Hesam performing with a microphone. Lights and shadows bounce across the wall.

Image credit: Luyu Chen

Performance

Graduate Curriculum & Courses

Graduate Curriculum & Courses

The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program is designed to offer maximum flexibility in addressing the needs of each individual student. Following admission through a department, students design their two-year plan of study based on optimizing the offerings and opportunities available throughout SAIC. 

AreaCredit Hours

Studio

  • Graduate Projects 6009 (21)
  • Exhibition 6009 (3)

24

 

Seminar

  • Graduate Level Seminars
12

Art History

  • ARTHI 5002 OR ARTHI 5120 (3)
  • Art History Courses, 4000-level or above (9)
12

Electives

Any course in any area at 3000-level or above 

Participation in four graduate critiques

Participation in ONE of the following as appropriate to artistic practice: 

  • Graduate Exhibition
  • AIADO or Fashion Exhibition
  • Graduate Performance Event
  • Graduate Screenings

Students who wish to use an alternative venue or presentation outside of these options must receive permission from the dean of graduate studies

12
Total Credit Hours60

* Students who wish to use an alternative venue or presentation outside of these options must receive permission from the Dean of Graduate Studies. The AIADO Department encourages students in their MFA design programs to participate in the AIADO and Fashion Graduate Exhibition.

Degree Requirements and Specifications

  • Completion schedule: You have a maximum of four years to complete your MFA in Studio degree. This includes time off for leaves of absence. Students will have access to studios for four semesters only.
  • Transfer credits: You must complete a minimum of 45 credit hours in residence at SAIC. You can request up to 15 transfer credits at the time of application for admission, which are subject to approval at that time. No transfer credits are permitted after a student is admitted.
  • Art History requirement: MFA students are required to take ARTHII 5002 Graduate Survey of Modern and Contemporary Art OR ARTHI 5120 Survey of Modern and Contemporary Architecture and Design. Art History courses must be at the 4000-level and above.
  • Undergraduate studio courses: Graduate students are permitted no more than one undergraduate studio course (3000-level and above) per semester without permission of the Dean of Graduate Studies. Courses at the 1000 and 2000-level are allowed only with permission.
  • Full-Time Status Minimum Requirement: 12 credit hours

Graduate Projects 6009

Graduate Projects 6009 advising, an ongoing individual dialogue with a wide range of faculty advisors, is at the heart of the MFA program at SAIC, encouraging interdisciplinary study across the curriculum. Standard enrollment consists of two Graduate Projects 6009 advisors, one graduate-level seminar, and an art history course each semester. The remainder of credits required for the full-time 15-credit hour load may include academic or studio electives. All MFA students must register for a minimum of one and no more than two Graduate Projects 6009 sections each semester. Students may request permission from the Graduate Program Advisor to take a third Graduate Projects 6009 section after priority registration.

In their final year, students must take one Exhibition 6009 section. The advising and grade for this course will be tied to the final exhibition. When taking undergraduate studio coursework, the student is responsible for understanding the faculty member’s expectations about completion of assignments, attendance, and any other criteria for earning credit. MFA students interested in completing a written thesis must take a research course and Research 6009 section and obtain approval from the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies.

Graduate Critiques

As one of the principal means of assessment each semester, you will be required to participate in Critique Week, a week-long schedule of critiques during which classes are suspended.

Fall semester critiques are organized by department with panels representing the discipline. This provides you with an opportunity to understand the department’s expectations, have your work reviewed from a disciplinary point of view, and to reiterate the expectations for graduate study.

Spring semester critiques are interdisciplinary, with panel members and students from across SAIC disciplines. Interdisciplinary critiques allow for a broad range of responses to your work, and are intended to assess the success of your work for a more general, albeit highly informed audience. Critique panels include faculty, visiting artists, and fellow graduate students.

Graduate Exhibition or Equivalent

At the conclusion of your studies, you will present work in the SAIC Graduate Thesis Exhibition, other end-of-year events at SAIC, or the Gene Siskel Film Center—or arrange with the graduate dean or division chair for an alternative thesis of equal professional quality. Each year more than 200 graduate students exhibit work, screen videos and films, and present time-based works, writings, and performance to a collective audience of 30,000 people.

Students wishing to install work around prevalent themes, strategies, or stylistic affinities can participate in a juried and curated section of the SAIC Graduate Thesis Exhibition. A faculty and staff committee conducts extensive studio visits and as a collaborative project with student participants, organizes and installs the show in designated space at the exhibition.

Undergraduate Courses

MFA students are advised to understand the expectations of their faculty when enrolled in undergraduate studio classes. Although graduate students are an asset to the group dynamic, faculty requirements for graduate students in undergraduate classes are variable. The student is responsible for understanding the faculty member's expectations about completion of assignments, attendance, and any other criteria for earning credit. To assure that graduate students are working at degree level, they are permitted no more than one undergraduate studio course (3000 level and above) per semester without permission of the dean of graduate studies. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 level are allowed only with permission.

Course Listing

Title Catalog Instructor Schedule

Description

This course introduces the student to basic elements of performance art; body and objects, form and content, space and time, and enactment and documentation. The exploration will be encouraged by visiting artists' workshops or field trips to performance events throughout the course. Students develop individual and collaborative projects infusing their own narratives and making real human connections. Primarily a beginner's course but open to all levels of students.

Class Number

1514

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Gender and Sexuality

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This course serves as an introduction to the puppet as performing object from traditional forms to contemporary practice. The class will focus on performance techniques with only basic instruction on fabrication. Students will create short form works centered on the puppet or informed by the language of the puppet. Additionally techniques of co-performance with the puppet and the puppeteer are introduced exploring themes of the doppleganger and the other.

Students are exposed to work in the field by attending 3 productions outside of class and viewing of video documentation work such as Handspring, Giselle Vienne, Geumhyung jJeong and Bread & Puppet. Additional readings on contemporary puppet theory are included.

The first half of the semester specific performances techniques are introduced such as Guignol hand puppetry, overhead projector and screen and rod shadow puppetry and three-person and one-person Bunraku style doll puppetry. Also introduced are rod puppet, scroll theater, Cantastoria and toy theater performance. Each technique then includes a theme and focus for the creation of a short original work. The second half of the semester focuses on the creation of work of the student?s choosing.

Class Number

2255

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

What does one¿s emergent creative practice have to do with one¿s body in the world? How do we maintain the resilience and vulnerability required of artists and art students when we already feel so vulnerable in our everyday lives? How, as audiences and community members, do we share and receive feedback generously while still honoring our own lived experiences?

This course offers strategies for students to explore, reflect upon, and connect common themes and interests in the development of an emerging creative practice that will serve as the basis of their ongoing studies at SAIC and beyond. While the focus of this course will be on both embodied practices and the politics of having a body, it is open to all disciplines and areas of study. Through studio assignments, readings, viewings, and writing projects, students will generate a clearer understanding about how and why they make art, and how to continue making their work authentically.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: Must be a sophomore to enroll.

Class Number

1763

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This course looks at the role of the observer and the performer through drawing and performance. Both practices respond to each other by mapping movement and moving mappings. We explore performance through drawing as a description, a medium, and a score for an embodied gesture. We use drawing to imagine movement and to move concepts, in which lines can act as tracing and foreseeing. Performances become descriptions and embodied marks and vice versa. We will look at performance art, presence practice, being seen and remarking on what will remain unseen, scores, methods of performance documentation and notation, as well as drawing as an embodied mark making and thinking process. We will look at artists like Francis Alÿs, Lygia Pape, The Gutai Group, Valie Export, Remy Charlip, Amy Sillman, among many other artists at the intersection of drawing as a performance practice like Janine Antoni, David Hammons, Stanley Brown, Raven Chacon, Joan Jonas; Artists in conversations such as Paul Chan and Martha Rosler, John Divola and William Camargo, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson. We will work through texts like Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness by Hendrik Folkerts, Walkaround Time: Dance and Drawing in the Twentieth Century by Cornelia H. Butler, The Aesthetics of the Performative by Erika Fischer Lichte, Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, and How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch. Working in and with public space as surface, students should expect to blur the lines between traditional and non-traditional drawings and performances. All formats will be approachable, self determined, nothing more or less than walking if you so choose.

Class Number

1522

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Community & Social Engagement, Public Space, Site, Landscape

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This course looks at the role of the observer and the performer through drawing and performance. Both practices respond to each other by mapping movement and moving mappings. We explore performance through drawing as a description, a medium, and a score for an embodied gesture. We use drawing to imagine movement and to move concepts, in which lines can act as tracing and foreseeing. Performances become descriptions and embodied marks and vice versa. We will look at performance art, presence practice, being seen and remarking on what will remain unseen, scores, methods of performance documentation and notation, as well as drawing as an embodied mark making and thinking process. We will look at artists like Francis Alÿs, Lygia Pape, The Gutai Group, Valie Export, Remy Charlip, Amy Sillman, among many other artists at the intersection of drawing as a performance practice like Janine Antoni, David Hammons, Stanley Brown, Raven Chacon, Joan Jonas; Artists in conversations such as Paul Chan and Martha Rosler, John Divola and William Camargo, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson. We will work through texts like Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness by Hendrik Folkerts, Walkaround Time: Dance and Drawing in the Twentieth Century by Cornelia H. Butler, The Aesthetics of the Performative by Erika Fischer Lichte, Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, and How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch. Working in and with public space as surface, students should expect to blur the lines between traditional and non-traditional drawings and performances. All formats will be approachable, self determined, nothing more or less than walking if you so choose.

Class Number

1522

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Community & Social Engagement, Public Space, Site, Landscape

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This class explores the relationship between language and physicality. It is designed equally for performance makers who want to develop their writing, and for writers who want to experiment with liveness.

Students will write in class - out of meditative bodies, out of sweaty bodies, out of self-conscious bodies, out of exultant bodies. They will also bring in found and original texts, and work with the body to activate and recontextualize them, to find correlations and contradictions that throw new light on their words.

The class aims to invite surprise by disrupting habitual postures and ways of moving and writing. By changing speed, scale, duration and context, the writing process will be strategically interrupted by action, and physical actions will be 'perforated' with opportunities for reflection. Attending to different sites in their bodies will offer students potent portals to memory, and readings that range from phenomenology to disability studies will offer further perspective and inspiration.

Class sessions will involve collaborative word games, instruction-based events, experiential anatomy, splicing together live and recorded speech (text to speech, live captioning, latency, and more), and traveling outside of the classroom to explore interactions between bodies and architecture.

Class Number

2450

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

This course will consider the ways in which performance practices can be queered - particularly through the lens of drag performance. While we will cover a selection of queer theory texts, a history of drag performance both in and out of the US, and consider contemporary examples of drag artists or artists employing drag in their work throughout the semester, students will not be expected to perform in drag (unless they so desire to!). Rather this course will encourage students to use drag as a conceptual and/or practical framework for thinking about and generating live performance work. We will think about the idea of the mask or the filter as a means for materializing personas or ¿altered/enhanced¿ states of performing, a ¿bodied¿ presence and playing with the gaze. We¿ll explore how drag can encourage us to harness the anecdotal and moments of extreme intimacy, hypervisibility and vulnerability as well create distance and opacity. Image making, music/sound, text, movement and time will all be equal ingredients in our work. Drag is in constant mutation, always reflecting/confronting society and politicizing the body; this should encourage us to understand the ways in which we can hold up performance as a mirror to the world around us. Some examples of artists, groups and texts we will look at will include Sin Wai Kin, Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell, The Chicago Black Drag Council, Zorroridrag, Pacha Queer, Drag: A British History, Joan Jett Blakk, Vaginal Davis, Audre Lorde¿s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power, Linda Simpson¿s Drag Explosion, Meredith Heller¿s Queering Drag.

Class Number

1515

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

States of Failure is an interdisciplinary studio course that holds the following questions core to its investigation: what might it mean to fail in performance or fail at performance? We¿ll take seriously and playfully the idea that radical new possibilities are revealed when things are agitated through processes that value failure as a way to understand things differently, to practise otherwise, deviating from an already determined logic or prescribed outcome. What happens when an intention fails or subverts the predicted outcomes of an act, an interaction or an object? What might occur when we allow ourselves to take other routes, when we let things slide or just go on too long?
Together we will consider what becomes available when as artists we diverge into disobedient or unanticipated behaviors. What might a material, an object or a state of being, doing or making reveal about its conditions and potentiality when it is not fit for purpose, inefficient, exhausted, collapsing before our very eyes?
Alongside developing your own practice, we draw on relevant histories of performance and body art, sculpture, painting, theatre, music and sound art, social practice and experimental writing. We¿ll interrogate how the state of something fails and we¿ll scrutinise failure itself (its uses, affordances, terms and conditions). Our work is focused through the lens of performance where failure is understood as vital, generative, unpredictable and inclusive.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: Professional practice course

Class Number

2520

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

A laboratory for experiment in terms of thought and action, this interdisciplinary critique seminar explores a series of key contemporary themes and issues in the area of live art. The course aims to be both topical and provocative, and as participants, you are invited to take a position (or play devil¿s advocate) in relation to a series of burgeoning topics and issues that are currently forming contemporary discourses concerning art and performance. In particular, this class will have a specific emphasis on interrogating presentational modes and discursive techniques. Through readings, discussion, and presentations, students will have an active stake in the form and nature of these discussions. The course is structured in two parts. In the first part, classes will focus on the activation and physicalization of what we have read. We will undertake practical workshops, embodied theory, provocations, and performance actions as a means of enacting the discourses we have explored. Students will examine their multidisciplinary work through the lens of performance. In the second part of the course, each student will present their current practice in the form of a performance, studio visit or other mode best suited for their work. Various guest artists, scholars and curators will be invited to participate in these final studio critiques.

Class Number

1967

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

What happens when the past disrupts the present? In this course, students engage in studio practice to explore how archival traces can be reanimated and transformed. Archival gestures may serve as scores for improvisation; silences may become performative landscapes; fragments may be disrupted, recomposed, or recontextualised. These explorations raise critical questions: How can we transform archival fragments into new performative works? What role does documentation play in preserving, transforming, or reinventing performance? As artists, how do we navigate the limits and boundaries of documenting ephemeral work? Graduate students will undertake individual and collaborative projects, integrating archival research with performance methodologies, critical reflection, and interdisciplinary experimentation. By the end of the course, students will have created original performative work that shows nuanced engagement with the archive as a tool, a provocation, and a site of aesthetic, ethical, and historical inquiry.

Class Number

2112

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Prerequisites

Open to MFA, MFAW and MAVCS students only

Class Number

2319

Credits

3 - 6

Department

Performance

Location

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Prerequisites

Open to MFA, MFAW and MAVCS students only

Class Number

2320

Credits

3 - 6

Department

Performance

Location

Take the Next Step

Visit the graduate admissions website or contact the graduate admissions office at 800.232.7242 or gradmiss@saic.edu.