Painting and Drawing

The Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a 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.

Transfer Day: Saturday, June 3

Learn about the transfer process, get portfolio advice, calculate your transfer credit & take a campus tour!
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Work by Painting and Drawing MFA Candidates from the 2019 MFA Show. Featured: Carbon Copy Collective (Danny Bredar, Nathan Engel, Ed Oh, Daniel Salamanca, and Leah Zheng), Skye Taniai, Carbon Copy Collective (Brigette Borders and WooJin Shin), Ben Cabral, Caroline Jacobson, and Cecilia Beaven.

SAIC’s Painting and Drawing Department offers:

  • Diverse and dedicated faculty, consisting of more than 70 working artists whose work appears in galleries and museums across the globe. Collectively their various practices embody a wide array of conceptual and material models for painting and drawing.
  • An experimental, multi-disciplinary approach to learning, challenging students to explore their ideas across a myriad of disciplinary forms and procedures  
  • A long record of alumni who have attained a high-level of achievement in their careers, earning exhibitions in world-renowned galleries and museums, teaching positions at leading Institutions, as well as grants, awards and prizes reflecting excellence in their field. Recent alumni of note include: Tony Lewis, Allison Zuckerman, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Angel Otero, Amanda Ross-Ho, Jeni Spota, and Zak Prekop  
  • Access to the internationally recognized collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which presents an encyclopedic body of work that spans 5,000 years of creative expression from cultures around the world  
  • Large, well-lit classrooms, critique spaces and studios where students develop their practices, hold open discussions and engage in rigorous dialogue with faculty and students which tests strategies of production and presentation