MFA Candidate Avin HannahSmith Awarded 2025 Dark Matter Residency

Avin HannahSmith, Columbia MFA student, pictured in his art studioAvin HannahSmith in his art studio.
Avin HannahSmith has been named a 2025 Dark Matter Resident at Elastic Arts for his multidisciplinary work exploring Afro-identity, spatial memory, and creative resistance.

Avin HannahSmith, a multidisciplinary artist and MFA candidate in Columbia College Chicago’s School of Visual Arts, has been named a 2025 Dark Matter Resident at Elastic Arts, a performance and exhibition venue in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood. The prestigious residency supports emerging Chicago-based artists whose work interrogates racial hierarchies through performance and visual representation. 

HannahSmith’s practice—what he describes as “spiritual geo-locational mapping”—blends design, abstraction, and astrology to explore Afro-identity, memory, and place. His current work draws from personal research into South Deering, the Chicago neighborhood where he grew up, and reimagines it through celestial patterns and urban histories. 

“I started off making work about what was happening in BIPOC communities through a fabricated universe,” he explains. “As I researched the history of redlining and tied it back to South Deering, my practice evolved. That’s when I began looking at how maps of identity can reflect spiritual and societal grids—how communities navigate and resist the systems shaping them.” 

HannahSmith joins a multidisciplinary cohort of musicians, poets, puppeteers, and performance artists who will present work across the city and at Elastic’s Avondale performance space. For HannahSmith, the residency is an opportunity to build on the modular design thinking he honed at Columbia and to continue working across forms—including sound, video, performance, and installation. 

“Columbia taught me how to pivot, collaborate, and make room for experimentation,” he says. “My studio practice here was built on modularity—on the idea that each piece connects to something larger. That’s become part of my philosophy.” 

As a Dark Matter Resident, HannahSmith plans to explore themes of collective meditation, reconciliation, and community celebration. Through interactive installations, sound manipulation, and projected visuals, he hopes to create spaces for public reflection—encouraging viewers to engage with land, memory, and self-knowledge. 

“I want to build something that aligns with how people move through healing and self-improvement,” he says. “If we understand the history beneath us, we can imagine new ways forward.” 

To see more of his work, visit avinarts.space or follow him on Instagram at @avinarts2. 

Learn more about Columbia’s School of Visual Arts. 

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