ArtSpeaks: an evening of artist presentations, each 8 minute long. It’s a chance for us to get to know our neighbors and hear them talk about something they are passionate about, whether about their practice as a whole, a facet of their work, a project they’re involved in, or something else!
For more information about ArtSpeaks or to join as a presenter, contact hello@makedostudios.org. Follow our Instagram and newsletter for presentation schedules.
ArtSpeaks
THURS 4/30/26 @ 6:00pm
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THURS 4/30/26 @ 6:00pm •••
Thursday, April 30 at 6:30pm
Abby Sunde, Lingyi (Ada) Hu, and Rachel Meghan
Abby Sunde (she/her) is a multi-media visual artist whose work explores our relationships with nature through glass, drawing, sound, and installation. Raised on Anishinaabe ceded territory in north-central Wisconsin and now based in Rhode Island, she is a 1st generation, direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and is also of Scandinavian and European American descent.
Her practice considers how we might reconnect with ancestral, embodied knowledge of the natural world that modern life often obscures. Attuned to the ways society has become distanced from the land, Sunde engages this rupture as a site of inquiry and undoing. Informed by decolonial theory, Indigenous epistemologies of relationality and belonging, and land-based pedagogies, she looks to the cycles of the earth as tethering points to history, memory, and surrounding natural phenomena. www.abbysunde.com
Lingyi (Ada) Hu is a glass artist from Nanjing, China, currently based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work considers glass not as a stable object, but as a condition of suspension where perception and material are continuously in negotiation. Moving between object, image, and installation, she constructs situations that ask viewers to look at glass rather than through it.
Her coming up solo show, Temporary Forever, explores the tension between permanence and ephemerality. Treating glass as a site where time is both held and interrupted, she develops arrangements of fragments, images, and structures that resist fixed interpretation. Drawing from imaging, systems of creating context, and archival forms, her work examines how knowledge is translated and stabilized, and what is lost in that process. lingyihu.com
Rachel Meghan (they/she) is a mother, bookseller, writer, and collage artist. They’ve been featured in Rue Morgue, Business Insider, The Olivetree Review, I Like to Dabble, and others. Rachel loves horror movies, musicals, weird books, cats, John Waters, and their family. monstorachel.substack.com
Thursday, March 26 at 6:30pm
Charlie Best, Cybele Collins, Alex Gonzalez
Charlie Best (they/he) is an artist, seamstrix, and museum worker. They've been making sculptures, garments, prints, zines, and more, while they did a lot of farming, sewing for people, and substitute teaching. He's now focusing on papercutting, mobiles, trying wood/metal again, and who knows what else. Charlie is frequently trying to figure out how best to describe their art practice, but they know it includes Polish and German folk art, trans imagining, fiber, and repairing people's clothes. They probably need to get access to a scanner soon. @charlie___best
Cybele Collins possesses gods-eye view into parallel worlds full of creation, destruction, structure and disarray, with a grace that refuses to be reduced to recognizable items from our own world. Her pinhole camera into these parallel cosmogonies preserves the writhing, bubbling mass of what we can try to describe as organic, or life-like constructions, without becoming a face, a body, a known organism, or a nameable thing. In fact, Cybele draws from the stuff that stuff is made of, and renders them into forms both alien and deeply recognizable as true. One can easily get lost following the contours of her artworks, discovering small features and movements that tickle our brain, all the while absorbing the whole construction, like focusing on the vein of a fallen leaf until a whole forest appears around it. To be induced beyond beauty into awe by these works is an appropriate reaction. In her current work, one can see an intersection between a fierce talent for illustration, a dedicated curiosity towards empirical phenomena, and a greater transcendent sense of wonder that comes form examining life and possible-life for both information and immersion. www.cybelecollins.com @ybelline
Alex Gonzalez is an artist whose work is largely informed by his background in ecology and urban landscape design. Working across mediums and degrees of abstraction, he explores the ambiguity of perception and the interface between land, water, and culture.