Chris Beaty & Michael Alamo-Costello
Biography
Chris Beaty is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois, working primarily in painting and drawing. Best known for his collage-inspired approach, Beaty constructs layered, fragmented compositions that explore memory, perception, and his lived experience with ADHD.
Deeply influenced by the nonlinear nature of memory and cognition, Beaty’s paintings and drawings evoke the sensation of navigating a restless or hyperactive mind. Through this distinctive visual language, Beaty transforms personal experience into a broader reflection on the fractured nature of modern life, inviting viewers to consider how we process, organize, and find meaning amid constant sensory input. He is currently pushing this body of work toward larger scale and investigating how authority and vulnerability can be embodied through imagery.
A former firefighter who left public service to pursue art full-time, Beaty earned his MFA from
the University of Illinois in 2020. His work has been exhibited nationally, featured in multiple
publications, and is held in numerous private collections across the United States.
Artist Statement
My practice explores the fragmentation of perception and identity through collage-based compositions, often drawing from the lived experience of ADHD as both subject and structure. I work in fragments and interruptions, stitching together visual languages that mirror the rhythm of a restless mind, hyper-attuned, nonlinear, and overflowing. Each composition becomes a map of observation and sensation, where meaning drifts and reforms. This is how I navigate attention—not as a deficit, but as a flood, 2025
Biography
Michael “Chester” Alamo-Costello is an American artist, educator, historian, publisher and writer based in Chicago, Illinois. He is most known for his long-running international “Art Drop” series (1998 – Present), where he places art into non-traditional settings, such as public parks, and for his photographic books, whose work has been noted for its rawness and everyday immediacy.
His projects and writings have been reviewed and published in ABC Cultura (España), ARTnews, Brunchstory (Seoul, South Korea), The COMP Magazine, Darkroom Magazine, Fumetto Logica (Italia), Mid-Day Newspaper (India), The Globe Mail (Canada), MCA Magazine (Museum of Contemporary Art), National Public Radio’s 848 program, Public Art Review, Art Lies Magazine, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Time Out Chicago, El Periódico (España), the New Art Examiner, De Telegraaf Amsterdam (the Netherlands), The International Herald News (Ireland), The Sichuan Daily (China), Verve Magazine (England), WGN – TV Chicago and other publications.
Artist Statement
In 1999 I began teaching at the University of St. Francis, a small Catholic university in Joliet, Illinois, roughly 40 miles southwest of Chicago. The position was initially a one-year appointment. In my 3rd semester I introduced a documentary photography course. Here, duringa view camera demonstration I began photographing the university’s community. At outset, I did not intend a technical exercise to develop into a sustained project. To date, I have made over 800 portraits. Through this effort, now in its third decade, I see how these images define a pivotal time in one’s life and how this document traces various societal shifts and transformation through the portraits of the rotating administrators, faculty, staff, and students.