Resources
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Painting and Drawing offers students the following equipment and facilities:
- Large, well-lit and well-ventilated classrooms with natural and color-correcting lighting
- Three critique spaces equipped with digital projectors
- Storage rack space
- Comics classroom equipped with drafting tables and digital scanner
- Two well-ventilated spray booths (one in the 280 Building and one in MacLean)
- Six display cases for exhibiting artwork
- Advanced Painters have shared studio spaces and a large critique space
- Weekly free figure model sessions
- PTDW Materials and Techniques StudioLab
- Painting and Drawing Visiting Artist Lecture Series
- Access to a world-renowned, encyclopedic art museum that encompasses more than 5,000 years of creative expression from cultures around the world
- Access to wood shop, metal shop, laser cutters, video and audio editing equipment, professional grade digital cameras, and light kits
- Affordable digital printing
Additional Resources for Graduate Students of the Painting and Drawing Department:
- Individual studios, each with a large storage locker
- Three large, naturally lit critique spaces in MacLean
- Visits from PTDW Visiting Artists
Resources Available to all SAIC Students Include:
Libraries and Special Collections
Unique access to important libraries and special collections including a world-class museum.
Media Centers
The media centers provide audiovisual equipment and services to accommodate documentation, creation, instructional, and exhibition needs.
Gallery Spaces
The SAIC campus showcases a diversity of student artwork across multiple exhibition venues. Students can propose to exhibit their work in a variety of formats and locations.
Visiting Artists Program
Public lectures are presented by world-renowned visiting artists, designers, and scholars. Speakers meet with students through studio visits, roundtable discussions, seminars, and workshops.
Instructional Shops
From bedazzlers to sewing machines, from traditional wood/metalworking to CNC milling, the SAIC Instructional Shops are facilities that have the resources to help you realize your projects. The shops are equipped with a wide range of hand, power, and stationary tools.
What the City of Chicago has to Offer:
World class museums and galleries
Since the late 19th century, when the museum collection of the Art Institute was established as a study center for the School of the Art Institute, students have used the museum's vast holdings to inspire and inform their creative and scholarly practices. No other school of art and design can claim such a major museum as part of their campus.
Unparalleled architecture
A living laboratory of the study of late 19th- and 20th-century architecture, landscapes, and interiors—the development of the Chicago school of commercial architecture, the flowering of the Prairie style house, the progression of the City Beautiful movement in urban planning.
