SAIC Announces Fall Season of Visiting Artists Program

Visiting Minds. Lasting Influence. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is pleased to announce the fall 2013 lineup of guest speakers for its Visiting Artists Program (VAP), continuing a tradition endowed more than 60 years ago. VAP hosts two seasons of public presentations by artists and scholars each academic year through lectures, symposia, performances, and screenings.

“This program is a cornerstone of Chicago's visual arts community and an invaluable resource for those interested in the art of our time,” notes Andrea Green, Director of the Visiting Artists Program. “The ideas of these internationally renowned artists and scholars are inspiring. VAP features some of the most compelling thinkers at work today—probing, provoking, and questioning the subjects at the core of the creative process and critical inquiry.”

The fall 2013 season opens Monday, September 9, with a lecture by Bill and Stephanie Sick Visiting Professor Andrea Zittel. Korean artists Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho discuss their Sullivan Galleries exhibition News from Nowhere: Chicago Laboratory on September 16, followed by a visit from visualization research pioneers Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg on September 24. Iconic American writer George Saunders details his newest collection of short stories Tenth of December on October 9, and visionary architect and 2013 Pritzker Prize Laureate Toyo Ito lectures on October 15. Korean fashion designer Kuho Jung visits on October 28, followed by conceptual artist and SAIC Distinguished Alumni Lecturer Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (MFA 1989) on November 12. The series closes on December 3 with a presentation by Brazilian abstract painter Beatriz Milhazes. More information on each presenter is included below.

VAP Online
In addition to making their appearances open to the public, SAIC presents many Visiting Artists Program lectures as audio podcasts online at saic.edu/vap. Recent presenters include Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Jacob Hashimoto, Martha Schwartz, and Catherine Opie. Join the conversation by following VAP on Facebook or by signing up for its eNewsletter.

Admission
All lectures are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted. Reservations for groups of 10 or more must be made two weeks prior to the lecture. Otherwise, seating is on a first come, first served basis.

Andrea Zittel: Bill and Stephanie Sick Visiting Professor
Monday, September 9, 6:00 p.m.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium, 230 S. Columbus Dr.

Since the early 1990s, Andrea Zittel has used the arena of her day-to-day life to develop and test prototypes for living structures and situations. The experiments are at times extreme—such as wearing a uniform for months, exploring the limitations of living space, and living without measured time. However, one of the most important goals of this work for Zittel is to illuminate how we attribute significance to chosen structures or ways of life and how arbitrary any choice of structure can be. Zittel uses her work in order to try to comprehend values such as “freedom,” “security,” “authorship,” and “expertise.” She is interested in how concrete and rational qualities are often subjective or invented. Zittel’s A–Z enterprise encompasses all aspects of daily living. Home furniture, clothing, and food all become the sites of investigation in an ongoing endeavor to better understand human nature and the social construction of needs. Andrea Zittel is based in Joshua Tree, California, where she founded A–Z West and is a co-organizer of the High Desert Test Sites and the A–Z smockshop. Zittel has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel; and the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, among others.

Established in 2006 by a generous gift from Bill and Stephanie Sick, this professorship enables internationally renowned artists and designers to visit and teach at SAIC.

Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho
News from Nowhere: Chicago Laboratory
Monday, September 16, 6:00 p.m.
SAIC Columbus Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Dr.

Korean artists Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho will present News from Nowhere: Chicago Laboratory, an ambitious collaborative project at the Sullivan Galleries of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago opening September 20, 2013. The exhibition couples their work with that of visionary architects, designers, scientists, philosophers, and other thinkers in a massive, interdisciplinary investigation that examines the world as it is today by imagining a postapocalyptic future. Moon and Jeon’s News from Nowhere describes a world in which the human race is nearly wiped out by manmade and natural catastrophes and must relearn the most basic skills and values. As inspiration, the artists looked to the eponymous 1890 novel by the 19th-century British designer William Morris, who envisioned an agrarian worker society in which divisions among art, life, and work were erased. But here and now, when a dystopia seems possible, Moon and Jeon have sought perspectives from science, architecture, product design, engineering, philosophy, and religion, as well as the arts, for their newly expanded project. Last year, Moon and Jeon participated in Documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany and the Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea, and received the 2012 Noon Award Grand Prize of Gwangju Biennale; 2012 Korea Artist Prize, co-organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea and the SBS Foundation; and 2013 Multitude Art Prize by Multitude Foundation.

Presented in collaboration with SAIC’s Department of Exhibitions and Exhibitions Studies.

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg
Visualization and the Joy of Revelation
Tuesday, September 24, 6:00 p.m.
SAIC Columbus Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Dr.

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg explore the joy of revelation: the special electricity of seeing a city aerially, hearing a secret, watching a lover undress. Viégas and Wattenberg investigate the art and science of visualization. Using data visualization technology, developed by computer scientists to extract insights from raw numbers, they show what happens when technology is aimed at data ranging from tropical storms to social networks, from arguments on Wikipedia to expressions of carnal desire. Viégas and Wattenberg currently lead Google’s “Big Picture” visualization research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before joining Google, the two founded Flowing Media, Inc. and created the groundbreaking public visualization platform Many Eyes at IBM. Viégas is known for her pioneering depictions of chat histories and emails. Wattenberg’s visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics. Their work has appeared in the New York Times and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Presented in collaboration with SAIC's Conversations on Art & Science lecture series and supported in part by the Office of the President.

George Saunders
Wednesday, October 9, 6:00 p.m.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium, 230 S. Columbus Dr.

George Saunders is a New York Times bestselling American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, and children's books. One of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet. He reaches the core of contemporary experience with his blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation. Saunders is also the author of three collections of short stories: the bestselling Pastoralia; CivilWarLand in Bad Decline; and In Persuasion Nation, and author of the novella-length illustrated fable, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and the New York Times bestselling children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. His work appears regularly in the New Yorker, GQ, and Harper’s Magazine. In 2006, Saunders received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2013, Time magazine listed Saunders on its list of 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Book signing will immediately follow. Tenth of December will be available for purchase, courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago Museum Shop.

Toyo Ito
Architecture After 3.11
The Butler-VanderLinden Lecture on Architecture
Tuesday, October 15, 6:00 p.m.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium, 230 S. Columbus Dr.

Visionary architect and 2013 Pritzker Prize Laureate Toyo Ito has been working on various public and private projects in Japan as well as internationally since the founding of his own office in 1971, Urban Robot (URBOT), which was renamed Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects in 1979. Since the completion of Sendai Mediatheque (2001), one of his most acclaimed works that has influenced younger generations of architects worldwide, Ito has explored architecture of the 21st century that goes beyond modernism’s purity and machine analogy, transforming organic geometries into life forms that reflect nature. In his lecture, Ito will discuss Home-for-All, communal spaces that were built for the towns washed away by the March 11, 2011, tsunami in Japan. Ito will reflect on how these spaces reveal the fundamental problems that exist within modernist architecture and how architecture should take form in the 21st century. Many of his completed projects have been awarded national and international honors. He received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the 8th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2002 and the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2006, as well as this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize.

This lecture is jointly supported by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Visiting Artists Program; Department of Exhibitions and Exhibitions Studies; William H. Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; the Butler-VanderLinden Lecture on Architecture endowment of the Architecture & Design Society at the Art Institute of Chicago; and AIA Chicago. The Architecture & Design Society gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of Park Hyatt Chicago. Additional support is provided by the National Building Museum.

Kuho Jung
Between KUHO and hexa
Monday, October 28, 6:00 p.m.
SAIC Columbus Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Dr.

Kuho Jung is one of the top fashion designers in South Korea and well known for his clothing, interior design, furniture, lighting, and more, with avant-garde aspects and minimalist aesthetics driving his work. Currently Executive Creative Director of Samsung, Cheil Industries Inc., Kuho Jung launched his first designer brand, KUHO, in 1997. Since 2010 he has presented hexa by kuho at fashion weeks in New York and Paris; and he has been the art director and costume designer for many films, dance performances, and plays (An Affair, Tell Me Something, Asako in Ruby Shoes, among others). After exporting his brand KUHO to New York, he was named “One of Nine Designers to Watch” in 2011 by New York magazine and was chosen by ELLE as one of the best new designers. He was also the recipient of the Best Costume Design Award at the Daejong Film Awards in 2004 for The Scandal and for Hwang Jin Yi in 2008.

This lecture is jointly supported by SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program, Department of Exhibitions and Exhibitions Studies, and Department of Fashion Design.

A selection of garments from Kuho’s recent collection will also be on view in the SAIC Fashion Department display cases from October 14 – 31.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series
Tuesday, November 12, 6:00 p.m.
SAIC Columbus Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Dr.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (MFA 1989) is a conceptual artist working across media to create works that challenge our notions of the political and cultural. He is internationally recognized for his activist-inspired public art and studio-based works. His work currently regards the inversion of utopia, the fabrication of war, and the hypersonic re-entry of modernism. He has received numerous awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and a United States Artists Guthman Fellowship. Manglano-Ovalle has presented major projects at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; Power Plant Contemporary, Toronto; KW Institute for Contemporary Art–Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Art Institute of Chicago; Musée D’Art Contemporain de Montréal; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; Documenta (13), Kassel, Germany; Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Krefeld Barcelona Pavilion, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He currently holds a professorship for Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University.

Presented in collaboration with SAIC’s Office of Alumni Relations.

Beatriz Milhazes
Tuesday, December 3, 6:00 p.m.
SAIC Columbus Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Dr.

Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes’s brightly colored abstract paintings take their roots from Brazilian and European modernism and baroque forms. They are inspired by the brilliant flora and fauna of her home country, Brazil, and its decorative cultural offerings such as Carnival and local folk arts. During the early 1990s, the artist developed an unusual technique of adhering small acrylic paintings on plastic—such as flowers, arabesques, or lace patterns—onto large-scale canvases in a style that referenced collage, graffiti, and plastic decals. She is known for her use of bold, vibrant color and stylized compositions of ornamental floral motifs and geometric forms. Milhazes has had solo exhibitions at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; Museum of Latin American Art, Buenos Aires; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and Fondation Cartier, Paris, and has participated in many biennial exhibitions including São Paulo, 2004 and 1998; Venice, 2003; and Sydney, 1998. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophía, Madrid, among others.

ABOUT THE VISITING ARTISTS PROGRAM
The primary mission of the Visiting Artists Program is to educate and foster a greater understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through discourse. Founded in 1868 and formalized in 1951 with the establishment of an endowed fund by Flora Mayer Witkowsky, the Visiting Artists Program is one of the oldest public programs of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to public presentations by artists, designers, and scholars, VAP arranges studio critiques, round-table discussions, and workshops for SAIC students, providing them with direct access to world-renowned speakers working across disciplines.

ABOUT THE SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
A leader in educating artists, designers, and scholars since 1866, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) offers nationally accredited undergraduate and graduate degrees and post-baccalaureate programs to nearly 3,200 students from around the globe. SAIC also enables adults, high school students, middle school students, and children to flourish in a variety of courses, workshops, certificate programs, and camps through its Continuing Studies program. Located in the heart of Chicago, SAIC has an educational philosophy built upon an interdisciplinary approach to art and design, giving students unparalleled opportunities to develop their creative and critical abilities, while working with renowned faculty who include many of the leading practitioners in their fields. SAIC's resources include the Art Institute of Chicago and its new Modern Wing; numerous special collections and programming venues provide students with exceptional exhibitions, screenings, lectures, and performances. For more information, please visit saic.edu.

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