36 South Wabash Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603
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The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) presents a new season of the Visiting Artists Program—a public forum that features today’s most influential practitioners and thinkers.
Formalized in 1951 with the establishment of an endowed fund by Flora Mayer Witkowsky, the Visiting Artists Program has featured over 1,000 international artists, designers, and scholars representing more than 70 countries through a diverse mix of lectures, conversations, and readings. All events are free, virtual, open to the public, and feature an audience Q&A. Registration is not required. Click each event for information on how to tune in. Learn more.
william cordova: Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series
September 14, 6:30-7:45pm CT
william cordova (BFA 1996) was born in Lima, Peru, and is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner. His work addresses the metaphysics of space and time and how objects and perception change when we move around in space. His practice has been motivated by a creative engagement with architecture, geometry, and history, and he is interested in the roots of abstraction, the history of textile encoding, and non-linear narratives. Presented in partnership with SAIC Alumni Relations.
Katie Paterson
September 28, 12:00-1:30pm CT
Katie Paterson is known for her multidisciplinary and conceptually driven work with an emphasis on nature, ecology, geology, and cosmology. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic, and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment.
Amitav Ghosh
October 5, 6:30–7:45pm CT
Amitav Ghosh is the author of The Circle of Reason; The Calcutta Chromosome; The Glass Palace; The Hungry Tide; The Ibis Trilogy; The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; Gun Island; and Jungle Nama, among others. Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than 30 languages, and he holds two lifetime achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. He is the recipient of the 2018 Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honor, and in 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.
Shirin Neshat: Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor
October 12, 6:30–7:45pm CT
Shirin Neshat employs photography, video installation, cinema, and performance to explore political structures that have shaped the history of Iran and other Middle Eastern nations. Neshat uses poetic imagery to engage with themes of gender and society, the individual and the collective, and the dialectical relationship between past and present through the lens of her experiences of belonging and exile. Established in 2006 by a generous gift from Bill and Stephanie Sick, this distinguished visiting professorship enables internationally renowned artists and designers to visit and teach at SAIC.
Hito Steyerl
October 19, 12:00–1:30pm CT
Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker, visual artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her prolific filmmaking and writing occupy a highly discursive position between the fields of art, philosophy, and politics, constituting a deep exploration of late capitalism’s social, cultural, and financial imaginaries. Resulting from a personal lens of documentary film, her work has developed in the form of immersive videos and multimedia installations combined with a spirit of research and experimentation.
Mark Bradford and Julie Mehretu in conversation
November 2, 6:30–7:45pm CT
Mark Bradford and Julie Mehretu are internationally acclaimed artists who explore the natural and built environment, imagined spaces, and urban geography. Their artwork reveals the complex and overlapping systems that shape public spaces and the ways in which race and class impact the layout of our cities. Bradford and Mehretu are amongst the 29 MacArthur Fellows included in the multivenue exhibition Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, which uses the idea of “the commons” to explore the current sociopolitical moment.
This conversation will be moderated by Romi Crawford, PhD, chair and professor in the Visual and Critical Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This program is presented in conjunction with the multivenue exhibition Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40.
For all events, persons with disabilities requesting accommodations should visit saic.edu/access.
About the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
For more than 150 years, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has been a leader in educating the world’s most influential artists, designers and scholars. Located in downtown Chicago with a fine arts graduate program consistently ranking among the top programs in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, SAIC provides an interdisciplinary approach to art and design as well as world-class resources, including the Art Institute of Chicago museum, on-campus galleries and state-of-the-art facilities. SAIC’s undergraduate, graduate and post-baccalaureate students have the freedom to take risks and create the bold ideas that transform Chicago and the world—as seen through notable alumni and faculty such as Michelle Grabner, David Sedaris, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Hunt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Cynthia Rowley, Nick Cave, Jeff Koons, and LeRoy Neiman.
