Aram 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.

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 her Post-Baccalaureate 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.

Sifuentes's work had been displayed in various exhibitions, both national and international. 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 included the 2015 A Mend: A Collection of Scraps, shown at Babson College in Massachusetts. In it, Sifuentes represented the labor-entailing jobs that were common for immigrants by collecting scraps of jean from Chicago seamstresses and tailors and sewing them together. Her other exhibitions include U.S. Citizenship Test Sampler, where Sifuentes addresses the sociohistoric role of women and function of noncitizen communities. In this, she hand-sews 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. At the time, Sifuentes felt unable to attend protests because she had a small child, and unsafe there because she was not, at the time, 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.

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