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

SAIC's 2013 MFA Show (April 13–May 17) is one of the country’s largest graduate thesis exhibitions with more than 100 participating students, 12 graduate curatorial fellows, and 3 guest curators. The show is both a culmination of graduate work and a must-see presentation of contemporary art and the next generation of artists and designers.

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Jacob Hashimoto (BFA 1996) works at the intersection of painting and sculpture, abstraction and landscape. On March 19, he was the Distinguished Alumni Lecturer for SAIC's Visiting Artists Program.

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On March 1, the Spring 2013 Undergraduate Exhibition opened at the Sullivan Galleries and more than 250 SAIC students exhibited their innovative work. The line for the opening reception stretched for three blocks down State and Monroe Streets as people waited to catch a glimpse of SAIC's boundary-blurring BFA work.

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SAIC alumni Liz Patelski (BFA 2011) and Lisa Panza (BFA 2011) presented their collections at SAIC's 2011 fashion show in Millennium Park, Then they teamed up to start their own line, Remi Canarie. Now they have their own online store, and unveiled their first official collection in February 2013.

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Samantha Hill (MFA 2010) uses oral, illustrative, and sculptural practices to chronicle under-represented voices in African American history. Known for her multimedia installations and performances within historic buildings, landmarks, and public locations, the artist is seeking to connect personal story through history, with a specific concentration on the Great Migration. She takes into account the role of the African griot or jeli (historic storyteller) while integrating various cultural accents—laundry, film, and other tactile experiences—to create the American experience.

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Sara Drake (BFA 2011) loves comics. She reads them and makes her own, and she wants more women to read and make comics too. So she started in a place where women have limited access to creative expression—Cambodia.

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If you want to see just how diverse SAIC is, look no further than our campus groups. These small communities of student involvement enhance the SAIC experience and deepen our understanding and knowledge of global cultures.

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Yarima Ariza (BFA 1997) and Hugo Michel Hernandez (BFA 1997) met while preparing for their thesis shows at SAIC. They married the following day, and over the next 16 years their love has remained constant as their geography has changed.

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It has been said that everything has been done before. SAIC professor and alumnus Eduardo Kac (MFA 1990) disagrees. He has spent the past 30 years breaking new ground as an artist working mainly with the tools of technology and science to develop radical, new work in the area of art and technology studies.

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Nadav Assor (MFA 2010) taps into visual storytelling through his art practice, which explores the visual and digital transmission of experience through digital media, installation, and performance. With his work, Assor not only investigates an individual’s subjective experience, but also how that translates into a broader context through technology’s ability to mediate between geography, body, and the human story.

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With the steady hand of a chemist, SAIC alumna Vesna Jovanovic (BFA 2003) pours ink onto paper, creating colorful blotches on which she draws the forms that reveal themselves to her. The east wall of her sunlit studio in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood is lined with rows of these inkblots in various stages of production. The drawings are part of a series called Pareidolia, a word that means the phenomenon of seeing an image or pattern where none exists.

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A supernova is the astronomical term for an exploding star. The phenomenon occurs when the core of the star collapses, creating a burst of radiation that outshines an entire galaxy and emits more energy than the sun. On a clear, bright day outside of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, there are no supernovae in sight—but Shane Mecklenburger (MFA 2009) is hoping there will be soon.

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Chris Csikszentmihályi is a leading scholar, artist, and designer in the area of information, politics, and communities. He cofounded the new Media Design Matters program at Art Center College of Design and the MIT Center for Future Civic Media (C4). He returned to SAIC in August to address new students and talked about what makes an art education unique.

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Barbara Koenen (Post-Bacc 1986, MFA 1989) often introduces herself as "an artist and a bureaucrat.” But a more apt title might be "the artist’s artist.” Working in, around, and outside of civic agencies, Koenen has dedicated her entire career to supporting and advocating for artists and finding or creating opportunities for arts programming.

Read her story and watch the video interview

With the December 12 closing of their East Garfield Park project space, New Capital, Chelsea Culp (BFA 2007) and Ben Foch (1995–99) return their collaborative focus to presenting their artwork, while still acting as a curatorial team in other venues.

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Jeremiah Lee (MAT 2005) uses scavenged cigar boxes and reclaimed materials to create three-string guitars that are perfect for strumming, blues-style slide guitar, and creating more complex chords. The instruments’ decorative patterns are reminiscent of the ornate facades of Chicago’s downtown structures and neighborhood historic buildings. They also embrace beauty, history, and the communities of artists who drive the city’s vibrant contemporary art scene forward.

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Chicago’s Albany Park is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the United States, according to the city’s official tourism website. It is a working-class neighborhood—its main street lined with Korean, Middle Eastern, Thai, Indian, and Mexican stores and restaurants. And it is Albany Park, with its unique blend of culture and everyday life that inspires Regin Igloria’s (BFA 1996) art practice.

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Through his blossoming socially engaged art practice, Juan William Chávez is interested in reshaping North St. Louis with a number of projects, including his public proposal for the Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary and Northside Workshop, a community space in Old North St. Louis.

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SAIC alumna Carla Bruni (MS 2008) is involved in a number of local and national historical preservation and environmental initiatives. In addition to helping green building advocates and preservationists find common ground, she educates communities about their homes through her writing and workshops.

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As a teacher at Bowen High School on Chicago's Southeast side, Bert Stabler (BFA 1997, MAAE 2003) teaches his students art as a way to address the violence, toxic soil, and social issues that plague their community. We interviewed Stabler during the second day of the Chicago Teacher's Union strike at a rally in downtown Chicago.

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As one of the leading political and performance artists of her generation, SAIC alumna Tania Bruguera (MFA 2001) researches ways in which art can be applied to everyday political life. In 2010, she launched Immigrant Movement International, a five-year project that tests her concept of "useful art,” by merging art into society’s urgent social, political, and scientific issues.

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Tara Lane (BFA 2004) left her position as Executive Pastry Chef at Chicago’s Blackbird and Avec restaurants to work on social justice projects that involve food. She landed at Jane Addams Hull-House where the extraordinary history of the Resident’s Dining Hall inspires her to educate people about the issues surrounding food production and social activism.

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The ideas running through Eric May’s (BFA 2000) art practice were developed at Ox-Bow School of the Arts in Sagatuck, Michigan, a campus set on 115 acres of natural forests and dunes and an area of agricultural bounty, and the influence of Chicago’s imagists—whose artwork mined popular culture, street culture, and low-brow culture—some of who taught May during his time at SAIC.

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Ben Finch (BFA 2002) and Richard Grant (BFA 2001) co-own and operate Finch’s Beer Co., a craft brewery on Chicago’s Northwest Side that has become part of the Chicago micro-beer renaissance, carrying into bars and businesses across the city and expanding into eight states. The co-owners have also kept in mind their artistic roots, tapping into the local artist community for label art and packaging ideas.

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Just three months after Dun-Well Doughnuts opened December 2011, the New York Daily News named Dun-Well’s artisanal creations the best doughnuts in New York City. But behind the scenes, owners Dan Dunbar (BFA 2009) and Christopher Hollowell are making business and artistic decisions they hope will get patrons to think about their food choices.

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Husband and wife Mohamed (BFA 1958) and Nanette (BA 1958) Drisi met while earning their degrees at SAIC. An SAIC fellowship funded Mohamed’s trip to Monoco in 1958, where he was commissioned to paint the official portrait of Princess Grace de Monaco. This experience helped them both launch portrait painting careers that spans more than 50 years.

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Each year during the Commencement activities, the Office of Alumni Relations inducts the class that graduated 50 years ago into the Half Century Club. The class is invited back to campus for special events, and attendees sit on stage during the Commencement ceremony. Members are also asked to share their memories in a video interview. Click the link below for a compilation of these interviews.

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After SAIC, Tom Palazzolo (Cert. 1962, BFA 1965, MFA 1966) went on to become a renowned experimental filmmaker who has screened his work at the Art Institute of Chicago and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York among other venues. As an SAIC student, he created a film that includes scenes from the dedication ceremony for SAIC’s Columbus Drive building. One speaker notes the historic significance of this event as the first time the school had classrooms above ground.

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For many "more-renowned" artists, Lucas is the man behind the curtain. Over the last 20 years, he's pulled prints for the likes of Kerry James Marshall, Willie Cole, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Bill Conger, Bernard Williams, Ray Noland, and Paul Andrew Wandless. He started pulling prints for artists when he was an undergraduate student at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. He says, "Initially I was all about getting the printing experience, but then it was more about the spirit of collaboration. Creating a new relationship is what it's all about for me."

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Listen to his video interview

SAIC helped Angeli Arndt (BFA 2010) find her own place in Chicago's art community and become an active participant in its cultural ecosystem. Like any ecosystem, giving is a necessary part of participation, and receiving is a natural consequence.

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The collaborative duo known as Lion VS Gorilla is dedicated to building community through experiential art that is humorous, a little absurd, and incredibly generous to both the participants and the recipients of the proceeds.

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Monica (MA 2001) and Chris (BFA 2004) Wilczak value the relationships their SAIC education has made possible. Through the ups and downs of life, they have kept a commitment to giving to SAIC's annual fund because, as Monica says, "I was the recipient of financial aid on a number of occasions. If it weren't for the generosity of those who came before me, I wouldn't have graduated college or grad school. It is my responsibility to continue this gift of philanthropy to help the next generation of artists and administrators."

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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

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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Liliya Lifánova (MFA 2010) is one of four recent SAIC graduates to receive a Fulbright award for 2011–12 and is currently in Russia using her award to create a performance piece based on notions of identity and border.

Born in the Republic of Kyrgyzstan, a former member of the Soviet Union, the artist earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College before earning her MFA through SAIC’s Department of Fiber and Material Studies.

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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
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.