Visiting Artists Program

Los Angeles-based artist Laura Owens is internationally renowned for her innovative approaches to painting.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul (MFA 1998, HON 2011) is recognized as one of the most original voices in contemporary cinema. 

Do Ho Suh works across various media, creating drawings, film, and sculptural works that confront questions of home, physical space, displacement, memory, individuality, and collectivity.

Appropriating archaeology, field ecology, and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Mark Dion’s practice examines the ways in which dominant ideologies shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world.

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and AIDS historian. 

British fashion designer Gareth Pugh is globally recognized for his approach to redefining modern luxury, and his clothes have been described as “wearable sculptures,” with experimental forms, volumes, and fabrics as part of his signature aesthetic. 

Stefan Sagmeister’s unconventional practice explores the subjects of our lives, like happiness or beauty; how they connect to design, and what that actually means to our everyday lives. 

From the late 19th-century women photographers established studios around the country creating images about their experiences. Many set up backdrops to resemble their family homes and their daily lives. During that time, only a small number of women were working as photographers but the few who worked as photographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries documented their families and friends. This lecture draws from my interests in women artists and photographers who explore personal and collective memories on beauty from early photography to now. Some of these artists reconfigure old family photographs, while others create entirely new images that reimagine the past. Central to experiencing memory is the image of Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of time and memory—she is often portrayed with a cloth draped over her body. Looking at the unclothed and clothed body by women working in the past has always created tension between conceptualizing and producing work about the female body.
 

Curating China’s First Design Museum

China has one of the fastest growing design economies in the world. As the country strives to shift from a ‘made in China’ to a ‘created in China’ mode of production, new cultural institutions are being planned to support the country’s design turn. Brendan Cormier will discuss his experiences curating a V&A Gallery in China, in collaboration with Design Society, a new cultural hub which will open its doors in December of this year in Shenzhen.

How do artists, scholars, and writers approach archival practice?  This talk will explore both the theoretical and practical dimensions of archival work, with a particular look at narratives about Chicago's cultural history.  Drawing on her recent book Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (Yale, 2017), Liesl Olson will discuss the allure of the archive as a potential source of untold stories.  Illuminating the importance of Chicago's early twentieth-century editors, bookstore owners, gallery owners, and cultural arbiters-many of whom were women-Olson will call attention to what the archive does-and does not-disclose.

Liesl Olson is Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library.  She is the author of Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford University Press 2009) and the forthcoming Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (Yale 2017).

Based on her forthcoming book Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany, which will appear in 2018 with the University of Minnesota Press, James-Chakraborty’s lecture will compare the political use of memory in Berlin since unification in 1990 versus its economic utility in the country’s former industrial heartland. James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin and the former Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the Yale School of Architecture. Her books include Architecture since 1400 and the edited collections Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War and India in Art in Ireland.

A discussion with Hong Kong artist Sampson Wong, Jonathan Solomon, Mechtild Widrich, Thomas Kong, Maud Lavin, Celine Setiadi, and Aram Han Sifuentes on global movements and protest creativity, theories of activist objects, and on the relationship between art and resistance. 

A workshop on designing protest objects with Hong Kong artist and urbanist Sampson Wong.

Sampson Wong holds a PhD in geography from the University of Manchester, and is currently a lecturer at the Liberal Arts Studies department, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. With research interests on contemporary urbanism, art and the public sphere and socially-engaged creative practices, he divides his time among the roles of artist, independent curator and academic. As an active participant in Hong Kong’s civil society and artistic sphere, he co-founded the Hong Kong Urban Laboratory, emptyscape, Umbrella Movement Visual Archive, Add Oil Team and The Twenties.

OPEN TO SAIC STUDENTS ONLY. Apply for the workshop here: https://tinyurl.com/ycbklhge
*Please apply using your SAIC email. Contact Ryan Deemer with any questions at rdeemer@saic.edu. 
 

David Getsy discusses Scott Burton's postminimalist theories of performance art in the 1970s and examines his strategic use of cybernetics, art history, and queer culture in his performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1977. 

Getsy is Goldabelle McComb Finn Professor of Art History at SAIC, and his books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale 2015), Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale 2010), Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance 1965-1975 (Soberscove 2012), and the anthology of artists writings, Queer, for the Whitechapel Gallery’s “Documents of Contemporary Art” book series (MIT 2016).  His current research projects undertake archive-based recoveries of forgotten queer and genderqueer performance and sculptural practices in late-twentieth-century America. For 2018, he is curating the first retrospective of performance artist Stephen Varble (Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York), and he is also completing a book on Scott Burton’s queer postminimalism and performance in the 1970s, from which this lecture is drawn. http://davidgetsy.academia.edu

Looking at internal questions such as editorial process and design alongside more external issues of funding and distribution, Petrovich will describe how he and fellow artist Roger White developed the structure for Paper Monument, and how their ideas were implemented in titles such as I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette and Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. Special attention will be given to their most recent book, Social Medium: Artists Writing, 2000-2015, where they anthologized an especially expansive period in artists’ writings. Petrovich will also discuss the divergent approach he has taken with DME, the imprint behind Adjunct Commuter Weekly and The Daily Gentrifier. Custom-making publications for various demographics to which he belongs, Petrovich has embarked on a multipart investigation of publishing’s relationships to visibility and community. In addition to presenting the periodicals themselves, Petrovich will outline how they engage with existing systems of collaboration, distribution, and reception.   

Dushko Petrovich is Assistant Professor and MA Program Director in New Arts Journalism at SAIC. A founding editor of Paper Monument and former board president of the n+1 Foundation, Petrovich has written for Slate, the Boston Globe, ArtNews, Bookforum, and Modern Painters, among many others. With his imprint DME, Petrovich has published Adjunct Commuter Weekly, which debuted in 2015 to widespread critical acclaim including profiles the in Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker, and The Daily Gentrifier, which came out in September.

A roundtable discussion featuring Huey Copeland (Northwestern University), Frank B Wilderson III (UC Irvine), Athi Mongezeleli Joja (University of Witwatersrand), Mlondolozi Zondi (Northwestern University), Sampada Aranke (SAIC).