The Arts Club of Chicago is pleased to announce the awarding of the first biannual Visual, Literary & Performing Arts Fellowship to visual artist Brit Barton. The fellowship provides an emerging Chicago artist MFA graduate with a two-year membership to The Arts Club, free of charge, as well as a stipend for various members-only performances and dining services. This fellowship is part of a new initiative developed at our last board retreat to build relationships with young artists in the city.
In her work Brit Barton regularly employs performance, video, sound, and drawing. Her sparse use of materials and gesture often evoke power and suggestion, with questions emerging around perception, time, and architectures. Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, Jessica Stockholder says “Brit’s work is about something – it’s clear and consistent – though it doesn’t translate easily into words. Perhaps it has something to do with how the act of measuring is connected to feeling and functions as metaphor.”
A 2016 graduate of the MFA program at the University of Chicago, Barton was also a member of Hyde Park Art Center’s Center Program in 2013, and graduated with a BFA in Photography at Texas State University in 2011. In April of 2016, she was a co-organizer of the symposium, Open Forum: A Visual Conversation on LatinX Art, an inquiry into the artistic engagement and predicaments of contemporary Latin artists, that was held at ACRE Projects. Of receiving The Arts Club Fellowship she says, “I think now is a really undefined time after having just graduated; being able to observe and kind of incubate is really crucial to me. I know that spending this time at The Arts Club is going to be both incredibly valuable, supportive, and insightful.”
Barton is also an arts writer for Newcity magazine and co-curator for an upcoming video series with artist Morganne Wakefield. This September, she will be featured in the new online exhibition Institutional Garbage, curated by Caroline Picard and Lara Schoorl.
