Sculpture
Sculpture Department
SAIC's Sculpture department offers one of the largest, most comprehensive, and diverse programs of its kind in the country.
Undergraduate Admissions Events
Meet with us, learn more about SAIC and our curriculum, and get feedback on your work.
Graduate Admissions Events
Learn how to prepare a competitive application, meet with faculty and staff, and explore our programs and facilities.
The Sculpture department is situated at the defining edge of contemporary practice and discourse. We practice sculpture at its broadest level of meaning.
Twentieth-century art practice opened up the spaces and materials of sculpture to those of the "real world," and this breadth of vision and experience is reflected in the development of the curriculum and resources, which encompass every material imaginable, leading to the expression of ideas in space. We are committed on levels both international and deeply local to the development of an economically and culturally diverse context for the study of sculpture and with increased attentiveness to environmental responsibility in art-making.
The Student Experience
The department offers a rigorous mix of conceptual, spatial, material, and process-based challenges through which students learn to understand, negotiate, and contribute to the changing cultural and ecological landscape. Educating thinkers as well as makers, our studio classes and seminars mix technical and material concerns with thematic and critical ones.
Students explore new media, emerging technologies, material invention, socially engaged art, installation and collaboration in conjunction with traditional skills and media such as carving, welding, mold-making, and foundry work.
Renowned Faculty
Our distinguished faculty members are nationally and internationally renowned artists, fully involved in the exploration and re-examination of the field. They are well-versed in contemporary theoretical debates and committed to building a diverse, exciting environment for the exchange of ideas and the production of culture and are engaged in the ongoing process of redefining the fluid field of sculpture through active practice.
Knowledge Lab
The Knowledge Lab is a program for research and practice where students and faculty engage in intersectional, material, and theoretical work in direct response to our current anthropogenic material and climate crises. The material and resource problems of the present time are novel in human history and our goal is to devise new methods of transdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge production that meet the challenges of our contemporary predicament. Our goal is to address the web of life and to identify new questions to reimagine material futures and generate new knowledge as we move into the future, as we re-imagine our futures. The Knowledge Lab currently hosts a living lab in the Sculpture Courtyard and is developing a Rematerials Lab.
Follow Us
Contact Us
Department Chair
Mary Jane Jacob mjacob@saic.edu
Graduate Coordinator
Sara Black sblack3@saic.edu
Senior Administrative Director
Nika Gorini
Administrative Director
Jessica DuPreez
Administrative Assistant
Maria Dunaevsky
Assistant Director of Sculpture Facilities
Eric Fuertes