Faculty Sabbatical Triennial
Image: Marlena Novak, Endangered Rusty-Patched Bumblebee and Leadplant from Dreaming The Prairie, 2024, 3D-modeled scene excerpted from Gameplay (interactive collaborative project),
This fall, SAIC Galleries is pleased to present the second SAIC Faculty Sabbatical Triennial exhibition, featuring a wide range of work across multiple disciplines by School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) faculty who have completed a sabbatical or other paid leave over the past three academic years. Significant gallery-based presentations and a scheduled program of talks and events alongside a dedicated website will represent the research and practices of these renowned SAIC faculty members. , SAIC offers sabbaticals, or salaried leaves-of-absence, to eligible full and part-time professors after seven years of service. During a sabbatical, faculty are relieved of their teaching and administrative duties so they may embark on a dedicated period of inquiry, experimentation, and production to help sustain their… .
Organization: Exhibitions. Building Address: 33 E. Washington St.
Monday, August 25, 2025, 11:00 AM – Saturday, December 6, 2025, 6:00 PM.
SAIC Galleries Street Level, SAIC Galleries Lower Level 2.
Frédéric Moffet: You’re Too Lovely To Last
, Frédéric Moffet, Goddess of Speed, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank. Join artist and filmmaker Frédéric Moffet for a screening that pairs three of his recent films with works by kindred artists Jamie Ross, Zuqiang Peng, and Amina Ross. For over three decades, artist and filmmaker Frédéric Moffet has cultivated a practice rooted in queer relationality—drawing inspiration from early gay liberation and thinkers like Michel Foucault, who imagined queerness as a way of being that fosters new forms of intimacy, community, and care. Moffet’s films grow out of his own networks of relation—pedagogical, intellectual, erotic—and are attuned to ephemerality and loss, recovering fugitive traces from cruising grounds, private archives, and history’s margins. In this program, titled after a lyric by Billie Holiday, he presents three recent films—The Magic Hedge (2016), Goddess of Speed (2023), and The Job (2024)—alongside works by kindred artists Jamie Ross, Zuqiang Peng, and Amina Ross, conjuring themes…
Organization: CATE, Exhibitions, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, September 11, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.
Objects of Common Interest Lecture
Objects of Common Interest, Lights On, 2023. Photo: Piercarlo Quecchia, courtesy DSL STUDIO,
Join us for a lecture by the design team Objects of Common Interest followed by an audience Q&A.
Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.
Founded by Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis in 2016, Objects of Common Interest engages at the intersection of art, design, and architecture. The studio explores a diverse range of scales, from sculptural objects and installations to immersive environments and public art projects. Based between New York and Athens, Petaloti and Trampoukis are also the founding partners of the sibling architectural practice LOT Office for Architecture.
Their work has been exhibited internationally at museums, institutions, galleries, and design fairs—including the Noguchi Museum, MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Vitra Design…
Organization: Visiting Artists Program, Architecture, Interior Arch. Building Address: 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Tuesday, September 23, 2025, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago.
Seth Scriver and Peter Scriver: Endless Cookie
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Seth Scriver and Peter Scriver, Endless Cookie, 2025. Courtesy of Magnify Films. Join Seth and Peter Scriver for an evening with their freewheeling animated documentary Endless Cookie. “A multi-layered wonder—part-family portrait, part-magic realist adventure, and part-unflinching critique of Canada’s long-standing…and often calculated mistreatment of Indigenous people.”—Chris Robinson, Cartoon Brew, Winner of the Contrechamp Grand Prix at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Seth and Peter Scriver’s freewheeling animated documentary follows Peter—an artist and storyteller from the Shamattawa First Nation—through a series of shaggy dog tales about growing up with his white half-brother Seth in 1980s Toronto, and later raising his own children in the remote north. There are chicken heists, Sasquatch sightings, trapping mishaps, and children’s chaotic adventures—woven together with accounts of police profiling, land grabs, and the haunting legacy of residential schools. Peter’s storytelling…
Organization: CATE, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, September 25, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.
Art Spiegelman in Conversation with Mark Pascale
Art Spiegelman. Photo: Enno Kapitza – Agentur Focus,
Join us for a virtual conversation between comic artist Art Spiegelman and curator Mark Pascale followed by an audience Q&A.
Click HERE to join via Zoom at 12:30 p.m. CT,
Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for recordings of past events and more.
Art Spiegelman has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus—which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Maus II continued the remarkable story of his parents' survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America. Spiegelman believes that in our post-literate culture, the importance of the comic is on the rise, for "comics echo the way the brain works. People think in iconographic images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts of language, not in paragraphs."
Having rejected his…
Organization: Visiting Artists Program. Building Address: Virtual.
Monday, September 29, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
Zoom Webinar.
Queers Teach This: Adam J. Greteman In Conversation With Erica Meiners
TBA.
Organization: Exhibitions. Building Address: 37 S. Wabash Ave.
Wednesday, October 1, 2025, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM.
Jordan Lord: Shared Resources
, Jordan Lord, Shared Resources, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank. ,
Join artist Jordan Lord for an evening with Shared Resources, a radical rethinking of debt, disability, and the ties that bind.
“Lord accomplishes something rare: the film’s subject matter, political commitments, and aesthetic approach work together dynamically, each…deepening the others.”—Carmine Grimaldi, Millennium Film Journal, In Shared Resources, artist Jordan Lord offers a radical rethinking of documentary, debt, and the ties that bind. Shot over five years, the film follows Lord’s family through bankruptcy after their father Albert loses his job as a debt collector, the accumulation of loans to fund Jordan’s education, and Albert’s increasing disability from chemical exposure during his military service. But the film is not simply a record of hardship. Lord frames these experiences within a broader meditation on indebtedness and interdependence—social, familial, and artistic. Throughout, Lord and their parents…
Organization: CATE, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC, Video Data Bank. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, October 2, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.
Pablo Helguera: Distinguished Alumni Lecture
Pablo Helguera at Librería Donceles, San Francisco, 2014,
Join us for a lecture by artist Pablo Helguera followed by an audience Q & A.
Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.
Pablo Helguera (BFA 1993) is a New York–based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses on a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory, and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances, and written fiction. His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist. This intersection is best exemplified in his project, The School of Panamerican Unrest, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego,…
Organization: Visiting Artists Program, Alumni Engagement. Building Address: 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Monday, October 6, 2025, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago.
Sharon Hayes: Ricerche: four
, Sharon Hayes, Ricerche: four, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Join artist Sharon Hayes for an evening with her expansive and deeply moving Ricerche: four. “A powerfully intimate portrait…of resilience and creativity”—Andrew V. Uroskie, ArtForum, Artist Sharon Hayes presents Ricerche: four, an expansive and deeply moving two-channel video composed from interviews with LGBTQ+ elders across the United States. The final installment in her decade-long series exploring sexuality and gender in the US, the work draws inspiration from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 film Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings), in which the filmmaker interviewed Italians about their shifting views on sex and sexuality. Adopting a similar structure, Hayes invites participants to reflect on their experiences of desire, identity, community, activism, and survival—modeling listening and dialogue as radical tools for intergenerational connection and collective understanding. As LGBTQ+ lives come under increasing political fire, Ricerche: four is an…
Organization: CATE, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, October 9, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.
Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt: Kentucky Route Zero
, Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, Ben Babbitt, screen shot from Kentucky Route Zero, 2013-2020. Courtesy Cardboard Computer. Join artists and game developers Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt for an evening of live performance, unique playthroughs, and rare materials from Kentucky Route Zero. “One of the most thoughtful, heartbreaking and yet fantastical looks at modern life in America.”—Todd Martens, LA Times, “KRZ really is the masterpiece critics have been lauding it as for years.”—William Hughes, AV Club, Widely regarded as one of the most important video games of the last decade, Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt’s Kentucky Route Zero is a haunting odyssey of debt and loss that unfolds along a secret highway beneath Kentucky. By turns surreal, tragic, and darkly funny, the game follows Conway, an antique delivery man on his final job, and the marginalized seekers he meets along the way. Developed over more than a decade, the project draws on a wide range of influences—from the…
Organization: CATE, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, October 16, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.
Lee Mingwei: Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor Lecture
Lee Mingwei, The Mending Project, 2009–present. Installation view of Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Art of Participation, 2015, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan. Photo Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum,
Join us for a lecture by artist Lee Mingwei followed by an audience Q & A.
Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.
Born in Taiwan and currently living in Paris, New York, and Taipei, Lee Mingwei creates participatory installations, where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness, and one-on-one events, in which visitors contemplate these issues with the artist through eating, sleeping, walking, and conversation. Lee’s projects are often open-ended scenarios for everyday interaction and take on different forms with participants' involvement and change during an exhibition. He has held solo exhibitions…
Organization: Visiting Artists Program. Building Address: 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Tuesday, October 21, 2025, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago.
Reading By Chris Sullivan and Performance By Judd Morrissey & Ava Aviva Avinsan with Doug Rosman
4:00 p.m. Reading by Chris Sullivan from his ongoing Diary, The Trojan Rabbit-Everyone, put down your pencils. , This work is about the creation of a single work, , My New Feature animated ?lm The Orbit of Minor Satellites. , And how art Opus like art objects weave with life, love, and death. , 4:45 p.m. THE ZONE OF PURE DOUBT | EPISODE 4: ADRIFT IN THE LATENT SPACE , Live Performance by Judd Morrissey, Ava Aviva Avnisan, & Doug Rosman, The Zone of Pure Doubt is an ongoing multimodal project combining poetry, augmented reality, and original music to reimagine equatorial line-crossing ceremonies as rituals of queer transformation. In this activation, Morrissey and Avnisan perform alongside Doug Rosman’s real-time navigation of AI’s latent space.
Organization: Exhibitions. Building Address: 33 E. Washington St.
Friday, October 24, 2025, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM.
SAIC Galleries Lower Level 2.
Jennifer Packer Lecture
Jennifer Packer, Idle Hands, 2021, oil on canvas, 90 x 84 inches. © Jennifer Packer, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York, and Corvi-Mora, London,
Join us for a lecture by artist Jennifer Packer followed by an audience Q & A.
Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.
Jennifer Packer creates portraits, interior scenes, and still lifes that suggest a casual intimacy. Packer views her works as the result of an authentic encounter and exchange. The models for her portraits—commonly friends or family members—are relaxed and seemingly unaware of the artist’s or viewer’s gaze.
Packer’s paintings are rendered in loose line and brushstroke using a limited color palette, often to the extent that her subject merges with or retreats into the background. Suggesting an emotional and psychological depth, her work is enigmatic, avoiding a straightforward…
Organization: Visiting Artists Program, Painting and Drawing. Building Address: 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago.
Laura Huertas Millán: Pharmakon Ecologies
, Laura Huertas Millán, The Labyrinth, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank. Join Colombian French artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán for an evening of works reflecting on colonial histories, Indigenous knowledge, and ecological violence. “Huertas Millán…take[es] viewers along narratives across foliage, time, and space.”—Hoor Al Qasimi and Jiwon Lee, Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, , Colombian French artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán has earned international acclaim for films as visually rich as they are thought-provoking, weaving together documentary, ethnography, and speculative fiction. Over the past decade, she has focused her practice on the coca plant, using it as a lens to reframe colonial legacies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the entwined histories of land, labor, and resistance. Drawing on the concept of the pharmakon—a substance that can both poison and cure—her work reflects on the coca leaf’s place in Andean ecologies and spiritual…
Organization: CATE, Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, GSFC, Video Data Bank. Building Address: 164 N State St.
Thursday, November 6, 2025, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Gene Siskel Film Center Theater 1.