SAIC Fiber and Material Studies

The Fiber and Material Studies Department (FMS) at SAIC is selling a Graphtec: Cutting Pro FC2250-180VC plotter cutter. Below are some detailed shots of the model we are selling.

If you are interested or have any additional questions please contact Melissa Leandro, Assistant Director and Daisy Palma, Manager of the FMS Department at:
[email protected], [email protected]

The Fiber and Material Studies Department (FMS) at SAIC is selling two floor looms. Below you will see both looms that are for sale; FB-21-WE has a weaving width of 52” and FB-6-WE has a weaving width of 46”.

If you are interested or have any additional questions please contact Melissa Leandro, Assistant Director and Daisy Palma, Manager of the FMS Department at:
[email protected], [email protected]

Please join us tomorrow!

Visiting Artist Lecture: Namita Gupta Wiggers

Wednesday, November 29, 4:15 p.m.
Sharp Building, 37 S. Wabash Ave., room 327
FREE and OPEN to the public

“Looking for Craft in All the Wrong Archives”

"In 2014, I received word that Monograph Bookwerks in Portland, OR had purchased publications from the estate of Hattie Mae and Max Nixon, influential educators who taught generations of students at University of Oregon. A day spent poring through boxes of publications, leaflets, pamphlets, newsletters, and magazines revealed historic shifts in textile history from the 1930s to the 1990s, and raised a number of questions to be explored in this talk. What do the books owned by educators who taught ceramics, metal, and textile histories and processes reveal about shifts in craft history? What are the effects of the shifts of knowledge centers from gendered home economics courses to ostensibly gender-neutral material science and art? Where—and what—constitutes the archive of modern craft?"

Namita Gupta Wiggers is an independent curator, educator, and writer based in Portland, OR. She is the Director and Co-Founder of Critical Craft Forum, and teaches in MFA Applied Craft + Design, a joint program of Oregon College of Art and Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art. From 2004-2014, Wiggers served as Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Craft, and as Director and Chief Curator from 2012-14. Current projects include: Across the Table, Across the Land, a collaboration with Michael Strand celebrating the 50th anniversary of NCECA (National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts); a maker-space project for the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, Miami; and lectures/programming for the 2015 Studio Art Quilt Associates and Surface Design Association Annual Conferences. Her writing can be found in Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft, Contemporary Jewelry in Perspective and the forthcoming Shows and Tales: On Jewelry Exhibition-Making, and Ceramics in the Expanded Field.

*This lecture series is made possible by the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies

We are excited to share this event and hope you can join us for our noon hour visiting artist lecture with Corkey Sinks, tomorrow, November 15, from 12pm to 1pm in the Sharp Building, Room 1005.

Lecture Title: Artificial Tide

Corkey Sinks (b. Dallas, TX) is an artist and designer based in Memphis, TN. Sinks received a BA in Media Studies from the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands, CA in 2005 and an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. She views her work as a form of secular meditation. Embracing the human tendency to divine meaningful patterns within the noise of collective information, Sinks straddles research-based and intuitive modes of production. Her work generally explores themes of paranoia, obsession, and healing, often referencing utopian philosophies, textile traditions, folklore, political and new religious movements, and the supernatural.

Sinks has exhibited work throughout the United States, Mexico, and Austria. In 2015, her book, Demon Baby Project: Events, Coincidences, and Repercussions was published by No Coast. Sinks is co-founder of Walls Divide Press, an artist-run small press producing zines, artists' books, and multiples.

Please join us tomorrow!

Visiting Artist Lecture: STEPHANIE SYJUCO

Thursday, November 2, at 4:15pm
Sharp 327 // 37 S. Wabash Ave.
FREE and OPEN to the public

"Total Fabrications"

Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; presenting parasitic art counterfeiting events that challenge notions of hierarchy and power; and “Shadowshop,” an alternative vending outlet embedded at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exploring the ways in which artists are navigating the production, consumption, and dissemination of their work. For her talk she will spotlight material-based, socially engaged projects and discuss how the act of fabricating identities, histories, and possibilities influences her work.

Born in the Philippines, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, Germany; The Havana Bienial, The Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan), The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others. A long-time educator, she is an Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley.

*This lecture series is made possible by the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies

We are excited to share this event with you and hope you can join us for Julia Bryan-Wilson's presentation tomorrow, October 31, from noon to 1pm in the Sharp Building, Room 1005.

Julia will be discussing her new book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2017), "the first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale. Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art."

Please see the announcement below for more information!

Please join us tomorrow!

Visiting Artist Lecture: JEFFREY GIBSON

Wednesday, October 11 at 4:15pm
Sharp 1005 // 37 S. Wabash Ave.
FREE and OPEN to the public

Drawing influence from popular music, fashion, literature, cultural and critical theory, and his own individual heritage, Gibson's work recontextualizes the familiar to offer a succinct commentary on cultural hybridity and the assimilation of modernist artistic strategies within contemporary art. Gibson’s Cherokee and Choctaw lineage has imparted a recognizable aesthetic to his beaded works exploring narrative deconstructions of both image and language as transmitted through figuration. Known for his reappropriation of both found and commercial commodities - ranging from song lyrics to the literal objecthood of Everlast punching bags - repurposed again through Minimalist and post-Minimalist aesthetics, speaks to the revisionist history of Modernist forms and techniques. The resulting sculptures and paintings seamlessly coalesce traditional Native American craft with contemporary cultural production and references, forming works that speak to the experience of an individual subjectivity within the larger narrative defining contemporary globalization.

*This lecture series is made possible by the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies

The Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) invites applications for a full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty position beginning August 2018. Rank and salary are competitive with peer institutions, and are commensurate with quality of practice, scholarship, current academic research, extent of teaching experience, and current professional standing. The application deadline is January 8, 2018. Please visit the link below for complete information and application instructions.

Jobs at SAIC: Full-time Faculty Positions - School of the Art Institute of Chicago Internationally esteemed as a school of art and design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) offers a comprehensive college education centered in the visual and related arts.

Congratulations to Kelsey deLisser, winner of Unison's wallpaper design contest and an SAIC student whose focus is in Fiber & Materials Studies. You can read more about Kelsey's studio practice and the inspiration behind the design in an interview below:

Q+A With #ArtInUnison Contest Winner, Kelsey Delisser – Unison | inunison

https://www.facebook.com/tim.doud.982/posts/184533616571917

Instagram post by VisArts At Rockville • May 25, 2017 at 12:31am UTC 17 Likes, 1 Comments - VisArts At Rockville () on Instagram: “9 days left to apply (link in the bio)! Special thanks to .doud & who will jury this…”

Great opportunity to apply for

Craft + Emerging Media Residency - 2018 | Alberta College of Art and Design

Visiting Artist Lecture: CAROLE FRANCES LUNG
Frau Fiber's Mission in America

Wednesday, March 29 at 4:15pm
Sharp 1005 // 37 S. Wabash Ave.
FREE and OPEN to the public

Carole Frances Lung is an artist, activist, and scholar living in Long Beach, CA. Through her alter ego Frau Fiber, Carole utilizes a hybrid of playful activism, cultural criticism, research and spirited crafting of one of a kind garment production performances. She investigates the human cost of mass production and consumption, addressing issues of value and time through the thoroughly hand-made construction and salvaging of garments. She has been awarded: Kohler Arts and Industry Residency, Craft Creativity and Design Center Grant, CSULA creative leave 2014, creative mini grant 2014, 2013, nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany award, At the Edge Gallery 400 award and Fred A. Hillbruner Artist Book Fellowship.

Carole currently maintains the Institute for Labor Generosity Workers and Uniforms, Frau Fiber’s headquarters and experimental factory, in the Art X complex in downtown Long Beach, and is an Assistant Professor Department of Art, Fashion and Textile option at California State University Los Angeles.

*This lecture series is made possible by the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies