Throughout the community-based course located at Homan Square, students will learn how nature inspires and reacts to design, while developing design proposals for horticultural grow-light pavilions. The workshop intends to be a platform introducing students to interdisciplinary design approaches including site-specific research, development, construction and more. This course envisions how design can transform and activate sites into fertile ground for creativity, innovation, and social interaction.

The Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago are the most visited gallery in its history. The fiction writer Marianne Malone has written a wildly successful series entitled Sixty Eight Rooms, that creates a narrative of a patron that shrinks and inhabits the Thorne Miniatures. Critical Miniatures and New Dimensions of Interiority will use the Thorne Rooms as a foil and subject of a 2016 exhibition/installation at the AIC’s Interactive Gallery in the Ryan Education Center. Through a careful examination of miniatures, theories of representation/simulation, digital experiences via VR media and full-scale digital fabrication, this course will provide partial content, design and programming that will be used in Critical Miniatures.

Those who create arts businesses, operate arts organizations and participate in the work of arts institutions shape how a significant part of culture is produced. By articulating and enacting plans, missions, programs and policies, professional and volunteer cultural workers advance rationales that materialize as specific opportunities, support, production, presentation and dialogue. These activities are driven by multiple interests, embedded in popular, economic and academic discourses, enacted variously at local, national and global scale. Drawing on contemporary examples and including experience contributed by seminar participants and visiting lecturers, this intensive course, geared towards artists and administrators, will lay out a foundation on which to assess the many positions currently active in cultural networks.

This team-taught class is an intensive, three-week immersion in drawing. Students investigate drawing as a technique and consider it in terms of a language that is used to structure ideas. The faculty consists of two SAIC faculty members and a visiting-artist-in-residence, working in a studio alongside students. Students work with faculty one-on-one, participate in group critiques, and attend lectures prepared by the faculty members.

Individual studios are provided to each student enrolled in this course.

This is a team-taught, three-week intensive Summer studio class for students who want to investigate painting issues and explore formal and conceptual interests in detail. The faculty consists of two SAIC faculty members and one visiting-artist-in-residence, working in a studio alongside students. The faculty and visiting-artist-in-residence meet with the students individually and conduct rigorous group critiques. Activities include: visiting artists' studios, galleries and museum collections.

Individual studios are provided to each student enrolled in this course.

This is a team-taught, three-week intensive Summer studio class for students who want to investigate painting issues and explore formal and conceptual interests in detail. The faculty consists of two SAIC faculty members and one visiting-artist-in-residence, working in a studio alongside students. The faculty and visiting-artist-in-residence meet with the students individually and conduct rigorous group critiques. Activities include: visiting artists' studios, galleries and museum collections.

Individual studios are provided to each student enrolled in this course.

This class looks forward by looking backward, researching, enacting, and embodying practices that for one reason or another have been disregarded in the wake of progress, and relegated to the archives of history. Students will participate in individual and collaborative projects involving writing, installation, documentation, and live performance. Teachers and visiting scholars will lecture on related subjects.

Available for credit or non-credit enrollment.