A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Kristin Mariani

Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

BFA, 1994, MFA, 2020, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions: Murmurations, De Vos Art Museum, University of Northern Michigan, Marquette; Of Sibyls and Source, Cynthia Winings Gallery, Blue Hill, Maine; NIDO Exhibition I, II, III, International Center for the Arts, Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy; Soledad, PRPGMX, Mexico City; DB14, Dallas; Dimensional Lines: Art + Dress, Evanston Art Center; The Arts Club, Chicago; Chicago Architecture Foundation; ArtStays 9, Ptuy, Slovenia; Audible at ESS, Chicago. Performances: Lac O Le Mon, San Cesario di Lecce, Poor Farm, Manawa WI; Art in Odd Places (AiOP), New York; International Center for the Arts, Perugia; Studio Gang, Chicago; MCA, Chicago; The Arts Club, Chicago; Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago; Free Dick Higgins, 214 Projects, Dallas. Costume Design: SITE/less, Chicago; MCA, Chicago; Roulette, NY; Audio Art Festival, Krakow, Poland; Ingenuity Fest, Cleveland; The Kitchen, NY; Joyce Theatre, NY. Publications: The Elephant, UK; Voice of America; The Chicago Reader; Bridge; Time Out Chicago; Art Forum; Front Row Magazine; Newcity, Chicago; Allure Magazine.

Artist Statement

My practice is an ongoing conversation between design and art. I acknowledge the slippery distinctions between the two disciplines, and my investigations unfold in this unstable territory. Through the craft of making clothes, I deploy aesthetic strategies, skill-based knowledge, and text to probe the historical, material, and labor-oriented underpinnings encapsulated in any effort to clothe a person. In my series of dress designs, titled Text Toiles, I address intimacy, care, language and boundaries, and question how the production of gender is figured through fashion, place, and labor.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This is an introductory look into fashion. Students will explore basic design skills
and processes, and work with various materials used in constructing garments. Both traditional and non-traditional materials will be explored through techniques and exercises related to the body. Students will learn how the tools and equipment for hand and machine sewing functions, and its role in constructing garments. A critical overview of fashion introduces students to various practical and theoretical approaches to understand and explore fashion within an art context.

Class Number

1399

Credits

3

Description

Fashion Design I builds the skills and talents required to achieve creative fashion. This class teaches the design fundamentals of the integrated core fashion design curriculum. Students will engage multiple skills to create individual, visionary, unconventional garments, and later, collections. Through a series of projects, students explore form, silhouette, volume, and research in design to arrive at a personal point-of-view in fashion. This course will specifically ask students to work conceptually and to develop research methodologies in their design work. Based on this inquiry, students generate sketches and surface treatments to refine their unique silhouettes and material manipulations. No prerequisite.

Class Number

1433

Credits

3

Description

Fashion Design II is the second part of a two-semester course building the skills and talents required to achieve creative fashion. Taken together with fashion construction II the class becomes a co-taught immersive laboratory. Here students combine design research, shape development, and creative explorations built on and with the foundations into conceptual garments that are fitted on models in both muslin and fabric. Co-req FASH2003; Pre-req FASH2001, FASH2002

Class Number

2210

Credits

3

Description

Fashion Design II is the second part of a two-semester course building the skills and talents required to achieve creative fashion. Taken together with fashion construction II the class becomes a co-taught immersive laboratory. Here students combine design research, shape development, and creative explorations built on and with the foundations into conceptual garments that are fitted on models in both muslin and fabric. Co-req FASH2003; Pre-req FASH2001, FASH2002

Class Number

2212

Credits

3

Description

This course teaches students hand and machine knitting with an emphasis on sustainable materials and practices. Themes of waste, re-use, recycling, and the redesign of pliable materials will serve as foundational concepts around which students will center their making. Students will learn hand and machine knitting techniques, how to read and write knit and pattern languages, steeking, unraveling existing knits, rehanging yarn to reclaim fiber, needle felting for knits, crochet, crewel work, and hand-stitching techniques.
Historic and contemporary knits will be encountered through visits to SAIC¿s Textile Resource Center and the Art Institute of Chicago¿s Textile collection. Artists presented in relation to public action, community building, and sustainable studio practices include the works of Magda Sayeg, Ernesto Neto, Wells Chandler, Jesse Harrod, and Orly Genger. Class discussions will address texts by Alden Wicker and Rebecca Burgess, and consider local and global community fiber/textiles programs in relation to environmentalism.
Assignments include readings, media viewing, discussions, explorations of knit stitches, and midterm and final studio assignments. Students will use existing and alternative raw goods and pliable materials, re-engineering them to create a range of project outcomes including 2-D and 3-D works, installations, performances and public actions.

Class Number

2259

Credits

3