Meet artist Ariel Gentalen during the DTSA Artwalk during Open Studio time 12.07.19 at Grand Central Art.  Ariel Gentalen's obsession with pop culture has become their research practice as a way to illuminate the lived trans experience.   The artist is developing multidisciplinary work on #transtime that seeks to bridge an understanding of the gendered body through our many cultural conceptions of time and gender presented in film, music, television, sports, art, and theater. Through these citations it becomes clear all those fields of play are influenced by toxic masculinity, which is both constructed and kept in place by the aesthetic of the white supremacist patriarchy.

Ariel Gentalen is a trans art-laborer, educator, and organizer seeking to diversify narratives and create platforms for engaging critical dialogue among artists, artwork and audience.  They received their BA in Art History and Women's Studies from California State University, Fullerton and their MA in Arts Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have also worked at the Third Coast International Audio Festival, the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they were a 2016/2017 Chicago Artists Coalition Curatorial Fellow, and were most recently, the Residency & Public Programs Manager at the Hyde Park Art Center.