CHICAGO
TSA Summer Artist Residency
Jul 23–Aug 6, 2026
Join us for a conversation and exhibition walkthrough Thu, Jul 23, 7 pm at Pueblo Unido
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is excited to launch the TSA Summer Artist Residency, a new annual program created to give artists dedicated time, space, and community to advance their creative practice.
The fully funded two-week residency brings together a small cohort of artists for focused studio time in a shared 500-square-foot space in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood. With 24/7 access to the studio, residents have the freedom to work independently or collaboratively while building meaningful connections through conversation, experimentation, and shared creative exchange.
Designed to foster lasting professional relationships, the residency extends beyond the two-week program through ongoing dialogue with TSA Chicago members and a dedicated curatorial team. The inaugural residency takes place July 23–August 6, 2026, and concludes with an Open Studio, inviting the public to meet the artists and experience work in progress.
The residency will culminate in a group exhibition at the TSA Chicago gallery in summer 2027, showcasing work developed during and after the residency while continuing to expand each artist's professional network.
Meet the inaugural Summer Artists-in-Residence
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is thrilled to introduce the first artists selected for the TSA Summer Artist Residency: Elsie Kagan and Susy Bielak. Their practices represent the beginning of what is intended to become a vibrant annual tradition of artistic exchange and community building.
Elsie Kagan is a Brooklyn-based painter, originally from Berkeley, CA. Her work draws together divergent languages into conversation with a material-based approach to abstraction, creating visually dense and exuberant paintings. Recent solo shows include 'the drop falls' at 3s Artspace in Portsmouth, NH in 2026 and 'the future is certain' in 2024 at the Shirley Project Space in Brooklyn, NY. Kagan has attended residencies including TSA Chicago, R.A.R.O Madrid, Vermont Studio Center, Residency Unlimited NYC, and Chautauqua.
Recent grants are from the NEA, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Kagan holds an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and a BA from Wesleyan University.
Kagan is the Founder and Executive Director of Interlude Artist Residency, specifically designed to address the unique needs of artist parents. A non-profit Residency program in Upstate New York, Interlude offers supportive and fully funded 3-week sessions for approximately 20 artists per year.
Susy Bielak is an artist and writer whose work explores migration, displacement, memory, and place. Through drawing, installation, performance, photography, text, and video, she reimagines the social and political structures written into our environments.Informed by diasporic experience, Bielak's work traces relationships between interior and exterior landscapes, connecting intimate experiences to larger environmental, political, and historical forces.
Her projects often emerge through sustained engagement with specific places, combining research, observation, collecting, and collaboration.
Her work ranges from drawings made with her breath to videos staged in sites of scientific testing, and from participatory public projects to installations incorporating maps, archives, found materials, and landscape-based actions. Her collaborators have included writers in exile, bus drivers, social workers, choreographers, engineers, musicians, and scientists.
Bielak's work has been exhibited, collected, and published widely, including by the Museo Tamayo, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center, New American Paintings, and Poetry Magazine. She received her MFA from the University of California San Diego and is Assistant Professor of Art at Lake Forest College, where she is currently a Mellon Fellow. She lives and works in Chicago.
@susyluck
Thursday, July 23, 7PM at Pueblo Unido Gallery
Join us for a conversation and exhibition walkthrough with Susy Bielak and curator Esteban King on the occasion of Camas de Ceniza / Ash Beds, at Pueblo Unido Gallery at 7PM. More info at pueblounidogallery.com/camasdeceniza-ashbeds.
