News

In addition to his staple installations, Gibson intends to populate the American pavilion with Indigenous poets, performers, and musicians.

Alum Tizziana Baldenebro (MArch 2018) is helming the United States Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale Architettura.

Assistant Professor Salvador Jiménez-Flores was recently featured in the Chicago Sun Times for completing his sculpture Caminantes, a nine-foot tall celebration of the immigrant experience in Little Village.

Amber Bay Bemak (MFA 2006), Maura Brewer (BFA 2006), Maris Curran (MFA 2006), Jac Jemc (MFA 2008), Martine Syms (BFA 2007), and Sheri Wills (MFA 1992, MA 1996) are among this year's fellows. 

Past Events

Patterns in Art and Nature
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Scientists and artists have long found common ground in their delight and fascination with patterns and regularities we see in the natural world. I will explore what we can say about how such patterns arise and how they have been used in art and design across time and cultures, from the Neolithic period to postmodernism.

Reconfigurable Architectures
Wednesday, April 7, 2021
Can there be design by disorder? This talk discusses ideas based on stochastic (re-)configuration in granular materials that spawned new concepts for soft robotics and architecture.

Shapes of Emergence
Friday, February 26, 2021
Baudouin Saintyves, SAIC's spring Scientist-in-Residence, is developing a projection performance, “Shapes of Emergence,” based on experimental physics of shapes and self-organization. With his own robotic devices, and the creation of audio-visual immersive narratives, he highlights a connection in the emergence of natural and creative forms.

Liberal Arts Lecture Series: Michele Hoffman Trotter
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
"Microcosm: The Hidden Universe in the Ocean"

African Americans in Europe
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
A panel discussion organized by Calvin Forbes, Professor Emeritus, and includes Liberal Arts faculty Anita Welbon as well as Ethelene Whitmire from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  

Dr. Guy Elgat- From Science to Perspectivism: Nietzsche on Art
Thursday, September 12, 2019
The Department of Liberal Arts holds one or two lectures by its faculty each semester to share and discuss their work with the SAIC community.

Liberal Arts Lecture: Assistant Professor Dr. Mika Tosca
Monday, April 29, 2019
Transcending Science: Can artists and designers help climate scientists prevent a climate apocalypse? The climate crisis is more desperate than ever - ice caps are melting, disease is spreading, heat waves are multiplying, storms are strengthening - and politicians continue to ignore the warning signs. In this talk Dr. Tosca details ways in which working with artists and designers can improve communication of climate science, bolster scientific research, and help bridge the divide between scientists, artists, and the public.

Mika is a trained climate scientist, having completed her Ph.D. work at the University of California, Irvine in 2012. While at Irvine, Dr. Tosca researched the interconnectivity of the climate with landscape fires and particulate (aerosol) emissions. She continued her work as a postdoctoral scholar at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (a contracted lab of NASA) in Pasadena, CA, working under Dr. David Diner. There she continued researching the interactions between climate and landscape fires, even traveling as far as Namibia in 2016 to research the complex relationships between smoke from fires and cloud formation. At SAIC, she has begun to explore whether scientists can work with designers to determine whether reimagining data visualization can help scientists ask better questions, and she continues to speak about contemporary science questions concerning climate change and the role of scientists, artists, and citizens in communicating climate change.