Marlena Novak

Following a decade and a half of establishing her solo career, Marlena Novak co-founded localStyle in 2000 with composer Jay Alan Yim as a platform for collaboration, focusing on the climate crisis and extractivism, biodiversity, human rights, and non-human others, hoping to give voice to the vulnerable via themes such as the mating behavior of non-binary marine flatworms, the sonification of electric fish, speculative blackbird grammar, the illusory logic underlying human taxonomic systems, the entanglements wrought by human geoengineering on Mars, the crisis facing coral reefs (whom they consider the voice of the Anthropocene), and an endangered bumblebee foraging on a rare Midwestern prairie. This intermedia practice includes experimental 3D animation, processed video, digital sound, live performance with electronics, and interactive installations.

Marlena Novak’s work has been collected in public museums—the Corcoran in Washington, DC, the Mondriaanhuis in Amersfoort, NL, the Davis Museum at Wellesley, and the Tweed Art Museum—numerous private collections in Europe and the USA and has been presented extensively in solo and group exhibitions in more than fifty cities worldwide (a.o. Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Cologne, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Linz, London, Mexico City, Münich, São Paolo, Shanghai, Sydney, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Valencia, Venice, and Warsaw). She has been commissioned by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), the STRP Festival (Eindhoven), One Prudential Plaza (Chicago), 150 Media Stream (Chicago), siva)(zona (Croatia), and the Chicago Cultural Center. Novak has held residencies at the Creativity and Cognition Research Studios (Loughborough, UK) and Krems, and was a visiting artist at numerous universities as well as the Amsterdams Instituut voor Schilderkunst, and the Pädagogische Hochschule (St. Gallen, CH). She has received the Marion Kryczka Excellence in Teaching Award (SAIC), an Artist’s Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council, and multiple awards from the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, and Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.