Low-Residency MFA Exhibition
JULY 9 – 31, 2022
SAIC GALLERIES
33 E. WASHINGTON ST.
JULY 9 – 31, 2022
SAIC GALLERIES
33 E. WASHINGTON ST.
Low-Residency MFA Exhibition is the culminating presentation of 20 Low-Residency MFA candidates in SAIC’s class of 2022, and an opportunity for them to present new and ambitious work to the public in the SAIC Galleries.
See Gallery Guide and Floor Plans
Visiting SAIC Galleries
SAIC Galleries welcomes the SAIC community and members of the public to visit the galleries in person. Appointments are required due to the volume of participants in this exhibition. To reserve your spot, please click here. Admission is free.
*All visitors to SAIC Galleries must show a state-issued picture ID and proof of COVID-19 booster vaccination OR proof of a negative COVID-19 test from past 72 hours upon entry and remain masked while in the building.
SAIC Galleries
33 E. Washington St.
Gallery Hours: Monday-Saturday, 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Monday July 25th 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Schedule to be announced
I am thrilled to welcome you to the 2022 graduate exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Here you’ll find a culmination of long hours in the studio, deep engagement with materials and texts, and intense discussion with colleagues and faculty. I am so proud of our grads for the ways in which they have navigated the difficult time in our world, dedicating themselves to their work and each other. They have worked through tremendous challenges, when art is both under-resourced and sorely needed. More than ever, we need artists and thought leaders if we are to survive and thrive, as a collective. Our grads have honed technical skills and made formal breakthroughs in and out of their studios, and redefined the relationship between thought, society, and the material world. With the artwork here, our graduates ask the community to join them to imagine new worlds, sustain empathy, and be playful and resourceful. I congratulate this cohort on their resilience and am eager to hear where they go next.
Delinda Collier, Interim Dean of Graduate Studies
The last few years have demanded that we all find other ways of continuing to live. We continue to face crises that challenge the conventions of how we thought the future-world would be. Artists have often been tasked with “making do” with whatever is at hand. Whether it be raw material, social concerns, or experimentation, artists find the ways to do. The challenges of the past few years have tacitly limited the ability for artists to easily enter studios, source material, or circulate their work. Yet, we find that artists manage to find a way.
This class of Low-Residency MFA graduates are on course in defining and designing their paths as contemporary artists. We are in the company of artists that go beyond the representational and into newly imagined re-articulations of the world. In this exhibition, we find artists that challenge language, invert social conventions, magnify political embodiments, paint the digital internetscape, conjure new sounds–these artists also aim to find us, as individuals or as a collective public. Their individual practices are strategies, blueprints of how we as a public might also imagine a way through the futures we all face.
In this exhibition, I encourage you to observe how artists move: they create objects, reorient questions, they urgently alert us to the conditions in the worlds around us. This culminating exhibition is also a meeting point for these artists that join us from around the world. The Low-Residency MFA program is rich with artists from different locations across the globe, precisely to momentarily create a unique ecology of ideas. This exhibition is an opportunity for us to experience a vision of futures yet to be.
J. Gibran Villalobos, Assistant Curator, MCA Chicago & Faculty, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Arts Administration & Policy