A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Headshot of Aaron Hughes, an adult person with a fair skin tone, short ginger hair, and a beard.

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Aaron Hughes

Lecturer

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Bio

Aaron Hughes (he/him) is an artist, curator, and anti-war veteran. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, Hughes works collaboratively to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. He develops projects that utilize popular research strategies, experiment with forms of direct democracy, and operate in solidarity with the people most impacted by structural violence.

His work has appeared in venues around the world including Museum of Modern Art in New York, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Maruki Gallery in Tokyo, and Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. He has received a number of awards, grants, residencies, and fellowships from a variety of institutions, including Center for Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago, Illinois Humanities, Ashkal Alwan, Blue Mountain Center, Lawrence Arts Center, Links Hall, The Kitchen, and Penland School of Craft. His recent publications including Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire (Bridge Books, 2024), Invitation to Tea: A Tea Project Archive & Recipe Book (StepSister Press, 2022), and Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo (DePaul Art Museum, 2022).

Hughes works with a range of art and activist groups including Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, About Face: Veterans Against the War, emerging Veteran Art Movement, and Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.

Hughes lives and works in Chicago.

Portfolio

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course will introduce students to the visual languages, graphic trends, and methods used in contemporary social movements 1960s to present. In collaboration with archivists around Chicago, we will view, discuss, and archived ephemera and create works in response to this research. The thematic structure of this course is situated around ideas of the radical archive. In its simplest form this refers to the aggregation of materials, practices, languages, information. We will also examine how radical (democratic or disruptive) archiving conceptually relates to more performative, gestural, or ephemeral forms; the ways an entire studio practice, a human life, or a single object can be considered an archive.
The 'Disobedient Objects' exhibition at the Victoria + Albert Museum provides the jumping-off point for this class. Readings + artists discussed include: Sharon Hayes, Julie Ault, Emory Douglas, Lucy Lippard, Gregory Sholette, Group Material. Archives visited + discussed include: Interference Archive; Gerber/Hart Library of LGBTQ history, SNCC Archives, ACT UP Chicago records.
I've compiled a list of archived collections available at local libraries and universities. From that list choose three collections you would be interested in engaging with. We'll narrow it down to one after negotiating with the whole class.
After you've chosen an archival collection, you will be creating additional works, ephemera, artifacts that would fit more or less seamlessly into that collection. Consider, if there are multiple authors/artists:
Where do you fit in? What aesthetic cohesion is there between materials? What language is used in the messages? Materials? Processes? Distribution? Is the archive considered a closed set or are there things missing? What are the implications of 'updating' a collection / closed set?' Students are able to choose from a list of four dozen Chciago-based archives on various themes. After visiting 1-2 archives as a class, they are able to make appointments to visit archives independently, call objects for study and documentation, and work to create something/s in response... either a proposed inclusion or an updating of an existing item.

Class Number

2396

Credits

3