ABOUT: My practice is an experiment in how mark-making encodes reality.
Humanity’s first transcriptions of the physical world were as pictograms, which formed the early foundations of language and mathematics. Through craft, accumulation, and the staging of objects, my work facilitates slippages between line, language, symbol, and personal and collective history to create interruptions of possibility within codified regimes of perception.
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Master of Fine Arts Thesis, 2026, “Artists as Agents of Economic Change”
BIO: Ava Igoe (née Carney, b. 1995) is a second-generation Polish-Irish American raised and based in Chicago. She received a BFA with honors from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University (2017) and a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2026) where she completed a written thesis on the intersection of art practice, economics, and social ontology. Since 2019, she has worked in public service at Chicago Public Library, specializing in youth art programming that reaches hundreds of young people across the city.
Igoe’s praxis exists at the intersection of education, public service, research, writing, and making. She has exhibited her work nationally and held residencies at Watershed Center for the Arts, Cité Internationalé des Arts, the Chicago Park District, YoungArts, and the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. She has received awards from YoungArts, the Kosciuszko Foundation, the Windgate Foundation, and the Municipal Art League of Chicago.