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SAIC CLASS OF 2020 GRADUATE WEBSITE
The Future of Our Plans: SAIC Graduate Class of 2020
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The Future of Our Plans: SAIC Graduate Class of 2020

Eyes On Archive

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Each day throughout August 2020, an invited arts professional selected three graduates to highlight. Browse the archive of viewing recommendations here.

 

Eyes On 8.28.20

Teresa Silva
Executive and Artistic Director
Chicago Artists Coalition
Chicago, IL, USA

Lately, I’ve been spending more time looking at art on screens, be it moving images for the screen or images of art for posterity. I would imagine the works by Chenyu Lin, Zheng Ang, and Gloria Fan Duan are made especially with the screen in mind, a window to distinct sensory experiences. They are either amusing ways of making and showing art, or inducing anxiety in a riotous space, or being a self-enclosed aesthetic system.

Chenyu Lin (阿蔺)
Zheng Ang
Gloria Fan Duan

Eyes On 8.27.20

Jared Packard
Exhibitions Manager
Bemis Center for Contemporary Art
Omaha, NE

These artists bring fantasy and opulence. Through adornment and felt handling of material, they reimagine how we relate to both our bodies and the bodies around us. In a six-feet-apart moment, their tender decadence offers sensuality, intimacy and escape.

Nicole Doran
Bun Stout
Alisa Maiboroda

Eyes On 8.26.20

Steven L. Bridges
Associate Curator
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI
Dabin Ahn
Dominique Knowles
Jacobo Zambrano-Rangel

Eyes On 8.25.20

Amanda Coulson
Executive Director
National Art Gallery of The Bahamas
Nassau, New Providence

Living in a low-lying, island nation on the front line of climate change, I am drawn to works that mine the relationship of man to the earth, of how we represent it, how we manipulate it, how we live in it. The observation of nature and landscape has a long history as a genre, but seems even more relevant today and these three artists approach it with curiosity, and ingenuity. Honourable mention to Leasho Johnson.

Gloria Fan Duan
Wei Zhao
SOH Meejung

Eyes On 8.24.20

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (MFA 1997)
Independent Artist

San Juan, Puerto Rico

These works jumped out at me for their joy, for the obvious pleasure that the maker takes in the process of making with other persons and other things of the world, for the idea of playful composition and experimentation embodied in them, for the presence of material-based thinking, for the risks and the vulnerability implied, for the ways in which bodies meet the world. In each case there seem to be profound questions being asked about what the limits of the work are and what sorts of categories and ways of looking and being in the world can be transformed through the work of art.

Ricardo Partida
Divyamaan Sahoo
Yvonne Martinez

Eyes On 8.21.20

Darryl DeAngelo Terrell
Artist, Curator, Educator

Detroit, MI
Billie Carter-Rankin
Stephanie Schwiederek
Chelsea Emuakhagbon

Eyes On 8.20.20

Sarah Khalid Dhobhany
Community Director
Mana Contemporary
Chicago, Illinois

Lately I’ve been into the aesthetics of nature in art and reassigning meaning to natural objects. I was very drawn to works by these three artists for this very reason—I found that they all used nature to bring to light a memory, or to change the way we perceive something.

Amira Hegazy
Dominique Knowles
Jenny Rafalson

Eyes On 8.19.20

Sarah Urist Green
Creator of The Art Assignment, Author of You Are an Artist

Indianapolis, IN

Each of these artists—Cassidy Early, Dominique Knowles, and Yvonne Martinez—exhibit strong and clearly articulated visions. With each, I feel like I’m seeing work I haven’t seen before, confident voices I’m enjoying experiencing now, virtually, and will look forward to tracking into the future, hopefully in real space.

Cassidy Early
Yvonne Martinez
Dominique Knowles

Eyes On 8.18.20

Shelley Selim
Curator of Design and Decorative Arts and Interim Director of Curatorial Affairs
Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields
Indianapolis, IN

All three of these graduates present visually striking works that reward viewers upon deeper inquiry. Surana’s ‘Sensing Food’ collection is rooted in the orthodoxy of design but embraces sensation, nostalgia, and sentimentality. Villaseñor-Marchal’s fiber works integrate deeply personal narratives and techniques with fantastical, enigmatic forms. Johnson addresses identity and representation in bold, dynamic paintings that are probing, contemplative, and absolutely electrifying.

Saiyyamee Surana
María Antonia Villaseñor-Marchal
Leasho Johnson

Eyes On 8.17.20

January Parkos Arnall
Interim Senior Curator, Performance and Public Practice
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Chicago, IL

These artists move beyond “selfie,” toward personal reflection as proposition. Self as homing device in an uncertain time (even before “these uncertain times”). Narrative and individual vantage operate as centering propositions, not end points. Self as pivot to recognize other and premise to observe, and to contaminate seemingly firm delineations of other.

Subjectivity here is a road toward connection. Self reflection not as narcissus enraptured, but reflection as map-making, one data point toward plurality.

Luan Joy Sherman
Sahand Heshmati Afshar
Leo Vicenti

Eyes On 8.15.20

Ciera McKissick
Independent Curator, Writer, Founder of AMFM, Public Programs Coordinator at Hyde Park Art Center and Communications Associate at Ox-Bow School of Art
Hyde Park Art Center / Ox-Bow School of Art
Chicago, IL

I was really drawn to these works because of the manipulation and distorting of the image, which is displayed differently across these three artists work and the material/medium they work with. I love the photo realism of Weiner’s work replicated on fiber, but especially love the unraveled and unfinished look of the bottom, and dismemberment of the figures. Similarly, I am drawn to the ambiguity of the figures presented in Johnson’s work, the black body, and the combination of different colors, textures and configurations that make up the whole. I am particularly interested in Carter-Rankin’s work and the process of deterioration, and the ties to archival footage and memory, along with the scale and presentation.

Leasho Johnson
Billie Carter-Rankin
Mia Weiner

Eyes On 8.14.20

Tanner Woodford
Founder + Executive Director
Design Museum of Chicago
Chicago, IL

Congratulations to all of the artists, designers, and scholars from the SAIC Graduate Class of 2020! What a significant moment for you, and candidly, the world. While reviewing all the impressive work in this virtual showcase, three examples strike me as particularly relevant, thoughtful, and intellectually stimulating. They share a common thread. Perhaps in a virtual world I am drawn to the tactile? Thank you all for sharing your talents.

Alisa Maiboroda
Ashlee Gines
Qianwen Yu

Eyes On 8.13.20

Elizabeth Chodos
Director
Miller Institute of Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA
Chengan Xia
Melody Takata
Théo Bignon

Eyes On 8.12.20

Tumelo Mosaka
Curator

New York City, NY, US

I was drawn to these 3 artists primarily because of their process and adaptation of materials. Their choice of everyday materials and use of language is transformed poetically into image that evokes new understanding of our everyday surroundings.

Cate Solari
Ryo Tomoda
Cortney Stephenson

Eyes On 8.11.20

Alissia Melka-Teichroew


Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In addition to the three artists selected here, Sam Link and Tim Karoleff are collaborators, so please check out both their pages. And honorable mention also goes to John Anderson.

Tim Karoleff
Kate Smith
Jennifer Traina-Dorge

Eyes On 8.10.20

Vincent Uribe
Art Director
LVL3 / Arts of Life
Chicago, IL

I was drawn to Dabin, Théo, and Ricardo’s work for both the formality and playfulness immediately present when viewing their portfolios. These practices are indicative of the skills, subjects, and quality of vision I gravitate towards in my own collecting and exhibiting practice.

Ricardo Partida
Théo Bignon
Dabin Ahn

Eyes On 8.8.20

Yolanda Cesta Cursach Montilla
Artistic Director
High Concept Labs
Chicago

It seems to me that the problem of covid is the ability of verification. Another problem is its hierarchy. I was searching, when studying these graduates’ works, for a sign of a particular critical knowledge of society as part of normal life. because in performance of life, after corona (pac), the question of art is how to create a new practice, for equality to be perceptible any more. to me this is what this group presents.

Lingyu Zeng
Sahand Heshmati Afshar
Priya Assal

Eyes On 8.7.20

Glenn Adamson
Independent writer

New York State

As a specialist in craft, I am naturally drawn to works involving deep materials-based consideration. At the moment though, I am also fascinated by how artists react when ‘all falls apart.’ The three artists I chose – of the many that impressed me, not least Saffronia’s colleagues in the Ceramics Department – all look underfoot for inspiration, showing how the chaotic fragments of our moment can be assembled into a new, individualistic order.

Ryo Tomoda
Judith Schubert Mullen
E. Saffronia Downing

Eyes On 8.6.20

Danny Giles
Artist, writer, educator
Course Director Piet Zwart Institute Master of Fine Arts
Rotterdam, Netherlands

These artists each lend their own personal experiences to make striking, insightful, and subtly destabilizing works. In their practices, identity is a complex condition of feeling and being in relation to the other that can reorient our assumptions of what the self is, how it finds its social moorings and how its narratives can become splintered and reorganized. These artists question how we come to know ourselves through ongoing negotiations of culture, geography, and society.

Leasho Johnson
Sofia Brockenshire
Luan Joy Sherman

Eyes On 8.5.20

william cordova (BFA 1996)
Cultural Practitioner
Yale University, Greenwood Art Project,
Bridge Red Studios, MDC Museum of Art + Design
Miami, FL / New York, NY / Lima, Peru

“those who ain’t got it can’t show it, those who got it can’t hide it” -Zora Neale Hurston

Qianwen Yu, Luis Lopez, Will North, all share an interest in using algorithms to give form to existentialist phenomenons. They pursue and scrutinize the elements of a geometric existence without pause. Thus constructing infinite plurality.

Qianwen Yu
Luis López
Will North




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