A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Portrait of Xi Li, an adult Chinese person with a light skin tone and short black hair.

Xi Li

AICAD Fellow

Bio

Xi Li (b. 1995 Suzhou, China) (she/her) is an artist who works with photography, printmaking, collage, and installation to examine image-making processes and the construction of alternative narratives in contemporary culture. Her work investigates how images shape, circulate, reconstruct, and eventually shift layers of meaning through media, history, and collective memory. Li has exhibited internationally at François Ghebaly (Los Angeles), AMANITA and LATITUDE Gallery (New York), and MadeIn Gallery (Shanghai), among others. She is a recipient of the Aperture 2023 Creator Labs Photo Fund and was an Artist-in-Residence at Silver Art Projects in 2024. Li holds a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art. She is currently the 2025–2026 AICAD Teaching Fellow at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

In this course we will focus on disciplinary and interdisciplinary art and design practices of contemporary art production. This team-taught, year-long class explores the materials and techniques of surface, space, and time (2D, 3D, and 4D), as well as the connections and interplay of these areas. Core Studio integrates the formal with the conceptual, traditional with the contemporary, and makes visible a variety of approaches in current cultural production in order to foster the development of students? emerging practices as makers and thinkers.

In this interdisciplinary studio course students will be authorized to use a variety of school shops, materials and equipment; including the woodshop, plaster studio, digital lab, sewing machine, hand tools, sound and video production, digital workflows and principles of visual fundamentals. This is a hands-on making class, faculty present artists and content related to a particular toolkit and, or project theme. Every section of Core Studio has shared learning outcomes which are uniquely realized by each Core faculty partnership.

Students should expect a fast-paced studio environment. In Core Studio students will complete short assignments as well as longer multi-week projects. Assignments are designed to help students develop their own ideas in relation to the materials, processes, and themes presented by faculty.

Class Number

1236

Credits

3