Three SAIC Alums Named to Inaugural TIME100 Art List
Three School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alums are among the artists named to TIME's first-ever TIME100 Art list, which recognizes the 100 most influential people in fine art today. Rashid Johnson (MFA 2005), Jeffrey Gibson (BFA 1995), and Trevor Paglen (MFA 2002) appear on the inaugural list, released in September.
Johnson, born in Chicago, works across painting, sculpture, photography, film, and installation to explore Black identity, history, and memory. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and this year he was commissioned to create Broken Men, a large-scale mosaic for the Teaching Kitchen at the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago's South Side.
Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians of Cherokee descent, is best known for vibrant works that blend Indigenous and Western traditions. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2019 and, in 2024, became the first Indigenous artist to hold a solo exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Paglen's photographs, sculptures, and installations expose the hidden systems of government surveillance, military power, and artificial intelligence. A 2017 MacArthur Fellow, Paglen received the 2026 LG Guggenheim Award for Art and Technology in March and published a new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI.
Together, the three artists reflect the range of SAIC's alum community, from painting and sculpture to photography and technology-driven practices, and the school's enduring influence on the conversations shaping contemporary art.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named alum Rodney McMillian (Post-Bacc 2000) one of its 2026 MacArthur Fellows.
