Aaliyah Merrick's Artistic Evolution

by Micco Caporale (MA 2018)

When Aaliyah Merrick started at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) as an undergraduate last fall, she was already an accomplished artist and entrepreneur.

She'd won several art competitions facilitated by organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and Scholastic. In fact, she’d won the Metra Safety Poster Contest so many times that the organization made a rule that barred past winners from entering. Meanwhile, she’d begun adapting her collage-and-watercolor cartoons of Black and Brown life for commodities like notebooks to sell online and at art fairs. But it was her first contest success that introduced her to the School—and kickstarted a guided journey of growth and self discovery she's yet to abandon.

As a seventh grader, Merrick placed first in an anti-drug poster campaign for the Illinois State Attorney's office. Her prize? Tickets for several downtown attractions and a free class through SAIC's Continuing Studies program. Merrick, then a Chicago Heights resident attending Catholic school, didn't have much in the way of a formal arts education, but she was obsessed with drawing and already had a strong style based on cartoons she loved like Chowder and Flapjack. That summer, her mother enrolled her in a drawing course at SAIC.

"I hadn't been in an environment where everyone around me was also focused on making art," she said. "I remember it being very different from school."

Every table was covered in brown paper, and ambient drawing was encouraged. Though there was a lot of freedom, Merrick was also pushed to focus on hyperrealism. She prefers creating cartoons, but she couldn't deny that in a short time, drawing realistically helped her sense of color, contrast, and gradient grow immensely. When she won the same competition again the following year, she decided to see how figure drawing might change her work.

"I was already decent at anatomy," Merrick explained, "but it was more like, 'Yeah, I got the whole body on the page, and it doesn't look weird. Congrats, me!' Now I can actually, you know, get it done."

Not only was that course Merrick's first time working from life, it was also her first time giving and receiving critique. Critiques weren’t easy, but learning to accept tough feedback was its own lesson, and she felt safe to ask questions and volunteer ideas. Despite being the youngest in the class, Merrick felt among peers. That's one of the reasons she took a comics course through the Continuing Studies program her senior year of high school.

"I hadn't been in an environment where everyone around me was also focused on making art," she said. "I remember it being very different from school."

Until then, comics had never been on Merrick's radar. Sure, she was influenced by cartoons, but animation was its own beast. Why bother with sequential art? At the time, classes were still being held online because of COVID-19, and options for drawing classes through the Continuing Studies program were more limited. She either had to take that one or pursue another medium. The class afforded her time to draw and gave her an opportunity to compare notes about colleges and the application process with seniors looking at the same schools she was. But it also ended up challenging Merrick's ideas of the relationship between text and image—and where that leaves her as an artist.

Choosing SAIC was easy. Merrick knew she'd be supported as the artist she already was while being pushed out of her comfort zone in ways she couldn't anticipate. Without moving far from her support system, she'd interact with people from around the globe. When the School offered her the largest scholarship package, that sealed the deal. Since starting, comics courses have been among her favorites, allowing her to play with time and perspective in more sophisticated ways than the illustrating she was used to doing. She can't wait to see what the next three years bring. ■