A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Kayla looks to the camera with a closed lipped smile, hair braided and resting on the right shoulder.

On This Page

Kayla Anderson

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Kayla Anderson is an itinerant artist, writer, gardener, and organizer. Their work often investigates the ways that culture and subjectivity shape, and are shaped by, technology and more-than-human encounters. Growing up in (San Antonio) Texas, where capitalism and disenfranchisement are more relentless than the sun, they value art as an arena for non-strategic modes of thinking, feeling, and communing with others.

Education: BFA + BA in Visual and Critical Studies, 2014, SAIC; MFA, 2020, Northwestern University. 

Exhibitions: Comfort Station, Nightingale Cinema, Roman Susan, Hyde Park Art Center, <3 etc., Chicago; Center for Contemporary Photography, Detroit; Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; The Chapter House, Los Angeles; HTMLles Festival, Montreal; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; MELT Festival, Brisbane; Nhà Sàn Collective, Hanoi. 

Publications: “Joiri Minaya unravels social fabrics and draws attention to patterns,” and “Morehshin Allahyari re-figures histories and imagines new futures,” Art21: In the Studio; “Floral Facades,” Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art Magazine; Old Future’s Almanac (book), Flatland; “Mounting the Horizon,” Collaborative Center for Storm Space and Seismic Research; “In Search of a Recuperative Aesthetics,” Art & Education Classroom; “Learning to Live Together,” Temporary Art Review + New Constitutions (book), Academy of Art & Design, Basel; “Twelve Books, One Long Zoom,” Aperture Magazine; “Holding Up the Sky: Art-Science Approaches to an Aero-dialogue,” Kunstlicht Journal, University of Amsterdam; “Future Reliquaries: Outposts,” The 3D Additivist Cookbook (book); "Ethics, Ecology, and the Future: Art and Design Face the Anthropocene" Leonardo Journal + MU TXT, Eindhoven; "Animism: Curating Discourse," Royal College of Art, International Awards in Art Criticism Compendium; “Object Intermediaries: How New Media Artists Translate the Language of Things” Leonardo Journal. 

Awards: Onion City Experimental Film Festival ‘Best in Show’; American Austrian Foundation, Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts; Thoma Art Foundation Envision Grant; Haus der Kulturen der Welt Travel Grant; DCASE Independent Artist Program Grant; Luminarts Cultural Foundation Fellowship; Andy Warhol Foundation Writers Workshop Fellowship; Leadership, Equity, and Action for our Food System Fellowship.

Kayla also teaches art and gardening at a CPS high school on the west side of chicago where they live.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This studio course focuses on themes, practices, contexts, and questions undertaken by contemporary artists and designers. Research Studio I is a course that asks students to begin to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities. This course engages with cultural institutions including: museums, galleries, libraries and archives as resources of critical engagement.

Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems.


Assignments in this course are faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary and idea based. The projects are designed to help students recognize their work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Students will experience a wide range of research methods and making strategies. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

Class Number

1264

Credits

3

Description

The course Research Studio II builds on the learning outcomes from Research Studio I, asking students to continue to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities.

This spring the entire Contemporary Practice department will have a shared umbrella topic for our RSII courses: Contemporary Now. All RSII classes will engage with the present and what is happening right now. With the world moving so fast - a pandemic, fires burning across the US west, people marching in the streets across the globe, and the storms that seem to keep coming, it is critical we ask questions of ourselves as artists, designers, educators and cultural producers: What responsibility do we have at any moment in history? How can the diversity of our practices: research, study, making and actions, address the present and design the future we want to see?

In RSII courses students will investigate this shared departmental thematic through the intersection of their own practice and the pedagogical practices of their faculty. All RSII classes are interdisciplinary, faculty have provided a subtitle, and a short description to describe the lens through which their class will explore the theme of Contemporary Now.

Class Number

1213

Credits

3

Description

As Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer states 'we Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities, the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. There are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.¿ In this course, we will look to non-human teachers to guide us in the creation of artworks, gaining new perspectives on the lives of non-humans, what they have to teach us about our own human culture, and the wider world around us. Each student will choose one companion (plant, animal, fungus, mineral etc.) to complete a field guide on and to make studio work in conversation with throughout the semester. We will also learn from other artists and writers who engage the more-than-human world, moving through the following themes: Collection & Attention, Cultural Histories of Nature, Material Matters, and Perception / Audience / Umwelt. This class will also include field trips to see how 'nature' is presented and curated, including to the Field Museum, the Lincoln Park Zoo and Conservatory, and any current relevant exhibitions.

Class Number

1785

Credits

3