Aram Han Sifuentes
Aram Han Sifuentes is a Korean American social practice fiber artist, writer, curator, and an adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sifuentes was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to Modesto, California, in 1992. She currently resides in Chicago, Illinois. Life and career. Sifuentes attended the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008 where she earned her BA in art and Latin American studies. She then went to Baltimore, where she earned a postbaccalaureate certificate in fine art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011, followed by an MFA in  fiber and material studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Works. Sifuentes's work has been displayed in various national and international exhibitions. She was the 2013 Windgate Museum Intern at the Smithsonian's Archive of American Art, and is independently curating an AAA oral history collection on craft. Sifuentes was also a 2012-2013 Curatorial Fellow at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sifuentes's solo exhibitions include the 2015 "A Mend: A Collection of Scraps", shown at Babson College in Massachusetts. In it, Sifuentes represents the labor-entailing jobs that are  common for immigrants by collecting scraps of jeans from Chicago seamstresses and tailors and sewing them together. Her other exhibitions include "U.S. Citizenship Test Sampler," through which Sifuentes addresses the sociohistoric role of women and the function of noncitizen communities. Hand-sewn into the piece are the 100 civic study questions and answers of the US Naturalization Test. Protest Banner Lending Library. Sifuentes's "Protest" "Banner Lending Library" project was conceived following the 2016 presidential election. Sifuentes was unable to attend protests because she had a small child; she also felt she would be unsafe at such events because she  was not then a US citizen. The library is a space where folks can make banners, but also borrow a banner to be used in protest and then be returned. The project has taken place at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in partnership with Gallery 400, Smart Museum, Comfort Station, Chicago Cultural Center, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, the Johnson Museum of Art, and at the Whitney Museum — where she worked with Cauleen Smith as part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial's programming. Awards. 2016 - Smithsonian  Artist Research Fellowship, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. 2017 - Beazley Designs of the Year exhibition at the Design Museum, London 2018 - Pulitzer Arts Foundation residency, St. Louis