3Arts Announces Six Recipients of $50,000 Next Level Awards for Visual and Teaching Artists

3Arts, the Chicago-based nonprofit grantmaking organization, recently announced the recipients of the 3Arts Next Level Awards—$50,000 unrestricted awards given to past 3Arts awardees—during a festive 3Arts Awards Celebration. While 3Arts has in the past distributed five Next Level Awards, this year’s roster was expanded to include one additional award for teaching artists; at $50,000, this is the largest no-strings-attached award for teaching artists in the world. Honoring the powerful work of local artists and their ripple effects in neighborhoods across Chicago, the 2024 Next Level awardees are teaching artists William Estrada, Emily Hooper Lansana, and Andy Slater, and visual artists Rozalinda Borcilă, Bethany Collins, and Riva Lehrer.

“In such a competitive field in which grants and awards for artists are often hard to access, receiving a major award is quite an achievement—but a one-time infusion of support is rarely enough to power artists’ ambitious dreams. Our Next Level Award is a rare second award designed to fuel their work as their careers evolve over time, when they are ready to bring new visionary projects to life,” said 3Arts Executive Director Esther Grimm. She added, “In 2023, we celebrated three Next Level visual artists and two teaching artists. Last night, we announced the addition of a third Next Level Award for teaching artists, expressing our enduring admiration for the artists who work across generations, in schools, neighborhoods, hospitals, prisons, elder care centers, and more. The six new awardees are truly ‘next level.’”

The 3Arts awards ceremony featured boundary-breaking performances by three past 3Arts awardees, including Rika Lin (2023 awardee) presenting Feedback, an experimental dance work that bends conceptions of gender and genre with collaborator Takashi Shallow; Donnetta “LilBit” Jackson (2023 awardee) performing an excerpt from A M.A.D.D. Mixtape, a piece choreographed by Jackson that explores the African diasporic roots of tap and footwork with dancers from M.A.D.D Rhythms; and singer-songwriter Nashon Holloway (2022 awardee) performing the world premiere of Go Awf, an original new song from her forthcoming album. The awards were hosted by Co-Chairs Michelle T. Boone, Whitney Hill, and Candace Hunter, and a Host Committee of arts and civic leaders.

Among the 3Arts awardees is William Estrada, whose upbringing spanned California, Mexico, and Chicago. His teaching and art-making practice addresses inequity, migration, historical passivity, and cultural recognition in historically marginalized communities. He is currently a faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago, a Teaching Artist at Telpochcalli School, a 2024 Mural Arts Philadelphia Strength Through Solidarity Fellow, and is collaborating with the Mobilize Creative Collaborative, Chicago ACT Collective, and Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative.

Emily Hooper Lansan is an arts educator, facilitator, and storyteller from Cleveland, OH, currently living and working in Chicago’s Bronzeville. Her work as a storyteller and community builder has helped her to develop an extensive performance repertoire featured at local institutions from the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center to the Chicago Humanities Festival, and nationally, from the Mississippi Museum of Art to the National Storytelling Festival. An Illinois Arts Council grantee, Lansanahas helped cultivate stories in diverse communities.

Andy Slater is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and disability advocate. Slater’s current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, alt-text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design. Slater is a member of the 3Arts Disability Culture Leadership Initiative (DCLI), New Art City accessibility board, and the founder of the Society for Visually Impaired Sound Artists. He is a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Users Projects Sensory Shift program.

Rozalinda Borcila is a Romanian immigrant, artist, and activist whose work explores settler colonialism as a placemaking project that involves multiple and entangled violences. Among career highlights, Borcilă developed the experimental seminar, video, and walking project Underlying Miami: Sea Level Rise and Settler Futurities for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the New Local in Brussels. Borcilă‘ spearheaded Meskonsin-Kansan, a book and walking project in collaboration with scholar Nicholas Brown and artist/anthropologist Lance Foster, Vice Chair of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska.

Bethany Collins was born in Montgomery, Al and lives and works in Oak Park, IL. Collins is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptual practice examines the relationship between race and language. Centering language—its biases, contradictions, and ability to simultaneously forge connections and foster violence—her works illuminate America’s past and offer insight into the development of racial and national identities. Drawing on a wide variety of documents, ranging from nineteenth-century musical scores to U.S. Department of Justice reports, she erases, obscures, excerpts, and rewrites portions of text to bring to the fore issues revolving around race, power, and histories of violence.

Riva Lehrer is an artist, writer, and curator who focuses on the socially challenged body. She is best known for representations of people whose physical embodiment, sexuality, or gender identity have long been stigmatized. Her work has been exhibited in venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, National Portrait Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Yale University, United Nations, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Arnot Art Museum, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Frye Art Museum, and Chicago Cultural Center.

In its 17-year history, 3Arts has distributed more than $8.1 million to more than 2,300 Chicagoland artists. 3Arts awardees include 68% women artists, 73% artists of color, and 22% Deaf and disabled artists. For more information about 3Arts, please visit 3Arts.org.