As a School of the Art Institute of Chicago alum, you know the value of an education that encourages you to network and collaborate across disciplines. We recently reached out to a few SAIC alumni and asked that they share their current work, SAIC journey, and ways they network and collaborate in their practice.

Check out your peers' great accomplishments below! Be sure to share your accomplishments via our news and announcements or events and exhibitions online forms.

Cortney Lederer, Director of Exhibitions and Community Initiatives at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, stresses the importance of creative community as the catalyst to build new networks, opportunities, collaborations and resources when she talks with fellow the SAIC alumni and the artists she works with. "Continue to network because maintaining a creative community will always play a critical role in your professional career,” she advises.

Read her interview

Listen to her video interview

Identifying and building relationships has helped alumnus and Golden Gallery Co-director Andrew Blackley (BFA 2007, MFA 2010) build an interdisciplinary art practice that includes collaborative and independent work as a gallerist, artist, writer, and curator living in New York and maintaining ties in Chicago.

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Alumna Katie Kurcz (MAAAP 2009) is helping to enrich the cultural landscape by strengthening nonprofit arts organizations in her role as Director of Programs at the Arts and Business Council of Chicago. She pairs nonprofit clients with volunteer business experts to help them "build a business organization to match the high quality of the art product.”

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Stephen Fiehn (BFA 2000) and Tyler B. Myers (BFA 2001) began working together as students at SAIC in 2000 and together moved to New York and built an international reputation as Cupola Bobber. The pair creates evening-length performance work, published writing, installations, and videos using a process inspired by the Chicago-based performance group Goat Island.

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Listen to their video interview

"This is mind-boggling!” began the email from SAIC President Walter Massey containing a message he had received from his long-time friend, colleague, and classmate at Morehouse College in the 1950s, Richard O. Hope, Vice President of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation at Princeton University. Hope had recently learned that Massey, President Emeritus of Morehouse College, is now SAIC’s President. Hope was struck by this extension of a surprising string of connections between the art and design school in downtown Chicago and the all-male, historically black college in Atlanta, founded just a year apart. Richard Hope’s grandfather, the prominent educator and political activist John Hope, was the first African American president of Morehouse College from 1906 until his death in 1936. But it is with Richard Hope’s grandmother, Lugenia Burns Hope, that the connections get interesting.

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Mathias "Spider" Schergen (BFAAE 1980) has become a fixture in the Cabrini Green community after spending 20 years teaching children art at Chicago Public Schools' Jenner Fine Arts Academy in the neighborhood. Early in his career Schergen created the name Spider (Mr. Spider to his students) in an inspired—and successful—attempt to connect with his students.

"I really feel it's important that a child be grounded in their experience of making art," Schergen says. "Children love learning how to do stuff. It's just a natural part of their empowerment as a child."

Read more about Schergen's inspirational work and watch a video of our interview with him.

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Direct community engagement is what attracted Lisa Junkin (MAAE 2007) to her current position as the first full-time Education Coordinator at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. This role is ripe with opportunities to collect personal stories, rich residential memories, and community input. Junkin's work each day is enriched by institutional encouragement to rethink how museums can serve nontraditional publics.

Read more about Junkin's work with Hull-House and watch a video of our interview with her.

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Emily Pilloton (MFA 2005) exemplifies the possibilities of forging a career path that fulfills personal passions while empowering others to reach their own self-directed potential.

Pilloton is the founder and director of Project H Design (design initiatives for Humanity, Habitats, Health, and Happiness), a nonprofit design and architecture agency she created in 2008. She operates her organization around the central idea that design can activate both education and community and capitalizes on the motivated energy of residents in the communities she engages.

Read more about Pilloton's Project H work and watch a video of our interview with her.

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Alumna Carol Abraczinskas (BFA 1989) practices a precise art. As the Principal Scientific Illustrator for the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, she draws fossil illustrations for use in research and publications and teaches a graduate-level scientific illustration course. Her crossover from fine art to science began during her time at SAIC when a figure drawing instructor suggested she take a scientific illustration class with professor Zbigniew T. Jastrzebski who helped define her style and technique. During her 22-year career, she has drawn thousands of fossils ranging from tiny, two-centimeter skulls to the bones of a 40-foot crocodile.

Read more about Abraczinskas's work and watch a video of our interview with her.

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Margaret Noble (MFA 2007) won a Microsoft Global Forum Educator Award for challenging students at High Tech High Media Arts School in San Diego to use the lens of creativity and the arts to discover the mathematical concepts hidden in their world. Drawing on her experience of transforming her house DJ practice into a multimedia arts practice as an MFA student in SAIC's Department of Sound, Noble required her students to submit an idea and refine it through the process of critique and revision. The project culminated in an exhibition at the Sushi Performance and Visual Art Center and took first place for knowledge building and critical thinking in Microsoft's award program.

Read more about Margaret Noble, her award-winning project, and her upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego here.

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Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) was alive in December with the sounds of site-specific compositions flowing through gracefully fluted amplifiers made by SAIC alumnus Ian Schneller (MFA 1986) at his Specimen Products Workshop in Chicago. First shown at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2010, Sonic Arboretum included two sold-out performances by Andrew Bird in addition to the exhibition, which ran from December 6–31 at the MCA. Schneller has carved out a remarkable career making instruments and amplifiers first for himself and then for friends and other musicians.

Read more about the show and a recent discussion with Schneller on his work, his collaboration with Andrew Bird, and how he marries utility with art in his work as a successful luthier, sculptor, and craftsman and watch a video of our interview at his workshop.

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Cesáreo Moreno (MFA 1992) is not your typical museum administrator. After 20 years of working at the National Museum of Mexican Art, he is currently the museum's Chief Curator and Visual Arts Director. But unlike some of his peers, he earned an MFA through the Painting and Drawing department at SAIC. This has helped shape his perspective as a curator. "Having conversations inside the studio oftentimes leads me to change the theme of the exhibit or to re-emphasize the thesis of an exhibition. I listen quite a bit to the artist more than the scholar," he said in a recent interview. In his curatorial work he challenges preconceptions of and about the Mexican community and strives to reach people of all backgrounds.

Read our Q&A with Moreno and find out what's next for the museum as it prepares for its 25th anniversary celebration.

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Stephanie J. Victa (MFA 2010) won a 2011–12 Fulbright award for a two-part project in the Philippines in which she first documented the transition of the native nipa hut to the modern concrete house and is now building a home for a family in need.

Victa is one of four recent SAIC alumni to win a Fulbright scholarship this year, the largest number of Fulbright recipients from a single US college of art and design. Other winners include: Alexandra Dietz (BFA 2010) for a photography project in India, Liliya Lifanova (MFA 2010) for a performance piece in Russia, and Ania Szremski (MA 2011) for art historical research in Egypt.

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SAIC alumna Sara Drake (BFA 2011) began a two-month trip to Cambodia in November to participate in the Independent Youth-Driven Cultural Production in Cambodia Project (IYDCPC) with SAIC faculty member Anne Elizabeth Moore (Visual and Critical Studies). After Moore and Drake collaborated on the column Ladydrawers about gender and comics on Truth-out.org, Moore invited Drake to join her IYDCPC project. The project, supported in part by Arts Network Asia, is meant to support a women's comics community in a place that the medium is limited.

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SAIC alumna Meg Caswell (BFA 2002) won HGTV's top-rated reality program Design Star and will now have a lifestyle program of her own. Design Star features 12 finalists designing rooms judged by a panel of acclaimed interior designers and special celebrity guests. See photos of Caswell's road to victory. She will be hosting a program called Great Rooms in which she will transform outdated kitchen, dining, and living spaces.

In her forthcoming book, Live Form: Craft as Participation, art historian and SAIC alumna Jenni Sorkin discusses the confluence of gender, pedagogy, and labor histories around women in the 1950s. She pays particular attention to a group of proto-feminist women potters from Black Mountain College, focusing on the external factors and art world exclusions that pushed female artists into the world of craft. As a preview to her Distinguished Alumni Lecture on November 2, SAIC caught up with Sorkin to talk about why these women were "hippie before the word hippie happened" and how art historians are not all that different from artists.

Read her interview

ERIC DEAN SPRUTH (BFA 1990, MA 1992)
Ink Therapy
Alumnus Eric Dean Spruth (BFA 1990, MA 1992) helps turn negative tattoos and scars into symbols of strength and potential

SAIC alumnus Eric Dean Spruth (BFA 1990, MA 1992), founder of Sacred Transformations, a Chicago-based not-for-profit organization that helps people transform tattoos or scars from negative experiences into marks of positive artistic expression. Sacred Transformations provides free services to people seeking recovery from various experiences—gang affiliations, abusive relationships, violence—by transforming physical marks into personal, positive images.

"Visibly we help to alter the physical marks. But the mental and spiritual scars that are reworked through the process are the truly rewarding transformations."

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As an undergraduate student at SAIC, Tristan Hummel (BFA 2009) read an article about how anyone can charter a CTA "L" train, and an idea took root. Hummel debuted Art on Track during his junior year, turning a chartered "L" train into an alternative art venue and bringing the work of more than 200 emerging artists to the Chicago Loop for one day in the fall.

This past summer, Hummel took his next big art initiative to the streets—or more specifically to a bunch of shipping containers in a Wicker Park grocery store parking lot. Dubbed the Built Festival and happening over a weekend in mid August, the temporary city looked more like a place for burly stevedores or smuggled contraband than the city's newest gallery district.

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In the spring of 2010, armed with a set of clues and a museum map, 35 SAIC students combed the collections of the Art Institute searching for works by SAIC alumni. The visual scavenger hunt, titled "Looking for Ourselves," brought students face-to-face with their SAIC forerunners, and as they zigzagged through the museum they encountered a myriad of works by alumni, from Georgia O'Keeffe's Sky Above Clouds IV to John Chamberlain's Toy. What they realized was that, at one point, these accomplished artists were just like them—working in the same studios, taking the same shortcuts to class, maybe even learning from the same professors. SAIC alumna Cheri Fakes (MA Art Education 2011) was one of the brains behind the treasure hunt.

Read her story and get your alumni treasure hunt.