Curator

 SUGs Directors

Contributing Artists

 Joseph Cruz, comic collective Xerox Candy Bar, Black at SAIC (BaSAIC), Anthonhy Creeden

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

Re-visioning the Archive is a collaborative Student Union Galleries (SUGs) curated exhibition in conjunction with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’ 150th Anniversary. At the core of SUGs’ mission is the maxim “student run, student work.” In this special exhibition, the gallery shares its archive of twenty years as a opportunity for introspection and exposition – to speculate about what it means to create a legacy of studnet artists exhibited by their peers. Re-visioning the Archive is a self-examination of how the organization has functioned as a conductor for evolving currents within SAIC’s insitutional and cultural memory for over twenty years. This exhibition emerged from an effort to catalogue SUGs’ physical archive: sorting through a material history – from rejection letters and proposals to catering receipts and exhibition ephemera. From there, the curatorial conceit grew into a collaborative project that invited groups from across the community – including writing community The Dining Room, comic collective Xerox Candy Bar, Black at SAIC (BaSAIC), and SAIC alumni Joseph Cruz (BFA 2011) and Anthony Creeden (BFA 2011) – to respond to the archive as source material and subject. The invitation to make new work is intended to highlight two central tenets of the gallery – building relationships between organizations throughout the institution and strengthening our role as a teaching gallery within and beyond SAIC. Collaborators were asked to respond to what most interested them in the archive, and the hope was that, rather than as a prescriptive exercise, the artists would use our invitation to immerse themselves in conversations around the history that the community is celebrating this academic year. Each collaborator chose different methodologies and parts of the archive to engage with. The Dining Room appropriates past exhibitions’ archives text: first by re-contextualizing and giving new meaning to borrowed language by manipulating archived title vinyl; second, with a durational work that invites audience members to activate text pulled from a variety of archival documents. Similarly, Xerox Candy Bar isolates and expands the secret lives of two characters from past exhibitions. Drawn from separate exhibition postcards, the parallel narratives converging on the wall serve to highlight the latent potential of archival ephemera and comic’s ability to relate these stories. BaSAIC responds to some of SUGs’ earliest exhibitions and the work of this year’s Diversity Summit keynote speaker Henry Louis Gates. Representatives of the group have constructed a tapestry reminiscent of genomic mapping that speaks to the ephemera of contemporary black culture. The work will remain on view past the end of the exhibition and coincide with the Summit. SAIC alumni and former SUGs directors, Cruz and Creeden, then bring the archive full circle as they excavate 22 years of the material history of SUGs’ Gallery X. Core samples taken from the gallery walls track an almost geological development through layers of paint. Along with a video work that abstracts the peeling await of each layer, they serve to make visible the student labour behind SUGs’ exhibitions. This core sample will act as a time capsule and take on a new iteration as a year-long installation in the LeRoy Neiman Center’s lobby. The work of Re-visioning the Archive became less a question of what SUGs has been and more an affirmation of archival practices and their potential. By actively engaging in a network of micro and macro institutional histories, we leave ourselves better prepared to evolve, adapt, and continue honoring our commitment to student artist and their work.