How can collaborations across disciplines expand or enhance your creative practice? How do you balance maintaining your own artistic voice while working within a collective vision? Join 2025 Creative Capital Awardees Jen de los Reyes and Oscar Rene Cornejo, and 2024 Culture Source Creators of Culture grantee KESSWA as they explore the ins and outs of collaborative and interdisciplinary practices. They will share best tips and practices for working across disciplines within and beyond the arts, finding collaborators, navigating partnerships, and producing successful collaborative projects. They will also answer questions from the audience.

Live captioning (CART services) and ASL and Spanish interpretation will be provided. Creative Capital is pleased to present this Artist Lab in collaboration with Creative Capital Curriculum Institutional Member, Culture Source.

Jen de los Reyes
Jen de los Reyes is an artist, educator, writer, and community arts organizer. With roots in the Riot Grrrl and DIY music scene, her practice incorporates pedagogical, ecological, and organizational methodologies. She founded and directed Open Engagement, an international conference on socially engaged art that was active from 2007–2019. She worked within Portland State University from 2008 to 2014 to establish the Art and Social Practice MFA program with a curriculum focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. Following that, Reyes was the Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught in the departments of Art and Museum and Exhibition Studies. Her collaborative work and practice have been situated at institutions including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Queens Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, MCA Chicago, and the Portland Museum of Art.

She speaks widely and has presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, UCSB, UMass, NYU, Textile Museum of Canada, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Concordia University, Carnegie Mellon University, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Milwaukee Art Museum, UC Berkeley, Alfred University, The Power Plant, and Project Row Houses amongst many others. She is the author of several books, most recently Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire. She divides her time between Chicago, where she founded Garbage Hill Farm, and Ithaca, NY where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Cornell University.

Oscar Rene Cornejo

Oscar Rene Cornejo is a first-generation Salvadoran American originally from Houston, Texas. With a background in pedagogy and activism, Cornejo synthesizes histories of abstraction in the US and Latin America with personal experiences in construction, land use, dissonant family memory, and Cold War historical archives. Works include video, fresco, Japanese woodcut, drawing, and installation to address the detrimental effects of civil war on Salvadoran society and the environment. He earned an MFA from Yale School of Art, a BFA from the Cooper Union, and is a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in El Salvador. He co-founded the Latin American Community Art Project, where he directed artist residencies to promote intercultural awareness through art education. He is a founding member of Junte, an artist project based in Puerto Rico. Cornejo’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Radiator Gallery, The Queens Museum, Recess: Assembly, Princeton University, Diverseworks, and Brattleboro Museum among other venues. He participated at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency. He is an Assistant Professor for Art at Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and is a Fresco Instructor at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

KESSWA

Kesiena Wanogho, known most commonly by her stage moniker KESSWA, is a transdisciplinary artist from Detroit, MI. As a performance artist, producer, and social practice artist, her work weaves pedagogy, fiber, video, music, interactive technology, and spoken word to function as a resource for healing. She has received a BA in Sociology from Wayne State University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 4D Design. Her work with renowned musician Shigeto, “Is My Mind A Machine Gun?” (2021) premiered on the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s (MOCAD) new media platform Daily Rush. It premiered as a performance art piece at Dlectricity’s 2021 Festival.

KESSWA is a 2024 Culture Source Creators of Culture grantee, a 2022 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow, and a 2020 McArthur Binion “Pay-It-Forward” Grantee who has toured Germany as Detroit-Berlin Connection’s premier artist-in-residence. She has performed at Pop-Kultur Festival and Haldern Pop Festival. She has also performed in support of avant-garde artists such as Esperanza Spalding, Sudan Archives, The Sun Ra Arkestra, and Rashaad Newsome at institutions such as The Cleveland Museum of Art, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, The Pinault Collection, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Most recently, she is a featured artist on Theo Parrish’s  DJ-Kicks compilation “Detroit Forward” and Shigeto’s third Ghostly International studio album “Cherry Blossom Baby.”