s work is contextualized in trans concepts of realness, the practical and economic value of performed beauty, and the ever-present possibility of transformation.

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