CHICAGO JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART
EST.  2026


00EDITOR’S FOREWORD

The structures that determine the preservation of art, the writing of history, and the critical circulation of frameworks have always been contested. With the defunding of arts education, coordinated dismantling of diversity initiatives, and the institutional embrace of artificial intelligence as a substitute for human cultural labor are not isolated developments, but rather emerge as a pattern, with their cumulative effect as a narrowing of who is permitted to make, study, and interpret art.

Chicago has never required outside validation to generate serious art and thought. Its history of labor organizing, radical aesthetics, and community-built cultural infrastructure predates and exceeds what mainstream art history has been willing to account for. That oversight is not neutral, as it reflects the same hierarchies of geography and credential that have long determined which cities, which schools, and which voices are worth platforming. Our mission lies directly in building a scholarly reference alongside traditional hierarchical modes.  (p.1)

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sophia Hernandez is a filmmaker and researcher based in Chicago. She has contributed to projects at Community TV Network and Cinema Sounds & Secrets. She also was a speaker at the Intercollegiate Art History Symposium at The University of Chicago in 2025, in which she bridged the gap between film preservation and archaeology in the art world.

Anya Lomachenko is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and activist based in Chicago. Working across sculpture, fibers, ceramics, and performance, she explores identity, displacement, and the restoration of memory. Her research examines intersections of personal and collective remembrance, the space between civil and military life, and the decolonization of Ukrainian cultural image.

Gia Theodoropoulos is a curator, art historian, and collector based in Chicago. Her research interests include Institutional Critique and Relational Aesthetics. Her curatorial practice is heavily driven by the process of how artworks operate as signifiers towards the conceptualization of an idea.

Lexi Wegner is an art historian, writer, and researcher based in Chicago and Dallas. Her main body of work and research includes 1860-1980 American art, as well as 20th and 21st century performance art, focusing on ephemerality and exploring colonialism in the American empire. She has been an educator at the Dallas Museum of Art.





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