Oli Watt

Associate Professor, Printmedia


Oli Watt has been teaching at SAIC since 2003. He took his sabbatical during the 2021 Academic Year.

Oli Watt is a Chicago-based artist, educator, and curator who emphasizes pivotal humorous moments as seen in cartoons, novels, films, music, and personal history narratives. He has been producing and exhibiting prints, sculptures, installations, and neon works since 1999, all of which use what can only be described as “dad humor” to shift perceptions of pop culture. Watt’s recent fabrication of numerous duck decoys served as an exercise towards the understanding, utilizing, and undermining of repetition as a process and a tool.

Watt has exhibited his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI; La Band Art Gallery, Los Angeles; and the Rocket Gallery, London. His work has been discussed in numerous publications including Art on Paper, Art US, the New Art Examiner and Village Voice. He is a recipient of the Maxine and Stuart Applebaum Award of Excellence and the Tweed Museum of Art Purchase Award. Watt runs the free range gallery and project space in the Albany Park neighborhood.

Education

1998 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
1991 BFA, University of Florida, Gainesville

Notable Classes Taught:

Funny Prints and Multiples
Relief Print Folios