Sunday, October 15
Join us on campus for one of the nation's largest portfolio days, plus come a day early for "Saturday with SAIC" and learn how to make the most of your NPD experience!
The Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at SAIC 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.
Sunday, October 15
Join us on campus for one of the nation's largest portfolio days, plus come a day early for "Saturday with SAIC" and learn how to make the most of your NPD experience!
Saturday, October 21
Graduate Portfolio Day provides the opportunity for prospective students to meet one-on-one with faculty, receive immediate feedback on their portfolios, and learn more about the curricula, faculty, and application procedures from a number of colleges. RSVP.
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.
Students in SAIC’s Art History program pursue research in a prestigious art school connected with a major museum. They work with a large department of full-time faculty specializing in modern and contemporary art and design with a global focus, and challenge, debate and interpret the field.
Full-time faculty are scholars with global reputations whose research is on the cutting edge of present trends in the field with specialties covering Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Europe, and North America. Their teaching engages with interdisciplinary perspectives such as race, gender and performance studies, decolonization and the transnational, experimental media and design history
Works by Michael Casey, Josiah Ellner, and Deo Rai
This course provides students with background on the issues and practices of contemporary curating, while preparing them to work as a team. This course is open to MA and MFA students by application and instructor consent.
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.
Our department is committed to the ongoing efforts to combat white supremacy and police violence as led by Black youth in this country and joined by thousands. We are committed to racial justice and see our work as scholars and critics as deeply intertwined with ongoing struggles for liberation. In an effort to use our institutional status as a platform, we have compiled an immediate and incomplete list of resources as a tiny gesture of solidarity with our students, faculty colleagues, staff, and everyone in the streets.
In light of the recent murders of Asian women in Georgia and systemic violence against Asians in America, we offer these resources in solidarity with the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.
We, as a department, acknowledge that the academic field of Art History is not separate from social and historical events or dynamics. As such, Art History as a field reflects the paradigms of structural racism in the United States and the larger world amid colonialism and neo-colonialism—projects of domination and white supremacy that continue today.
In the last 15 years, our department has made efforts to counter racist dynamics in the field and at SAIC by expanding course offerings and hiring full-time specialists in fields such as African, African-American, Latin American and Asian art history. While these efforts have, on the curricular level, contributed to a decentering of the North Atlantic canon, they have, quite simply, not been enough. The department presently does not have a single Black full-time faculty member. Students have repeatedly expressed concerns about how BIPOC art histories are taught; about microaggressions in the classroom; about a need for more sensitivity in how knowledge related to Black and Brown people is introduced to our students—particularly when faculty introduce material that is not directly linked to their own backgrounds.
We have to do better and are committed to doing better. We hereby pledge following the action items:
This statement has been drafted and reviewed by full-time faculty in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, and has the ethical weight of a contract. By signing, we collectively commit to it.
Art History, Theory, and Criticism Office
MacLean Center
112 S. Michigan Ave., Suite 605
Chair
Daniel Quiles dquile@saic.edu
Graduate Program Director
Bess Williamson swilli12@saic.edu
Undergraduate Program Director
Jennifer Dorothy Lee jlee241@saic.edu