A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
SAIC faculty member Camille Casemier Johnson.

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Camille Casemier Johnson

Lecturer

Contact

Professional Site

Bio

Camille Casemier (b. 1995, Vermont) (she/her) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work contends with persistence: the ways stories endure through objects, images, and gestures. She works across performance, photography, video, drawing, and archival research to study how legacy is rehearsed, resisted, and occasionally unsettled.

Casemier comes to drawing through performance—through an embodied engagement with lines, thresholds, and inherited forms. She is interested in how legacies of the line shape our capacity for mark-making and meaning-making. Her practice as an educator does not seek to define what a drawing is, but to ask what it does and how it moves—between bodies, materials, and histories.

Her ongoing research includes her work as a content creator at Mt. Sinai Resale Shop, where she investigates the cultural rituals of accumulation through short-form video, interviews, and the everyday dramaturgy of secondhand things. Recent projects include her 2025 residency at the Hong Museum in Wenzhou, China, where she studied the material and cultural legacy of a regional dish known as fish jelly; Hugh’s Pole (2025), a 43-foot printed image installation laid across a downed telephone pole for the Chicago Cluster Project, tracing the afterlife of a settler monument found in Rod Slemmons’ photographic archive; and Almost Heaven (2024), a solo exhibition at Trinity College.

Casemier holds a BFA in Art and Theater from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Performance from SAIC, where she now teaches in the Painting and Drawing and Performance departments. Her work has been presented locally and internationally, including in Mexico City (Festival Arte Accione), Yogyakarta (Performatif Drawing Forum), Germany, Poland, and across the Midwest.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

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

2260

Credits

3

Description

The 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 will be exploring performance through drawing: drawing as a description, a medium, and a score for an embodied gesture. We will use drawing to imagine movement and to move concepts, in which drawing can act as tracing and foreseeing. Performances become descriptions and embodied drawings 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 mark making and thinking process. We will look at artists like Sol Lewitt, Lygia Pape, Monica Baer, among other artists at the intersection of drawing as a performance practice like Janine Antoni, David Hammons, Stanley Brown; Artists in conversations such as Paul Chan and Martha Rosler, Devin T. Mays and David Schutter, John Baldessari and Paul Thek, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson. We will work through texts like Walkaround Time: Dance and Drawing in the Twentieth Century by Cornelia H. Butler, Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene by Donna Haraway, and
'White Elephant Art vs Termite Art' by Manny Farber.
Working in and with public space as surface, students should expect to create traditional and non-traditional drawings and performances, blurring the line of traditional drawing material and embodied practice. Performance will be approachable, self determined, nothing more or less than walking if you so choose. Students will produce a final show at No Nation.

Class Number

2256

Credits

3