Student Projects & Opportunities | School of the Art Institute of Chicago

A group of students and an instructor discuss a sculpture at the AIC

Learning with Artists and Designers

Studying an MA in Art History at SAIC includes various exciting opportunities to learn alongside contemporary practitioners, both in and outside of the classroom. Because MFA students at SAIC are required to take the equivalent of one Art History class per semester, MA seminar groups usually include MFA candidates working in a variety of practices. This unique seminar experience creates dynamic discussions on art theory, history, and criticism between practicing artists and art historians in training. In addition to these in-class discussions, there are a number of interdisciplinary programs and courses that allow MA students to learn and socialize with artists and designers.

A sculpture on a pedestal in a gallery surrounded by colorful paintings

Works by Michael Casey, Josiah Ellner, and Deo Rai

Advanced Curatorial Practice

This course provides students with background on the issues and practices of contemporary curating, while preparing them to work as a team, taking on the role of Graduate Curatorial Fellows. This course is open to MA and MFA students by application and instructor consent.

Justice Henderson standing in front of Ed Clark painting speaking to unseen audience

Gain Work Experience

MAAH and Dual students have numerous opportunities to gain paid work experience throughout their time at SAIC. The majority of students work as Teaching Assistants in undergraduate classes, allowing them to obtain experience teaching and working with students and professors. The department also offers a Research Assistant position as well as a departmental Graduate Assistant position to connect MA students with professors and allow them to learn about various research and administration techniques that can become part of their own practice. MAs also work as Curatorial Assistants at the SAIC Galleries, run by the schoolwide Exhibitions department at 33 E. Washington St. and other exhibition and collections sites on campus. These positions allow students to learn about curating large-scale exhibitions with fellow SAIC students. There are also a number of MAs who work off-campus at the Art Institute of Chicago as well as other arts nonprofits throughout the city of Chicago through fellowships and internships.

A group of students standing in front of some archways.

Study Trips

SAIC offers a large selection of faculty-led study trips to provide students with relevant and dynamic opportunities to experience international travel and build intercultural competency, all while earning credit toward a degree. Study trips take place during the winter and summer holidays and typically last for two to three weeks. Study trips are lead by Instructors from both the MA and MFA programs, offering participants the opportunity to travel, learn and socialize with faculty and students from across SAIC. Eligible students may apply for financial aid to cover a portion of study trip tuition costs.

Recent Theses

The thesis project is a central component of our MA program and involves in-depth, original research on a topic of the student’s choosing. All MA students in Art History complete a written thesis; Dual Degree students choose between the Art History thesis or Arts Administration thesis. For a full list of thesis projects, including abstracts, see the SAIC Thesis Repository.

MA in Art History
Yaxin Deng, “Yuichi Yokoyama’s Neo-manga: An Another World in Patterns and Motion”
Elissa Fertig, “Petra Collins's Female Gaze: On Documentary Photography in a New Media Age”
Mengran Liu, “Root-Searching Nonstop: On the Revival of Chinese Folk Art Through Contemporary Art Practices From the “New Folklore” to Art Rural Reconstructions”
Amanda Mendelsohn, “Lesbians Killed the Radio Star: a Brief History and Analysis of Confessional-Style Experimental Lesbian Video Art at the Video Data Bank in the 1980s and 90s”
Pablo Nukaya-Petralia, “Daughter of the Wasteland: The Collages of Eve Babitz”
Kelly Pope, “Visions of Care in Curved Concrete: Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women Hospital and Raymond Hilliard Homes in Chicago”
Christina Stavros, “Homemaking: Immortalization of the self”
Blair Thomas, “The Bunraku in Contemporary Puppet Theater”
Morgan Turner, “Mieko Shiomi, Spatial Poem”
Katherine Tuthill, “The Photographic Anachronism in Contemporary Art: Liz Deschenes, Abelardo Morell, and Hiroshi Sugimoto”
Anja Xheka, “Reflective Nostalgia and Albanian Propaganda Children's Films”
Yilin Yang, “Teaching the body: Drawing from life and learning against traditions in the art schools of Paris, Shanghai and Singapore from the nineteenth to twentieth century”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
Justice Henderson, “Ed Clark: Navigating the Nebulous”
Clayton Kennedy, “Presence and Placement: Applications of Digital 3D Objects in Museums”
Alivé Piliado, “Imaging Latin America: The Kodachrome Slide Project of Florence Arquin”
MA in Art History
Barrett Burke, “Crossing Borders: Weaving a New Immigration Narrative Through Noelle Mason's Coyotaje Series"
Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, “Power Play: Self-Formation Through Subculture in Contemporary Chicano Art”
Elsa Haarstad, “After Preservation Took Over: The Afterlife of Public Housing in Contemporary Art & Design in Chicago”
Meagan Howard, “Remembering a Pandemic: COVID-19 Monuments, Memory Politics, and Memorialization During Crisis”
Rylee Thomas, “Leaky Thresholds: The Installation, Performance, and Textual Praxis of C. Ree”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
Sophie Buchmueller, “Life and Death under Glass: Exploring the Entanglements of Mark Dion's Neukom Vivarium”
Heather Burich, “Collections in the Time of Catastrophe: A Study of Disaster Preparedness in Gulf Coast Art and Culture Museums”
Rebecca Leigh Goodman, “X-Ray Visions: Lynn Hershman Leeson's Representations of Female Medical Patients from the 1960s”
Marin Layne Florence Williams, “Glorifying Spilled Milk and Decrying Violence: The Dissolution of Public and Private in Sanja Iveković’s Lighthouse”
MA in Art History
Samantha Marie Adams, “Ambivalent Images, or Tracing Repetition Compulsion in the Visual Vocabulary of Georges Bataille’s Editing of Documents Magazine, 1929-1930”
Melanie R. Ball, “An Air of Serenity: Chicago’s Carl Sandburg Village and the Construction of Middle-Class Desire, c. 1962”
Kelly M. Dolan, “Objects in/of Queer Abstraction: The Transformation of Cassils’ Piss[ed]”
Chenghan Gao, “Guohua as a Transnational Concept in Global Context (1911-1945)”
Jake Matthews, “The Legacy of Material in Collective Actions and the Photography of the October Group”
Denis Mutungi Mwaura, “Mea(morial) Culpa: The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, Embodiment, and the Afterlife of Slavery”
Gunnar Olseth, “Touch and Vision in Claude Cahun’s Irrational Objects”
Antonia Piedmonte-Lang, “Sites of Adjacency: Thinking and Feeling Jacob Holdt’s ‘American Pictures’”
Qiuyang Shen, “A Body in Places: Performative Monumentality in Eiko Otake’s Spectral Performance”
Christine Stringer, “Answering to Softness: Materiality, Place, and Conflict in Doris Salcedo’s Sumando ausencias”
Quinn Veasman, “As Time Goes By: A Speculative Viewing of Ralston Farina’s Aléatoire Je ne Sais Quoi”
Martha Wilde, "Defamiliarizing Home: Surrealism in the Art of Mona Hatoum"
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
Nicolay Duque-Robayo, “Curiosity in the City: Affect and the Formation of the Reflective Planner”
Rebecca Haley, "New Imaginations for the Role of the Museum Trustee"
MA in Art History
Gabrielle Christiansen, “Artificial Nature and Total Indulgence: Queer Craft in the Works of Arch Connelly, Nicolas Moufarrege and Greer Lankton”
Jenny Dally, “Shadow of a Doubt: The Limits of Documentation in Eleanor Antin’s CARVINGs”
Jennifer Eun, “War, History, and the Legacy of Allegorical Production: Silvia Kolbowski's Art after September 11, 2001"
Graham Feyl, “Artificial Nature/Total Indulgence: The Materiality of Works by Arch Connelly, Nicolas Moufarrge and Greer Lankton”
Chava Krivchenia, “Ecosystem, Organism, Molecule: A Triple Scope Study of Lee Bontecou’s Untitled (1964)”
Julia Kulon, “The Subliminal Mimesis of Modernity: Polish Socialist Realist Sculpture, 1950–1954”
Lauren Makholm, “Imperative Images: Nirma Zárate's Early Screenprints”
Melody Miller, “Other People's Heritage: The Prioritization of Subculture in Three Works by Jeremy Deller”
Bradlee Murch, “Of Dusty Pages and Ornament: Hints of Permeability in Charles Locke Eastlake's Ideal Victorian Home”
Minh Nguyen, “School of Thought: The Conceptual, Language-Based Practice and Pedagogy of Sàn Art”
Lydia Pifer, “Art and the Evolving City: James Turrell's Houston Works”
Elizabeth N. Reed, “Grasping for Access: Historical, Contemporary, and Speculative Inquiries on the Presence and Treatment of Design in Museums”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
Sophie Jenkins, “Collected, mediated, suspended: the manipulated image worlds of Taryn Simon and Sarah Charlesworth”
Whitney Mash, “Depictions Of House & Home: The Narratives And Counter-Narratives Held Within Domestic Architecture In The Works Of Jacob Lawrence, Kerry James Marshall, And Amanda Williams”
Shannon Hebert Waldman, “Scaffold: Towards an Imperfect Justice”
MA in Art History
Madalen Claire Benson, “Site & Territory: Anti-colonialism in Jin-me Yoon and Maureen Gruben’s Contributions to LandMarks2017”
Stephanie R. Dvareckas, “Dialectics Of The Soviet Avant-Garde In The First Exhibition Of Ukrainian Nonconformist Art”
Saerom (Celia) Jung, “Kurt Schwitters's Late Works in England (1942-1947): Politics of a Dadaist in Exile”
Cate MacFadyen, “The Present Process: Deep Lez Processing in the Present in Allyson Mitchell”
Susan Lee Mackey, “Dreams of the South: Racial Fantasy in the Plantation Photographs of Clarence John Laughlin”
Yue Ren, “Injection Versus Extraction: Socially Engaged Art of Contemporary China in Context Transformations”
Miriam R. Ruiz, “Small But Ours: Picture Poems and the Czech Interwar Avant-Garde”
Isabel Alexander Servantez III, “Creating an Intersectional Chicano Art: The Work of Malaquias Montoya”
Jacob Zhicheng Zhang, “Performing Identities in the United States: Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee, and Ming Wong’s Migratory Politics”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
Lindsey Kathleen Bell, “Accessing Sorrow: The Community Potential of Ragnar Kjartansson’s Durational Performance Works”
Baiqi Chen, “Active Contemplation: 30 Years of Huang Zhuan and Chinese Contemporary Art”
Danielle Eady, “Artists in National Parks: New Paradigms to Illuminate Invisible Histories”
Elliot J. Reichert, “Nationalist Cultural Heritage and the Question of Lebanon: 1939, 1999”
Carlos Salazar-Lermont, “Curation as a Bridge Between Communities. The Claudio Perna: Human Geography Project”
Cici Wang, “The Future Development of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art in State-Owned Museums in China”
Celina Wu, “Visualizing the Invisible: Learning to See Photography”
MA in Art History
Lily Brewer, “Reading Omni: Visuality and Science Popularization in the Magazine of the Future”Alden Nowell Burke, “Under This Name, Another: The Presentation of Self and Naming with Hannah Wilke and Senga Nengudi”
Kathryn Cato, “Taking Up Space: Investigating Genders Through Formalism in Contemporary and Postminimal Contexts”
Zoe Louise Carlson, “Cecilia Vicuña: Towards a Contemporary Indigenism 1990-2010”
Daisy Charles, “Place and Process: Conceptual Art in Edmonton, Inuvik, and New York”
Luna Goldberg, “Performing Critique: Three Case Studies at the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale”
Veronica Sesana Grajales, “A Global Nationalism: Designing the Wall & the Integration of the Arts in Brasilia”
Makayla May, “Activating the Archive: Mapping Mediation and its Afterlife in the Work of Sammy Baloji”
Ratna R. Patel, “Work of Art in the Age of Public-Private Partnership”
Brandi Cordier Sjostrom, “Constructing Identities Online: Examining Amalia Ulman's Excellences & Perfections Series”
Elle Tompkins, “The Art of Eating: An Investigation of Contemporary Artists and Designers Who Critically Analyze Industrial Food, Marking Their Parallels to Gastronomic Social Movements”
Xue Yang, “Park, Protest, and Pop South Korea's Candlelight Protest of 2016-17”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
Lindsey Jancay, “Stenographic Image and the Shorthand Imaginary: An Iconographic Analysis of the Gregg Shorthand Anniversary Edition”
Tally de Orellana, “Curating Difference: Appropriation and Antagonism in Identity Formation”
Ian Gabriel Wilson, “Essential Ornaments: The Architecture of Ödön Lechner & The Development of a Magyar Style”
Yinzi Yi, “Criticality and Complicity in Cao Fei's RMB City: The Production and Circulation of Regional Images in a Global Art Context”
MA in Art History
Nour Ammari, “Iconoclasm and the Islamic State: Understanding ISIS’ Destruction of Cultural Heritage
Alice Ashiwa, “The Making of Art Spaces in Post-WWII Tokyo: The Case of the Sogetsu Art Center”
Kat Buckley, “Threading Through the Interwar: Nomadism, Tapestry, and the Rediscovery of Marie Cuttoli”
Claire Frost, “The Future Eva Hesse: Lucy Lippard, Sol Lewitt, and the Construction of Eva Hesse”
Lindsay Garbutt, “All Known Means of Design: Reproduction and Audience Engagement in Herbert Bayer’s Bauhaus Exhibition Design at the Museum of Modern Art, 1938”
Zeenat Nagree, “‘Surviving Culture,’ ‘Co-Existing Cultures.’ Indigenism and Authenticity in the Art of Criticism of Geeta Kapur and J. Swaminathan in the 1960s”
Hannah Pivo, “Forming Flow: Knud Lonberg-Holm and Ladislav Sutnar’s Information Design Manuals and the Development of Modern Visual Communication Standards”
Brit Erin Schulte, “Queering the Weimar Archive: The Transgressive Bodies & Transgressive Performances of Anita Berber & Sebastian Droste”
Veronica Sines, “System as a Tool, Art as Energy: The Significance of Language in the Works of Lee Lozano”
Kevin Whiteneir, Jr., “Queer Heretics: Case Studies in the Convergence of Witchcraft and Queerness in Contemporary Art.”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
Zoe Alexandra Goldman, “Leading America Through Local Modernism: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes' (Mexico) Exhibitions and Publications on Architecture, 1950-1952”
Lydia Claire Gordon, “Maternal Ambivalence and Non-Normative Maternal Desires in Chelsea Knight's The Breath We Took, 2013
MA in Art History
Farah Zeynep Aksoy, “Mediated Modernism: Jewad Selim's Wall Paintings and the Vacillations of Postcolonial Iraq”
Paula Calvo, “Materiality and Reproduction: Photographs of the Disappeared Recovered by Victor Basterra”
Frances Claire Dorennaum, “Keep in Touch: Reading and Relationships in Moyra's Davey's Burn the Diaries, My Saints, and Of Jane”
Lillian M. Elliott, “Great Scott! Picturing the Past through the Waverley Novels”
Annalise Flynn, “Something in the Water: The Sea, the Slabs, and Leonard Knight's Salvation Mountain”
Sabrina Greig, “Order and Chaos in the City: Cartography's Mediation of Race Relations, Labor, Industry, and Transit in Chicago”
Lauren Marie Johnson, “Breaking Typography's Glass Window: Materiality as Mode in Robert Massin's Typographic Redesigns of French Postwar Experimental Literature”
Denise Joseph, “Construction Ahead: Saadiyat Island Cultural District, A Case Study in Becoming a Cultural Capital”
Shang-Huei Liang, “Action, Image, Archive Chen Chieh-Jen's Art of Re-Imagining, Re-Narrating, Re-Writing, and Re-Connecting”
Greg Sato, "Sophisticated Ignorance": Quantifying the Film Canon”
Ke Wang, “Translation as Relation: Art History Translated into Chinese”
Sarah Wheat, “The Architect as Nomad: A Critical Examination of Bruno Taut's Theory of Architecture”
Ange Wong (Wai Man Wong), “To Cut and to Arrange: Radical Ikebana and Avant Garde Art in the 1950s”
MA Dual Degree in Art History and Arts Administration
Ligia Herrera, “Urban Development, Street Art and Neighborhood Branding in Wynwood”
Olivia Junell, “Diversity, Access, and Participation in Contemporary Arts Philanthropy”
Arthur Kolat, “Twilight on the Roads:The Wagner Drives of David Hockney”
Barbara Ann Meisinger, “The Strange and Autonomous Gas Station”
Alda Akhsar Tchochiev, “Cardinal Loop Conference Proposal: A Commitment to Contemporary Cultural Conversation in Chicago”