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

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Stephanie Brooks

Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

Education: BFA, 1994, Ohio University, Athens; MFA, 1997, University of Illinois at Chicago. Exhibitions: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center; Columbus, Ohio; Rotunda, NY; New Center for Contemporary Art, Louisville; Memphis, TN; New York, NY, Los Angeles, CA; Milwaukee, WI; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Gallery 400, Chicago; Kendall College, Grand Rapids, MI; San Francisco, CA. International Exhibitions: Berlin, Copenhagen, Ljubljana, London, and Vienna. Commissions: City of Chicago; The City of Phoenix, AZ; University of Arizona. Recent Publications: Green Lantern Press, Illinois State University Press, PrintText, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Perennial Press. Collections: Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Microsoft, Phillip Morris/Altria, The MacArthur Foundation.

Personal Statement

My sculptural works are fueled by the visual, physical, verbal and written. Equations, equivalents, and norms are in distress and readdressed in my art practice.

With my sculptures, I investigate and interrogate systems in our built, affective, textual, canonical and public environments. Through object-making, the works create complexities in order to expose the multiplicities of meaning inherent in the locations of forms. My artworks insert alternative narratives within, around and through the locations minimalism, building, abstraction, language, humor, and textuality.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Students in this course pursue assignment-based explorations in sculpture. Technical demonstrations help students develop material interests and studio skills, including innovative uses of both traditional and digital processes. Within the semester students will produce (three) projects with a focus on the artistic and social contextualization of their work. Multiple individual critiques help students analyze their work and articulate their intentions. Student presentations and readings deepen the student's theoretical groundings in the discipline. Class critiques are a workshop forum for application of the knowledge and verbal skills that define an artistic and aesthetic position.

Class Number

2483

Credits

3

Description

In this course students explore the ways in which artists communicate sentimentality and nostalgia in their work. From media (film, photography) to materials (found objects) and processes (collecting, stitching) students examine the complexities of nostalgia and sentimentality through and beyond materiality, and discuss the poetic, political, cultural, social, and psychoanalytic implications of doing so. Using both art and literary sources students study an historical context as well as look at contemporary artists? work. Student critiques and readings are assigned to complement a weekly lecture and discussion topic.

Class Number

2516

Credits

3

Description

This studio course explores the multiplicity of meanings inherent in the objectness of sculpture practices. Our weekly classes address such issues as monuments, earthworks, and performance; history and temporality; materiality and dematerialization; research, manufacturing, and consumption; tensions and connections between sculpture, architecture, and designed objects; and the ways new media, especially the internet and other virtual sites, alter our notions of the permanent and the ephemeral. Each week we'll discuss readings from contemporary and art historical texts and critique student work. Students will be given assignments and projects to be completed and critiqued throughout the semester.

Class Number

1732

Credits

3