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

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Evan Fusco

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Evan Fusco (they/them) is a lecturer (that is lecturer, artist, writer, educator, publisher, host, etc.) based in Chicago, IL. They received a BFA in 2016 and an MFA in 2019 and have taken various classes since then including with the New Arts School Modality. They are a faculty and AICWU union member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Along with this, they run General Things Press and host the reading series General Readings. Pieces of theirs have been published, performed, contained, or shown in and/or at: Other Forms, MOCA Cleveland, Apparatus Projects, The Chicago Art Book Fair, Plates Journal, Carrol University, Prompt Press, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection. Along with teaching at SAIC they are currently teaching a free class at Schoolhouse in Chicago, IL, are working on various writings which will come together as a manuscript tentatively titled Frankenstein, or the Function of Reason, and will be presenting new sculptures and a lecture performance at the Garfield Park Arts Center alongside Lemmy Ya’akova as well as curating various artists into the programming.

Personal Statement

Timothy Morton: …to be a thing at all is to have been hurt. Harry Dodge’s paraphrase: …to be a thing is to have been wounded. My paraphrase of a paraphrase: to be a thing at all is to be with and to exhaust. To state a verbose practice is to fail it and never allow it to exhaust. I think often of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s conception of study, and in the practice consider its relational implications. Performances built towards productive failures and exigencies of the moment. A kind of autistic thingliness as I have begun to describe it. Disunification of a self following Aria Dean’s understandings of Robert Morris as a kind of fool, kind of dandy. Gregg Bordowitz stating that, “Nothing is as it appears to be and everything is significant.” A montage of a statement to hold space for the lecture-performances, plays, sculptures, essays, no longer here and yet to come in the practice. Thinking towards what constitutes a real, and how to grasp its process in works that prioritize collapse, sabotage, obtuseness in order to exist within what Jane Bennett would call thing-power in order to find what Erin Manning would call minor gestures.

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

1285

Credits

3

Description

This interdisciplinary critique seminar is designed to help students recognize patterns of inquiry within their studio work while proceeding toward an outward-facing practice beyond graduation. An assessment of previous projects will be the starting point for an ongoing critical examination of your creative practice, through which you will be asked to contextualize and position your work in the art-worlds of the 21st Century. This course is a forum for in-depth individual and group critiques with technical and conceptual discussions tailored to your practice and research. In addition to various readings, screenings, and field trips, class visits by local artists and curators will provide the opportunity for conversation about the lived experience of sustaining a creative practice. With an emphasis on faculty mentorship, class meetings will support the development of a focused, self-initiated Senior Project, a strong portfolio, and the tools for maintaining an independent studio practice.

Class Number

1149

Credits

3

Description

This interdisciplinary critique seminar is designed to help students recognize patterns of inquiry within their studio work while proceeding toward an outward-facing practice beyond graduation. An assessment of previous projects will be the starting point for an ongoing critical examination of your creative practice, through which you will be asked to contextualize and position your work in the art-worlds of the 21st Century. This course is a forum for in-depth individual and group critiques with technical and conceptual discussions tailored to your practice and research. In addition to various readings, screenings, and field trips, class visits by local artists and curators will provide the opportunity for conversation about the lived experience of sustaining a creative practice. With an emphasis on faculty mentorship, class meetings will support the development of a focused, self-initiated Senior Project, a strong portfolio, and the tools for maintaining an independent studio practice.

Class Number

2423

Credits

3