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Hope Wang is a Chicago-based artist and the co-director of LMRM, a project space fostering opportunities for art-making, research, and community programming around digital weaving. Through handweaving, photography, poetry, and printmaking, she develops what she calls (American) Midwest Melancholy as a visual language. She is interested in what always feels out of reach: the last seconds of the sun setting against the factory wall, the smell of asphalt baking in the summer heat, or the wavering space between an open storefront and a shuttered one. Contending with sloppy traces of human activity in the city, her studio work explores memory, loss, and longing in the ever-shifting architectural landscape. She often jokes that she creates geo-cache of public places she has cried in.
Will Quam is a Chicago-based architecture photographer, architecture writer, and researcher. And he loves bricks. Above all, he believes that nothing is boring. He documents brick as a way to pay more attention to the world around him and encourages others to do the same.
He has photographed for architects, engineers, manufacturers, and preservationists around the midwest. Since 2016, he's shared Chicago's architecture and history through his project Brick of Chicago, leading award-winning walking tours for thousands across the city. His photographs and expertise have been featured by PBS Chicago, The Chicago Tribune, Block Club Chicago, McSweeney's, and more. He is the author of forthcoming book, Fire and Clay, How Bricks Reveal the Hidden History of Chicago.