Undergraduate Exhibition at SAIC Galleries. Photo: Tony Favarula
SAIC offers a dynamic, interdisciplinary curriculum that gives you the freedom to explore. Learn more about each of our degrees and areas of study by clicking on the titles below.
Animation is the presentation of a sequence of still images that create the illusion of movement. Artists have explored animation for hundreds of years from early motion-based cave drawings to contemporary 3D films.
In the 19th century, artists like Edward Muybridge used the camera to create a stop-motion gallery of a horse’s locomotion. Today, both new and old technologies are employed at the school to enable students to study the craft of both 2D and 3D animation.
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Amy Lawson Smeed (BFA 1997) was the first woman head of animation in Disney history when she led the team for Moana. Smeed has been working at Disney Studios for 20 years, animating movie favorites such as Frozen, Wreck-it-Ralph, and Tangled.
In Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects, our studios have no boundaries: we are creative across disciplines and engaged with our community at SAIC, our context in Chicago, and the world. Our dedicated faculty teach from diverse experience in practices that impact public life and drive public culture. We value the craft that brings ideas into the world, the research that informs criticality, and the compelling stories we tell to share our work.
Our students are exploring the future of how we live, work, and communicate; asking how design responds to shifting modes of belonging; and ensuring design will address the transcendent challenge of a changing climate.
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Every two years, the Chicago Architecture Biennial shows us how design can revitalize communities. For the 2021 edition, SAIC faculty members were essential contributors to two projects being spotlighted by the biennial: The Englewood Nature Trail and Borderless Studio.
The Arts Administration and Policy department is structured around the values of collaboration, creativity, experimentation, inclusion, critical thinking, care, activism, advocacy, and reflection, all of which we believe are central to building the future of cultural leadership. We embrace the interdisciplinary, experimental core of SAIC through integrated curriculum design, merging theory and practice, constantly developing new partnerships and ways of working collaboratively across sectors, and combining inventiveness and aspirational values with solid grounding in practical skills.
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As the director of the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, Laura-Caroline de Lara (Dual MA 2012) brings the words and work of marginalized artists to the forefront.
Students come to the Art Education department to gain the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to manifest their deeply felt vocations as artists and educators, to enhance their own creative potentials, and to collaboratively build resilient, creative, democratic communities.
The Art Education programs are uniquely situated within the vital and diverse cultural and artistic communities of Chicago, providing a wealth of experiences and opportunities for mentorship in museums, schools, and community settings.
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Emily Calderon teaches art at Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy. When the pandemic hit, she had to reimagine every lesson plan. “If anything, I’ve learned what really matters," she said. "And some days, I spend 30 minutes just listening to the kids. Life is happening outside of the classroom."
The Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism offers a wide range of courses on modern and contemporary art that span the Globe. It is committed to innovation in research and teaching a diverse curriculum.
Classes address art of all media, design and architecture, visual and material cultures, and contemporary theories of art and culture. The international networks for contemporary art are an important part of the course offerings, and we offer a wide range of classes in Asian, African, Latin American, European, and North American Art.
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If you were to stroll through the parks that flank the perimeter of the Art Institute of Chicago, you’d see dozens of public artworks and monuments. Professor Mechtild Widrich notices and cares about all of them—and she thinks you should, too. Her book, Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art, follows case studies of monuments all over the globe, and implores readers to see and understand their significance.
The two disciplines of art and science are resoundingly different, especially from the perspective of curriculum design and degree requirements. Yet there are interesting overlaps between the two areas that artists and designers are actively exploring.
Many art and science courses have the aim of creating a culture of creative thinkers from the arts and from the sciences who join together to combine their knowledge and abilities to come up with innovations, collaborations, and most of all, new ways to address environmental concerns.
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In Chicago, less than 9 percent of the city’s waste is recycled. To combat the use of single-use plastic containers, SAIC students Sara Selmić (MDes 2022) and Kelly Xi (MFA 2022), the creators of PermaPak and participants in the Biodesign Challenge, set out to create a new, more sustainable way of packaging food.
Art & Technology / Sound Practices (AT/SP) is a place to explore artistic production with technology, sound, or their unlimited hybrid forms through focused study and interdisciplinary exploration. It integrates two visionary SAIC departments: the Department of Art & Technology Studies and the Sound Department, each with more than 50 years of radical artistic and pedagogic exploration.
AT/SP offers a large, diverse, and ever-changing range of courses designed to provide students with an immersive, thorough, and critically engaged course of study from a global perspective. Its curriculum integrates skills-based learning with conceptual investigation and critical interrogation to prepare students to be creative and productive cultural citizens.
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Inspired by the creative computing spirit of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Assistant Professor Lee Blalock created Retro Tech, a course that delves into the history of vintage technology and creative programming. “[The class] truly is about exploring, playing, and learning for the sake of learning,” Blalock shared.
The Master of Arts in Art Therapy and Counseling program explores the relationship between life experiences and artmaking and prepares graduates for a career helping people gain or recover intellectual and emotional clarity, equilibrium, and power through artistic expression.
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There was a time in Noel King’s (MA 2015) life when she thought she might be an art historian, photographer, or painter, disciplines she studied in high school. Then she pivoted in college and decided to major in psychology—which she loved—but something was still missing. Now, as a Deaf art therapist, King helps her patients explore their identity through creativity.
At SAIC, art and design become tools for political exploration and activism in a number of studio, art history, and liberal arts courses.
Liberal arts courses in Global Comparative Studies give students a solid framework for comparing and analyzing cultural, historical, economic, political, ecological, and ethical modes around the world, while courses in Art Therapy and Counseling; Art Education; Arts Administration and Policy; Film, Video, New Media, and Animation; Sculpture; and Visual and Critical Studies bring students out of the classroom and into the city of Chicago to engage with political issues firsthand.
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Associate Professor, Adj. Asha Iman Veal is associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and a Humanity in Action Landecker Democracy Senior Fellow.
Taylor Morgan, "Loan Delinquents (Books 1-5)," 2019, acrylic, flashe, ink and colored pencil on canvas bound masonite
The process of making a book and publishing can be the work of a lifetime or a semester. SAIC has a special resource area to augment the study of self-published texts and artists’ books.
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J. Howard Rosier (MFA 2018) made the most of his time in SAIC’s MFA Writing program by launching a magazine and expanding a short story into a novel that asks what it means to be Black in America. He edits the journal Critics’ Union, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Criterion, Kenyon Review, Bookforum, and the Believer. Rosier received an Alan Cheuse Emerging Critics Fellowship from the National Book Critics Circle.
The Department of Ceramics is a model of interdisciplinary investigation where art, design, and craft are the fields of research and innovation.
Drawing from a wealth of technical and cultural traditions as well as from high-tech industrial applications, you will engage in a study and practice of ceramics that is unique and urgently contemporary. The SAIC Ceramics department reflects and embraces these contradictions, offering courses exploring interdisciplinary topics in ceramics such as the intersections of and shared methods, materials, and critical discourse among Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects, Fiber and Material Studies, Sculpture and Performance.
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Mie Kongo (BFA 2006) is an artist, a sculptor, and a professor, but above all, she is an observer. Fueled by a sense of curiosity and discovery, Kongo’s ceramics practice is rooted in exploring the nuance and subtleties of everyday life.
Comics and Graphic Novels courses at SAIC are designed for students who want to create narrative works with sequential art to convey a message to the reader.
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Chris Ware (SAIC 1991–93) is an award-winning cartoonist and author whose work tries to tell unpretentious stories about what it feels like to be alive via the generally approachable yet surprisingly complicated medium of the American comic strip. He is the author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which was included on Amazon's "100 Books to Read in a Lifetime" list in 2014.
An image of the Community Tree Planting and Dedication Day.
SAIC students are not only engaged in their immediate community in Chicago’s Loop, but also interact with the city and the world at large.
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Salamishah and Scheherazade Tillet (MA 2005) have always believed in the power of art. As sisters and founders of the nonprofit organization A Long Walk Home, they have centered their work on the experiences and leadership of Black women and girls. For the past 20 years, their programming has encouraged girls and young women to use art and activism to change the narrative on sexual violence, gender discrimination, and racial injustice.
The Fashion department provides a unique, interdisciplinary experience that challenges students to bring an artistic and theoretical approach to the work and benefit from rigorous artistic and professionally oriented training.
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Grace DuVal (Post-Bac 2012, MDes 2015) doesn’t identify as a fashion designer. Her captivating work aims to transform unconventional materials into “something totally unexpected or unbelievable,” and this spirit of creativity and innovation led to her designs being featured on RuPaul's Drag Race.
Borrowing critically from product design, systems design, furniture design, and interaction design, the Designed Objects Pathway focuses on the critical and creative rethinking of the systems, tools, furnishings, and products that we use or interact with in our everyday lives.
Investigations into how objects extend human potential and inspire imagination are balanced with studies in the responsible and imaginative use of new technologies, materials, and production processes. A concern for sustainability provides an opportunity to explore alternative visions of how we live, work, communicate, and play.
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Norman Teague (MDes 2016) is a Chicago-based designer and educator who focuses on projects and pedagogy that address the complexity of urbanism and the history of communities. Teague worked with Theaster Gates on 12 Ballads for Huguenot House dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. He also served as lead craftsman and co-founder of the Design Apprenticeship Program at the University of Chicago's Arts Incubator.
The Visual Communication Design department encourages students to actively engage their world and define their role as contributing designers by developing their critical and analytical skills, personal voice, and visual language. The department cultivates a sense of social responsibility and inquiry in student designers who will be working at the intersection of art, design, and mass culture.
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McKenzie Thompson (MFA 2014) is the founder of Outsider Supply, an e-commerce apparel brand informed by six years of living in Chicago. Combining streetwear with visual and textual references to art history once considered avant-garde, Thompson takes a minimalist approach to clothing that invites lookers and wearers alike to consider what these artists, movements, and ideas mean now.
Digital imaging is at the core of many artistic mediums. At SAIC, we offer digital imaging courses throughout our departments.
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Marlena Novak served as associate director of Northwestern’s Animate Arts Program and has been a visiting artist at the University of Chicago, Cleveland Institute of Art, Amsterdams Instituut voor Schilderkunst, and Pädagogische Hochschule and a resident at the Creativity and Cognition Research Studios. She has received grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.
SAIC offers a number of courses that give students the tools to develop as social activists in their community. SAIC students study issues of economic inequality with Chicago as their classroom.
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Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi contributes to disability culture as an artist and an academic. Yi’s practice revolves around disability art and culture and access pedagogy from the perspective of her identity as a disabled artist. She is the creator of Crip Couture, a wearable art project that focuses on representing disabled bodies and disability culture through fashion, and she is the arts and culture project coordinator at the Disability Culture Activism Lab, a platform for creative advocacy projects and disability allyship training.
Exhibitions and public events provides students with a forum in which the development and exchange of ideas is possible. It is an interdisciplinary area of the SAIC curriculum.
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For Allison Glenn (Dual MA 2012), the art of curation is about collaboration. So, when she was asked to helm an exhibition in Louisville, Kentucky, honoring the life of Breonna Taylor, Glenn knew what she needed to do: listen.
The Fashion Design department provides a unique, interdisciplinary experience that challenges students to bring an artistic and theoretical approach to the work. Students benefit from rigorous artistic and professionally oriented training.
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Nick Cave is an artist, educator, and foremost a messenger, working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. Many might be surprised that an artist of Cave’s stature—his work has been celebrated and exhibited all over the world—is still teaching, but community has always been essential to his practice.
The Department of Fiber and Material Studies provides you with an interdisciplinary study of fiber, materials, and processes that incorporate different art-making approaches, including: textile construction, sculpture, installation, action, and craft.
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Alum Bryana Bibbs is the founder of The We Were Never Alone Project, a series of weaving workshops for survivors of domestic violence. During the workshop, Bibbs teaches participants a basic plain weave and gives them space to share their stories. She sees these workshops as part of a tradition of community spaces that have been centered around knitting.
The Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department endorses and encourages experimentation with radical form and content. Our commitment to deep interdisciplinarity crosses a broad spectrum, including: cinema, animation, time-based installation, and new media.
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Alum Apichatpong Weerasethakul (MFA 1998, HON 2011) is a filmmaker who most recently won the Prix du Jury award for his film Memoria (2021) at the Cannes Film Festival. In previous years, Weerasethakul won the Prix du Jury for his film Tropical Malady (2004), the Prix Un Certain Regard for Blissfully Yours (2002), and the Palme d’Or for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).
In Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects, our studios have no boundaries: we are creative across disciplines and engaged with our community at SAIC, our context in Chicago, and the world. Our dedicated faculty teach from diverse experience in practices that impact public life and drive public culture. We value the craft that brings ideas into the world, the research that informs criticality, and the compelling stories we tell to share our work.
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Norman Teague (MDes 2016) is a Chicago-based designer and educator who focuses on projects and pedagogy that address the complexity of urbanism and the history of communities. Teague worked with Theaster Gates on 12 Ballads for Huguenot House dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. He also served as lead craftsman and co-founder of the Design Apprenticeship Program at the University of Chicago's Arts Incubator.
The Art and Technology Studies department offers game design studio options to all students with interest in the field, regardless of their home department.
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Jake Elliot (BFA 2011), Tamas Kemenczy (BFA 2007), and Ben Babbitt (BFA 2013) are best known as the creators of the popular video game Kentucky Route Zero, which is critically acclaimed and has been the recipient of many awards, including the British Academy of Film and Television Arts 2021 award for original property.
The study of the human figure is as old as the act of drawing. Students who wish to engage with this area of study can choose from a variety of SAIC course offerings that address particular areas of interest within this category such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies or women’s studies.
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Aram Han Sifuentes is a social practice and fiber artist, writer, and educator who works to center immigrant and disenfranchised communities. She has been a recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, 3Arts Award, and Joyce Award, among many others. Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Chicago Cultural Center, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Hyde Park Art Center, Asian Arts Initiative, Skirball Cultural Center and moCa Cleveland.
The Visual Communication Design department encourages students to actively engage their world and define their role as contributing designers by developing their critical and analytical skills, personal voice, and visual language. The department cultivates a sense of social responsibility and inquiry in student designers who will be working at the intersection of art, design, and mass culture.
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McKenzie Thompson (MFA 2014) is the founder of Outsider Supply, an e-commerce apparel brand informed by six years of living in Chicago. Combining streetwear with visual and textual references to art history once considered avant-garde, Thompson takes a minimalist approach to clothing that invites lookers and wearers alike to consider what these artists, movements, and ideas mean now.
Our dynamic Master of Science in Historic Preservation is an all-encompassing program covering the areas of restoration design, materials conservation, architectural history, and preservation planning, all while affording the flexibility to explore specific areas of interest through elective coursework in the field of heritage conservation.
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Tucked away in a quiet corner of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Nicholas Lowe’s mind is racing, connecting every historical document to its source and every source to contextual details, drawing maps in his head about where the archived material is, where it came from, and where it’s going to go next. Lowe is searching for a story.
The benefit of developing an illustration practice is that it is a stand-alone art form as well as a building block for nearly every art discipline. SAIC offers the opportunity to practice illustration across multiple studio disciplines. From fashion design to animation, students have the freedom to explore a range of studio courses in illustration that will allow them to hone their technical skills as well as develop conceptual storytelling through drawing.
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McKenzie Thompson (MFA 2014) is the founder of Outsider Supply, an e-commerce apparel brand informed by six years of living in Chicago. Combining streetwear with visual and textual references to art history once considered avant-garde, Thompson takes a minimalist approach to clothing that invites lookers and wearers alike to consider what these artists, movements, and ideas mean now.
In Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects, our studios have no boundaries: we are creative across disciplines and we are engaged with our community at SAIC, our context in Chicago, and the world. Our dedicated faculty teach from diverse experience in practices that impact public life and drive public culture. We value the craft that brings ideas into the world, the research that informs criticality, and the compelling stories we tell to share our work.
Our students are exploring the future of how we live, work, and communicate; asking how design responds to shifting modes of belonging; and ensuring design will address the transcendent challenge of a changing climate.
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Tizziana Baldenebro (MArch 2018) has built a newsmaking curatorial career, which is firmly grounded in social and environmental justice. In 2023, she is helming the United States Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale Architettura. The theme: Everlasting Plastics.
The Department of Liberal Arts provides the rational and intellectual foundation for success at SAIC and in your continuing practice as a thinker and artist.
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SAIC students have the incredible advantage of studying art on a museum campus. Arts Administration and Policy classes allow students interested in museums and cultural hubs to closely study the Art Institute of Chicago's galleries, resources, and programming to develop a deeper understanding of this field.
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As the director of the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, Laura-Caroline de Lara (Dual MA 2012) brings the words and work of marginalized artists to the forefront.
The Department of Painting and Drawing is home to a diverse range of conceptual and material approaches. It is an open, pluralistic community with a primary emphasis on experimental consideration for painting in the 21st century.
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“Painter” is the description that Angel Otero (BFA 2007, MFA 2009) identifies with most, but using that title has the unintended effect of singling him out. The artist’s compositions made of dried oil paint smash together colors, textures, and focal points—almost daring viewers to discern a hierarchy. His sculptures reward careful viewing for their textures and off-kilter sense of motion, while the playful dimensions and negative space in his still lifes render his creations virtually unrecognizable from much of what constitutes the Old Master genre.
The Department of Performance was founded in an experimental spirit and is unique in the United States as one of the only contemporary live-performance art departments in an art school at the undergraduate and graduate level focused on performance practice and performance studies.
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To try to summarize Nyugen E. Smith’s (MFA 2016) oeuvre would be a fool’s errand. His work is too vast and too full; it spans every conceivable art form and is at once about the universal experience of being alive and the specific experience of being a first-generation American born to parents from Caribbean countries.
The Department of Photography offers a multifaceted approach to the medium, including traditional forms of image-making and conceptually oriented practices, making the SAIC Photography program uniquely diverse.
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Dawit Petros is a visual artist, researcher, and educator. His work is informed by studies of global modernisms, theories of diaspora, and postcolonial studies. His works have been recognized with awards including a Terra Foundation Research Fellow, an Art Matters Fellowship, and artist residencies at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Addis Ababa Photo Fest, and an Independent Study Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Through SAIC’s Writing and Film, Video, New Media, and Animation departments, students have access to workshops that allow them to learn the craft of writing a performative manuscript and see their work through to live performance.
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Gitanjali Kapila is a writer, producer, and director. She has a graduate degree in filmmaking from Columbia University and has written, directed, and produced/co-produced three shorts since 2017, including Breathing above the Treeline, which was released with 14 live screenings world-wide and received multiple awards and nominations. She's also a Nicholl Fellowships Quarterfinalist.
The Department of Printmedia presents an interdisciplinary exploration of printmaking that prizes experimentation and emphasizes the research and discovery needed to bring ideas to fruition. Iteration and discovery, purposeful execution and serendipitous results are highly valued. The department’s approach to materials, technique, and process are contemporary.
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Ayanah Moor is a visual artist and educator living and working in Chicago. She earned a master of fine arts from Tyler School of Art, Temple University and a bachelor of fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her artwork is held in public and private collections, including the Capital Group (Los Angeles); DePaul Art Museum (Chicago); Soho House (London); Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago); and the David L. Lawrence Convention Center (Pittsburgh).
In Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects, our studios have no boundaries: we are creative across disciplines and we are engaged with our community at SAIC, our context in Chicago, and the world. Our dedicated faculty teach from diverse experience in practices that impact public life and drive public culture. We value the craft that brings ideas into the world, the research that informs criticality, and the compelling stories we tell to share our work.
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In Chicago, less than 9 percent of the city’s waste is recycled. To combat the use of single-use plastic containers, SAIC students Sara Selmić (MDes 2022) and Kelly Xi (MFA 2022), the creators of PermaPak and participants in the Biodesign Challenge, set out to create a new, more sustainable way of packaging food.
Public art has increasingly begun to expand in possibility and form. Creative interventions in public space can be realized to imaginatively engage a community's sense of “place” or “well-being” into the work itself. These sorts of projects relate to the area of study called Community and Locality. SAIC students create temporary or permanent interventions in public space both within and outside the School community. Various departments are engaged in the creative dialogue with alternative and public spaces for exhibition and practice in specific courses.
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As a kid, alum Lid Madrid (BFA 2021) didn’t see anyone who looked like them skateboarding, so it remained a forbidden sport. When they got to SAIC to study architecture, Madrid decided they weren’t going to let skateboarding be prohibited from their life. They received an SAIC Idea Generation Grant for a public mobile DIY skate park, and OnWord Skate Collective was born.
Some of the most well known contemporary artists have made their careers highlighting prejudice in specific communities worldwide. Because social justice concerns as well as identity issues drive the creation of many art and design works today, SAIC offers a number of courses that seek to ask important questions about class, race, and ethnicity in Chicago and around the world.
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Romi Crawford's research and courses explore areas of race and ethnicity as they relate to American visual culture (including art, film, and photography). She is co-author of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2017). She was co-curator of the 2017 Open Engagement conference in Chicago and was previously the curator and director of the Education Department at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
The Sculpture department offers one of the largest, most comprehensive, and diverse programs of its kind in the country. The department is situated at the defining edge of contemporary practice and discourse, focusing its broad offerings through four curricular themes: Permanence and Ephemerality, Public Practice, Space and Place, and Systems.
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Richard Hunt (BFA 1957, HON 1979) is considered one of Chicago’s most prolific and accomplished sculptors, and throughout his career (which spans nearly seven decades) he has made an enormous contribution to public art in the United States. In 1968, Hunt became the first Black visual artist to serve on the National Council of the Arts, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1971, when he was just 35 years old, the MoMA celebrated Hunt with his first retrospective.