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SAIC Art History

News, opportunities, and events from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s department of Art History, Theory, & Criticism.

The Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) engages the history of art and design across the globe as informed by contemporary theories and practices. We are situated in a comprehensive art school and connected to a world-class art museum. We offer more than 100 courses in Art History, Theory, and Criticism each semester and have 15 ful

l-time faculty and more than 30 part-time faculty teaching modern and contemporary art history, theory, and criticism. In addition to offering degrees in modern and contemporary art history at both the graduate and undergraduate level, the department is fully integrated into studio and design education across SAIC. The Bachelor of Arts in Art History (BAAH) allows students to pursue a dedicated degree focused on the historical, theoretical, and critical interpretation of art and visual practices. The BAAH entails substantial coursework in Art History supported by additional coursework in Liberal Arts and in Studio. The Master of Arts (MA) in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism program is the most extensive of its kind in a comprehensive art school in this country, and its curriculum allows for an expansive view of the historical, theoretical, and critical issues relating to art, design, and contemporary visual cultures. Many of our graduates become curators, professors, writers, critics, publishers, gallerists, arts administrators, and activists.

05/09/2022

Celebrating our graduating MAs in Modern and Contemporary Art (and Design) History!!

Elsa Haarstad (BFA '15, MAAH '22) has received a Getty Graduate Internship where she will be working at the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) in the Building and Sites Department for the 2022-2023 term. Elsa is completing her degree this semester, with an emphasis in design history. Her forthcoming thesis is titled "After Preservation Took Over: The Afterlife of Public Housing in Contemporary Art & Design in Chicago."

04/25/2022

Joshua Chambers-Letson
"Season of Glass: Yoko Ono Grief Diary, or, Shatter and Scream"

IN-PERSON Keynote Lecture
MAAH Symposium
Wednesday, May 04, 4:30 p.m.
Zoom also available, link in bio

Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University and, for the ’21-’22 academic year, a Presidential Fellow and Visiting Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Yale University. JCL is author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Q***r of Color Life (2018), A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (2013), as well as a host of academic articles, book chapters, and exhibition catalogue essays. With Tavia Nyong’o, Chambers-Letson is the editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown (2020) and with Christine Mok the coeditor of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital (2021), with Ann Pellegrini and Nyong’o—a series co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press.

This event will provide auto-generated captioning. Persons requesting additional accommodations should visit saic.edu/access

04/08/2022

To continue celebrating our thesis writers, Ye-Bhit Hong is a candidate for a Bachelor of Arts in Art History.

Hong’s research originates in questions about how military, state, and corporate surveillance technologies that operate beyond the consciousness of most citizens affect “neoliberal” societies. She is fascinated by the idea that effective technology is that which facilitates its own invisibility. How can aesthetics help us understand the role and impact of these invisible systems? Hong’s thesis explores the influence of surveillance practices on aesthetics and how the work of contemporary scholars Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, among many others —reveal and critically analyze unseen systems of power.

04/01/2022

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Sampada Aranke, the 2022-2023 Director of Mellon Archival Programs at Rebuild Foundation!

03/18/2022

The common impression of the communist East Germany is one of austerity and cultural oppression. The Auto-Perforation Artists, a collective of four artists who created the country's most legendary experimental artworks, in fact, embraced that vision in an aesthetic that married self-harm to the absurd. Importantly, their performance art––begun while set design students at a state-run art academy in the city of Dresden––countered the gendered and class constraints of East German society. Shocking, irreverent, and entirely committed to their art, the Auto-Perforation Artists ultimately managed to carve out a place for performance art in state culture.

Dr. Sara Blaylock is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota Duluth. To date, the bulk of her research has concerned the experimental art, film, and visual culture of the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s. Broader interests include official cultural policy in state socialism, the art and visual culture of the Cold War East and West, documentary film from the Eastern Bloc, as well as global histories of modernism and post-modernism in Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and the United States. Blaylock's research has appeared in a number of academic and arts forums, both in English and in translation, including in Third Text and Cinema Journal. Her first book Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany has just appeared with the MIT Press.

In-Person guest lecture.
Thursday, March 31st, 4:30 P.M.

03/14/2022

Can one pursue a career in the art market while continuing to work as a scholar? As they have increasingly staged museum-quality historical exhibitions, larger galleries have been incorporating highly trained researchers for some time now. Daisy Charles, MAAH '18, will discuss her career trajectory since graduation, which has led to her current position as an archivist and researcher at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City.

Daisy Charles is the Director of Archives and Research at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, where she conducts in-house scholarship on artworks in support of sales and exhibitions. Daisy edits gallery exhibition catalogues, oversees the library and archives, and writes texts on individual artworks and exhibitions. Prior to her MA in Art History at SAIC Daisy worked with private collections, providing collections management, research, and cataloguing assistance.

Alumni Series: Daisy Charles
Thursday, March 17, noon
link in bio

11/30/2021

Please join us for the art history faculty talk "A Total Abuse of History: The Toxic Racial Lies of Green Lives Matter" with Associate Professor, Adj. Margaret MacNamidhe.

"During this talk (very much a work in progress) I discuss a c.1906-14 photograph from Ireland's northernmost county, a scene of tillage farming. Potatoes are planted by two shawled, female-identified figures in a so-called 'lazy bed' (a variety of crop cultivation dating back thousands of years). This photograph is part of a vast collection of such images amassed by the Congested District Boards established by the British government in 1891 to alleviate rural poverty throughout Scotland and the island of Ireland. But the white supremacist movement, Green Lives Matter, locates the photograph in the southern United States, and, ignoring the crucial difference between indentured servitude and chattel slavery, claims that the photograph shows enslaved people from Ireland. This talk laments the shocking ignorance of history that makes such toxic lies possible. It addresses the multi-decade work of the Congested District Boards before going back in time to the deeply stratified 18th-century world of Monserrat, a Caribbean destination for both expellees from Cromwellian Ireland (1649-50) and enslaved people from west Africa."

Link in bio

This event will provide auto-generated captioning. Persons requesting additional accommodations should visit saic.edu/access

11/13/2021

Tuesday, November 16, 12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m.

Join us for the “Making and Knowing” Roundtable with Assistant Professor, Adj. Lisa Zaher (Art History), Lecturer Jess Tucker (Film Video New Media and Animation), and Professor Eduardo Kac (Art and Technology Studies.)

This event will provide auto-generated captioning. Persons requesting additional accommodations should visit saic.edu/access

Jessica Tucker (aka Fetter) is an Amsterdam-based video maker, new media artist, and musician. She works with video, performance, sculpture, and music to stage the strange, elusive endeavors of self-knowing and self-production. Immersive, seductive, saturated, and often disorienting, her videos and performances reconfigure tropes of the social Internet and commercial media industry to question the virtual nature of intimacy, fantasy, anxiety, and nostalgia. Identity fluctuates, desire and disturbance mingle, and the artifice of technology is both omnipresent and always just out of reach.

Recently graduating from the Master of Fine Arts in Studio program from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020, she previously studied at Wellesley College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cinema and Media Studies, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Audiovisual Art. She has performed and exhibited her work throughout Europe and the USA, and has been supported by grants and scholarships from the Mondriaan Fund, the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK), the Prins Bernhard Culture Fund, and the Young Artfund Amsterdam, among others.

11/12/2021

Art History + Practice Conversations Series: Eduardo Kac, Jessica Tucker, Lisa Zaher, “Making and Knowing.”

Tuesday, November 16, 12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m.

This event will provide auto-generated captioning. Persons requesting additional accommodations should visit saic.edu/access

Eduardo Kac is an artist and writer who works with electronic and photonic media, including telepresence, holography, computers, video, robotics, and the Internet, as well as biological systems, such as animals, plants, bacteria, and organic tissue. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan, and South America. Kac's works belong to the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Holography in Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, among others. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Leonardo, published by MIT Press. Writings by Kac on electronic art as well as articles about his work have appeared in several books and periodicals in more than twenty countries. Eduardo Kac is a Ph.D. research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Arts (CAiiA) at the University of Wales, Newport, United Kingdom. He is an Assistant Professor of Art and Technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has received numerous grants and awards for his work.

Recently graduated from the Master of Fine Arts in Studio program from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020, Jessica Tucker (aka Fetter) previously studied at Wellesley College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cinema and Media Studies, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Audiovisual Art. She has performed and exhibited her work throughout Europe and the USA, and has been supported by grants and scholarships from the Mondriaan Fund, the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK), the Prins Bernhard Culture Fund, and the Young Artfund Amsterdam, among others.

11/01/2021

What is it like to work across the street? This week, media curator extraordinaire Robyn Farrell, MAAH '13, discusses the challenges and rewards of working in the Modern and Contemporary Art department of an encyclopedic museum in light of the major Barbara Kruger retrospective that is currently on view. Particularly if you have or will join Robyn on one of the tours of the show, this talk will be an important complement to the picture of contemporary curating that she will sketch for us.

https://saic-edu.zoom.us/j/84734644884

Robyn Farrell is an associate curator in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Since joining the department in 2013, she has served on the curatorial teams for Kara Walker: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! (2013), Frances Stark: Intimism (2015), Kemang Wa Lehulere: In All My Wildest Dreams (2016), and Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again (2019), and organized projects with Andrea Fraser (2016), Rodney McMillian (2017), Martine Syms (2018), Cauleen Smith (2018), Naeem Mohaiemen (co-curated with Hendrik Folkerts, 2019), and Gregg Bordowitz (co-curated with Solveig Nelson, 2019). Her exhibition with Barbara Kruger, THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU. (co-curated with James Rondeau) opens in September 2021.

Sponsored by the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism, the Alumni Series focuses on professional practice and navigating careers in the arts after graduation.

This event will provide auto-generated captioning. Persons requesting additional accommodations should visit saic.edu/access

10/24/2021

Thinking about an Art History PhD? This Thursday, Oct. 28 at noon, we hear from brilliant Dual-Degree graduate Dorota Biczel about the range of roles she has engaged during and after receiving her PhD from UT Austin: curator, scholar, teacher and now museum director.

Zoom link TBA.

The Executive Director and Curator of the Houston Center for Photography, Biczel will discuss her academic and curatorial trajectory as well as her new position. Among many other exhibitions, she was a researcher for Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 (2017) and assistant curator on the Mercosur Biennial 12 (2020). She will also address the merits of the Art History Ph.D. in today's academic climate, and looks forward to a lively Q & A.

Biczel holds a dual M.A. in Art History and Arts Administration & Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship has focused on the impact of migrations and social justice movements on experimental art in Latin America, especially in the Andean region. Between 2002 and 2010, she initiated and managed a successful artist’s cooperative in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. More recently, she has lectured and mentored graduate students at SAIC and the University of Houston. She was instrumental in the organization and curation of the 2020 Mercosur Biennial, developing a series of exhibitions and conferences that emphasized the work of women and Afro-Latin American artists; when COVID intervened, she and her colleagues quickly pivoted to an online format.

This event will provide auto-generated captioning. Persons requesting additional accommodations should visit saic.edu/access.

10/18/2021

We are pleased to announce that the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize for the best book on the decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas published in 2019 or 2020 has been awarded to Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design by Bess Williamson (New York University Press). The prize rewards scholarly excellence and commitment to cross-disciplinary conversation.

In commending Accessible America, the prize committee points out how, in a politically astute text, the author does not treat disability in isolation, but as an issue with ramifications for design more generally: “Williamson discusses seldomly contemplated objects that, although initially addressing the needs of the disabled, have shaped and continue to shape the lives of most people in the U.S.A. today, and in the Americas more broadly. As such, it is a compelling study of the relationships between people and things, and is clearly an outstanding contribution not only to disability studies but also to design studies and design history.”

In recognition of Professor Williamson’s outstanding scholarship, Bard Graduate Center will host a symposium on the subject of the book in spring 2022.

.bess

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http://www.saic.edu/academics/graduatedegrees/maaap/

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