Virtual visiting artists lectures

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.

Cameron Rowland in Conversation with Richard Birkett
February 9, 6–7:15pm CT
Cameron Rowland creates work that centers on the material operations of racial capitalism that order everyday life. Rowland’s work relies on a materialist approach to the conditions of production that structure both institutions of subjection as well as their refusal. The work is grounded in a critique of property and the capacity for art to function as a medium of this critique. Rowland will be in conversation with curator and writer Richard Birkett. Presented in partnership with the Society for Contemporary Art.

Trenton Doyle Hancock
February 22, 6:30–7:45pm CT
For almost two decades, Trenton Doyle Hancock has been constructing his own fantastical narrative that continues to develop and inform his prolific artistic output. Part fictional, part autobiographical, Hancock’s work pulls from his personal experience, the art historical canon, comics and superheroes, pulp fiction, and myriad pop culture references, resulting in a complex amalgamation of characters and plots that possess universal concepts of light and dark, good and evil, and all the gray in between. Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Department of Painting and Drawing.

Bani Abidi: Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series
March 1, 12–1:15pm CT
Bani Abidi (MFA 1999) has been working with the moving image for the past two decades. She has consistently blurred the edges between fiction and fact while gleaning from the dark absurdities of everyday life. Her staged scenes and anonymous characters struggle with enacting small gestures of resistance within broader dynamics of state power and nationalism. Abidi, who also draws and photographs, uses humor in all its gravity and firmly believes in the agency of laughter. Presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and SAIC Alumni Engagement.

Barak adé Soleil
March 31, 12–1:15pm CT
For over three decades, Barak adé Soleil (he + they pronouns) has contributed to the contemporary arts scene across North and South America, Europe, and West Africa. An award-winning artist, curator, and facilitator, adé Soleil bridges the lived experience of being Black, queer, and multiply disabled with traditions from the African diaspora, access aesthetics, and postmodernism to create multilayered live art works and cultivate stimulating global conversations. Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Wellness Center and Department of Performance. 

Ikko Yokoyama
April 5, 7:30–8:45pm CT
Ikko Yokoyama is lead curator of design and architecture at M+, Hong Kong’s new museum for visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Before joining M+, she was based in Stockholm and served as head of exhibitions at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Yokoyama serves as an executive committee member of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums and an advisory panel of the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textiles in Hong Kong. Presented in partnership with the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lecture Series in SAIC’s Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects.

Fred Moten
April 12, 6:30–7:45pm CT
Fred Moten is a cultural theorist and poet interested in social movement, aesthetic experiment, and Black study. He has written a number of books of poetry and criticism, the latest of which, co-authored by Stefano Harney, is All Incomplete (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2021). Moten is engaged in ongoing collaborations with critic Laura Harris, theorist Stefano Harney, and artist Wu Tsang. Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Low-Residency MFA Program. 

All events will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation services. For additional access requests, visit here.

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.