Alex Bradley Cohen & Steve Ruiz

With Daniel Schubert Stolen Sign-Painting & the Retail-Work of R. Suga. in the Milwaukee Ave. Window Gallery

Beneath layers of both the urban truths of hip-hop and modernist painting ~slick languages~ Alex Bradley Cohen battles with his own identity. Through painted portraits of friends, “identity texts”, ceramic sculpture, and drawing, Alex finds a balance of play, ritual, and addressing terms of community and his-self.

In his landscape paintings, Steve Ruiz uses visual storytelling–conventions from graphic novels and comics, to explore the interaction between narrative, imagination, and a sense of place. He aims to convey the significance which attaches to environments, whether mundane or extreme, when backfilled with memory and animated by stories, seeming set apart, and set for action.

Alex Bradley Cohen lives and works in Chicago, IL. Cohen is an alumnus of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He is recipient of the 2014 James Nelson Raymond Fellowship. Recent exhibitions include The Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA and The Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL. His work was featured on the cover of New American Paintings (issue 113, 2014).

Steve Ruiz is an artist and writer currently based in Cambridge, UK. He earned an MFA from the University of Chicago in 2013 and has recently exhibited work at Flat Space in Chicago and Bermuda Gallery, Milwaukee. In addition to his studio practice, Steve writes about contemporary art for Daily Serving and manages Chicago’s visual art calendar, The Visualist.