AGE: 30
BASED: Chicago

Most of us intended to spend the pandemic learning a foreign language or reading War and Peace, but ended up bingeing The Queen’s Gambit instead. Isabelle Frances McGuire actually followed through with their pandemic goal: teaching themselves coding and robotics on YouTube. “I spent the day with a little worksheet writing notes, doing essentially a fake college class,” McGuire says.

In the process, their art practice transformed. McGuire, who studied film, video, and new media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, began incorporating haunting robots and animatronic figures into their work, creating mashed-together sculptures from cast-off toys, mannequins, found objects, and 3D-printed elements. (Imagine a gentler, nerdier, and less cynical Jordan Wolfson.) “I started to see my work as basically like a coding process,” McGuire says.

The art world took notice in 2023, when McGuire debuted a solo show at King’s Leap in New York that inventively remixed symbols and sounds from famous video games. McGuire considered the two floors of the gallery equivalent to levels of a game. Each had two sculptures that served the role of guardians protecting a warrior child (downstairs, the child figure was Baby Yoda, programmed to frantically scan the room). The legendary curator Bob Nickas deemed the show one of the best of 2023 in his year-end review.

Since then, the Chicago-based artist has stood out in group shows at Artists Space in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In December, they will present a new body of work at Chicago’s Renaissance Society, inspired by a different kind of American cultural phenomenon: Abraham Lincoln. McGuire plans to build a one-to-one facsimile of the Kentucky cabin that was historically marketed as Lincoln’s birthplace (it is, in fact, a reconstruction). While the project might seem like a departure, McGuire sees it as a continuation of their interest in the line between truth and fiction. Plus, any game worth its salt begins with a complex origin story for its hero.