Our Artists
We bring different perspectives to the table, but we’re united by a love for purposeful work, thoughtful design, and real connection.
Nathan Alston
Nathan is a management consultant by day.
By night, Nathan is a photographer and visual artist. Originally from Chesapeake, Virginia, Nathan has always used art as a way to better understand who he is and where he comes from. A former theatre performer, his love of storytelling now guides his photography practice. Broadly, his work explores Black queer identity, memory, intimacy, and belonging. But when you look a little closer, it’s really just Nathan figuring out how he fits into all of it.
His piece on display, Glass Is Made of Sand, explores connection and memory through photography and sand collected over the past 35 years. The work brings together two seemingly contradictory experiences: wholesome childhood family vacations and chaotic gay beach vacations. By placing these memories alongside one another, Nathan considers how experiences that seem completely unrelated can become part of the same story. Glass Is Made of Sand asks the viewer: What disparate and contradictory experiences have shaped who you are?
Joey Brenckle
By day, Charlie Sage moves through the industry of digital marketing; by night, they enchant pop anthems and drag personas on the stage. Charlie crafts a universe rooted in self-expression and creativity by weaving music, visual storytelling, and performance.
After studying marketing and graphic design at the University of Oregon, Charlie brought their vibrant energy to Chicago. Over the past two years, they have enchanted audiences across Northalsted, competing in five premier showcases and becoming a growing figure in the scene. Most recently, they lit up the stage in Shine on Halsted, a competition celebrating live vocals and high-concept drag.
As part of the After Hours Artists collective, Charlie explores the delicate alchemy of commercial work and authentic artistic passion. Rooted in resilience like their botanical namesake, Charlie Sage proves that true artistry can bloom anywhere, regardless of the soil.
Grace Coudal
Nathan is a management consultant by day.
By day, Grace Coudal is a working photographer in Chicago, IL, leading critique groups around the city and always adding to her photo book collection.
At night, she is a visual artist, working on her personal projects that use photography to explore intimacy and personhood through portraiture. Utilizing film photography, Coudal documents tender and subtle moments with her various subjects, adding to the current queer visuality of the midwest. Coudal is a graduate of the University of Michigan where she received her BFA in Art & Design and her minor in Sexuality & LGBTQ+ Studies.
Through the themes of personhood, autonomy, and relationships, this work reflects a retreat into nature. Alternating between scenes of sun soaked environment and carefully crafted tableaux, Coudal reveals a softness that only seems possible on a long, hot summer day in a Midwestern landscape. As viewers we are trusted to be curious and step inside the frame as a witness to these quietly suspended moments.
Nathan is a management consultant by day.
By day, Grace Coudal is a working photographer in Chicago, IL, leading critique groups around the city and always adding to her photo book collection.
At night, she is a visual artist, working on her personal projects that use photography to explore intimacy and personhood through portraiture. Utilizing film photography, Coudal documents tender and subtle moments with her various subjects, adding to the current queer visuality of the midwest. Coudal is a graduate of the University of Michigan where she received her BFA in Art & Design and her minor in Sexuality & LGBTQ+ Studies.
Through the themes of personhood, autonomy, and relationships, this work reflects a retreat into nature. Alternating between scenes of sun soaked environment and carefully crafted tableaux, Coudal reveals a softness that only seems possible on a long, hot summer day in a Midwestern landscape. As viewers we are trusted to be curious and step inside the frame as a witness to these quietly suspended moments.
Charlie Sage
Libby Donnelly
Nathan is a management consultant by day.
By night, Nathan is a photographer and visual artist. Originally from Chesapeake, Virginia, Nathan has always used art as a way to better understand who he is and where he comes from. A former theatre performer, his love of storytelling now guides his photography practice. Broadly, his work explores Black queer identity, memory, intimacy, and belonging. But when you look a little closer, it’s really just Nathan figuring out how he fits into all of it.
His piece on display, Glass Is Made of Sand, explores connection and memory through photography and sand collected over the past 35 years. The work brings together two seemingly contradictory experiences: wholesome childhood family vacations and chaotic gay beach vacations. By placing these memories alongside one another, Nathan considers how experiences that seem completely unrelated can become part of the same story. Glass Is Made of Sand asks the viewer: What disparate and contradictory experiences have shaped who you are?
Luke Dyer
Nathan is a management consultant by day.
By night, Nathan is a photographer and visual artist. Originally from Chesapeake, Virginia, Nathan has always used art as a way to better understand who he is and where he comes from. A former theatre performer, his love of storytelling now guides his photography practice. Broadly, his work explores Black queer identity, memory, intimacy, and belonging. But when you look a little closer, it’s really just Nathan figuring out how he fits into all of it.
His piece on display, Glass Is Made of Sand, explores connection and memory through photography and sand collected over the past 35 years. The work brings together two seemingly contradictory experiences: wholesome childhood family vacations and chaotic gay beach vacations. By placing these memories alongside one another, Nathan considers how experiences that seem completely unrelated can become part of the same story. Glass Is Made of Sand asks the viewer: What disparate and contradictory experiences have shaped who you are?
Kiana Greenlaw
Nathan is a management consultant by day.
By day, Grace Coudal is a working photographer in Chicago, IL, leading critique groups around the city and always adding to her photo book collection.
At night, she is a visual artist, working on her personal projects that use photography to explore intimacy and personhood through portraiture. Utilizing film photography, Coudal documents tender and subtle moments with her various subjects, adding to the current queer visuality of the midwest. Coudal is a graduate of the University of Michigan where she received her BFA in Art & Design and her minor in Sexuality & LGBTQ+ Studies.
Through the themes of personhood, autonomy, and relationships, this work reflects a retreat into nature. Alternating between scenes of sun soaked environment and carefully crafted tableaux, Coudal reveals a softness that only seems possible on a long, hot summer day in a Midwestern landscape. As viewers we are trusted to be curious and step inside the frame as a witness to these quietly suspended moments.
By day, Luke is a STEM career advisor, but by night, he is an up and coming ceramicist. Luke has always had a creative side, and going through a grueling grad school program, he sought an escape from data, growing yeast, and slideshow presentations full of data on how his yeast were growing. Like many others in 2020, this took him to the wonderfully tactile world of ceramics and miraculously, all these years later, he’s still in it. Luke now uses his ceramics to not only as an escape, but as a form of expression. His pieces attempt to blend the rustic nature of a rural upbringing with the modernity and freedom of form of contemporary ceramics.
His pieces on display, jointly titled My Body, Your Body, seek to proudly display the parts of himself he most fears and reviles. Come check out his body of work at The After Hours Artists Fall 2026 Exhibition.
Damien Geter
Kristopher Kordek
By day, Kristopher Kordek works as a Civil Engineer and has a Master of Science in Hydrology from Northern Illinois University.
By night, Kristopher specializes in antiques restoration, renovation, and interior decorating. In his free time, he draws inspiration from the antique and salvaged pieces he finds to inform and direct his projects. His self-taught skills in architectural salvage, woodworking, restoration, and decorating allow him to fully realize, from conception to final product, his vision of showcasing the potential of items that would otherwise be destroyed or discarded. By demonstrating how to reuse and renew salvaged materials to create beautiful spaces, Kristopher seeks to challenge the perception that reducing waste and promoting sustainability can’t be the core tenets of renovation and design.
Displayed here are a series of before and after photos showcasing highlights from a home renovation & design project. The photos illustrate the transformation of empty space using found and salvaged objects into finished assemblages sympathetic to and inspired by the period from which they are derived.
Caroline Suttlehan
By day, Renata photographs with and manages operations for a luxury wedding photography and cinematography studio.
By night, Renata explores different kinds of Body Art - the art we make with and for our bodies. Her work is rooted in both classic and expansive applications of body ornamentation, visual art and performance art. Renata documents and editorializes the work of collaborating artists to create imagery that both supports their practices commercially while creating new works of art together. She views artistic expression for and through the body as an innate and necessary human behavior, employing photography as an accessible format for viewers to engage with an artist’s physical work while celebrating their craft through creative portraiture.
Displayed is a collection of images from one of her foundational collaborations with Abigail Poplin of Prick Jewelry, a jewelry designer and painter from New Orleans. Photographed in Abigail’s home studio, the environment creates a visual terroir of personal treasures, paintings, and pieces that honor the artist just as much as the art. Abigail describes her jewelry as wearable sculptures and fortification from organic forms like bones and insects, molding each piece to create modern armor. She collaborated with Renata on styling to highlight the tension between hard metal and soft skin, the forged and the animate. The delicate, and the strong. The elegant structures are a decorative exoskeleton, provocatively protective ornamentation that straddles the pleasurable pain of a Prick and the piercing power of a puncture. Can you feel it?
Alexander Wells
Nathan is a management consultant by day.
By day, Grace Coudal is a working photographer in Chicago, IL, leading critique groups around the city and always adding to her photo book collection.
At night, she is a visual artist, working on her personal projects that use photography to explore intimacy and personhood through portraiture. Utilizing film photography, Coudal documents tender and subtle moments with her various subjects, adding to the current queer visuality of the midwest. Coudal is a graduate of the University of Michigan where she received her BFA in Art & Design and her minor in Sexuality & LGBTQ+ Studies.
Through the themes of personhood, autonomy, and relationships, this work reflects a retreat into nature. Alternating between scenes of sun soaked environment and carefully crafted tableaux, Coudal reveals a softness that only seems possible on a long, hot summer day in a Midwestern landscape. As viewers we are trusted to be curious and step inside the frame as a witness to these quietly suspended moments.
By day, Caroline is a management consultant (w/ fellow exhibiting artist Nathan actually).
By night, Caroline is a visual artist whose work over the last several years has centered around a simple - but it turns out, ever-expanding - question: “How many different ways can you make 2 stacked cubes?”
It is the feeling of play - of assembling, disassembling, and reassembling the same elemental form- that has kept Caroline chasing the answer. Nearly 150 iterations later, Caroline has found that these two simple cubes serve as a limitless playground for form, color, and perception where cubes shift from two-dimensional to three, from solid shapes to skeletal lines, from flat planes to layered fields of color.
In this work on display, Caroline invites viewers to play alongside her and create cubes within a nostalgic school setting intended to bring us back to the time where our curiosity was louder than our fear.