Department of Art

Leonard Suryajaya (b. Indonesia) uses his work to test the boundaries of intimacy, community and family. He uses photography, video, performance and installation to show how the everyday is layered with histories, meanings and potential.

Suryajaya’s photographs are held in major institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and The Block Museum. His work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Benaki Museum in Greece, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, National Library in Singapore, Esker Foundation in Canada, and Aperture Gallery in New York. He’s received awards from prestigious institutions such as Guggenheim Fellowship, Artadia Awards, DCASE Esteemed Artist Award, Aaron Siskind Foundation Award, and Robert Giard Foundation Fellowship. He received MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BA and BFA from California State University Fullerton. He lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Learn more about Suryajaya at his website or on his Instagram page.

Coinciding with the November opening of Hypernatural, her second solo exhibition at R & Company in New York City, Joyce Lin will discuss her sculptural furniture practice, which investigates the relationship between surface and structure and the erosion of boundaries between the natural and the man-made. Drawing on elements of surrealism and faux finishing, her recent work explores the growing disconnect between truth and appearance in the built environment.

Lin holds degrees in Furniture Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and Geology-Biology at Brown University through the Brown/RISD Dual Degree Program. She has exhibited widely, with work held in collections including the RISD Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Peabody Essex Museum. Her practice has been featured in The New York Times, The Architect’s Newspaper, Dwell, and the landmark books Objects: USA 2020 and Objects: USA 2024. In addition to her studio work, Lin teaches woodworking and design at institutions such as RISD and TXRX Labs in Houston, where she is currently based.

Learn more about Lin at her website or on her Instagram page.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner. Her middle name, Janan, comes from the Arabic trilateral root (J-N-N / جنان), evoking that which is unmoored, veiled, and unsanctioned. Accordingly, Rasheed explores the relationship between language, mysticism, and disobedience. She examines the materiality of wayward language—acrobatic (Clarice Lispector) sentences with trap doors (Fred Moten), runaway syllables that scatter to the marooned edges of a page, words that escape the orbit of its mother sentence, footnotes that consume their reference, and utterances that dissipate before being recorded. She also explores the materiality of reading, centering spiritual practices where reading happens through touch and digestion, rather than solely looking. A "language person" (Paul Soulellis), she "gives language a body" (Chang Yuchen) through her large-scale installations, multichannel video works, publications, software, performance, public archives, and learning platforms.

Her work across art, pedagogy, and emerging technologies has garnered numerous honors. In 2024, she was an Artes Mundi 11 Finalist and received a High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree. She received additional fellowships and awards from Working Artist (2023); Schering Stiftung (2022 Award for Artistic Research); Creative Capital Award (2022); an Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google (2022); and Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts (2021). Her work has also been presented across the world, including the continents of North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Henry Art Gallery (2025), REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum, Bronx Museum, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MASSMoCA, the Kitchen, and ICA Philadelphia, among others.

Learn more about Rasheed at her website or on her Instagram page.