Curatorial Roundtable: "On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival”
Location: Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago (located on the left after you go through security on Michigan Avenue entrance),
On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival is curated by four artists—Isaac Facio, Nneka Kai, L Vinebaum, and Anne Wilson—whose paths merged at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Fiber and Material Studies Department. The exhibition is deeply informed by their practices as makers and their respect for fellow artists as holders of material, ancestral, and cultural knowledge. The curators will discuss their processes in creating this exhibition. Drawn primarily from the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection, the exhibition brings together over 100 objects from diverse cultures dating from antiquity to today to reveal the ways people use textiles to sustain spiritual beliefs, understand death, cope with grief, remember those who have passed, and heal from trauma, both personally and collectively. Included are burial shrouds, funerary hangings, mourning…
Organization: Fiber and Material Studies. Building Address: 111 S. Michigan Ave. Has the department chair or head approved the event and provided approprite funding? TRUE. Have you reached out to the Exhibitions Department for approval? FALSE. Have you reviewed this checklist? drive.google.com…: Yes.
Thursday, September 18, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago.
Artist Talk with Jan Tichy
As part of Czech Heritage Week—a week-long celebration featuring cultural exhibitions, film screenings, and educational programs that highlight Czech history and contemporary creativity— Tichy will discuss In Place of Magic, his body of work that is on view as part of the Faculty Sabbatical Triennial. Hosted by the Czech Consulate in Chicago. .
Organization: Exhibitions. Building Address: 33 E. Washington St.
Monday, September 22, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
SAIC Galleries Lower Level 2.
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
, ,
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 – 1:45 PM.
Zoom Webinar.
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.
Jerry Bleem: Story Time | Demonstration of Artist's Books
Wednesday 4:00 p.m.- 45 mins, Bleem will be presenting his artist’s books in their entirety at a demonstration. In the gallery.
Organization: Exhibitions. Building Address: 33 E. Washington St.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM.
SAIC Galleries Lower Level 2.
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.
In Conversation: Dorothy Burge and Dr. Sharbreon Plummer
Location: Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago (located on the left after you go through security on Michigan Avenue entrance),
Dorothy Burge and Dr. Sharbreon Plummer will join forces for a timely conversation about the role that textiles play in advancing social justice and capturing difficult histories. Their conversation will discuss the legacy of quilts in Black history, Burge's own work as an artist and activist, and the importance of her two newest works commissioned for On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival.
In conjunction with On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival which is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from September 6, 2025 - March 15, 2026.
This event is made possible by the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies. Free and open to the public.
Persons with disabilities requesting accommodations should visit saic.edu/access.
Organization: Fiber and Material Studies. Building Address: 111 S. Michigan Ave. Has the department chair or head approved the event and provided approprite funding? TRUE. Have you reached out to the Exhibitions Department for approval? FALSE. Have you reviewed this checklist? drive.google.com…: Yes.
Thursday, October 16, 2025, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM.
Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago.
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.
Wells Chandler: I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together
Wells Chandler is an expanded-field painter whose practice intersects the sacred, idiosyncratic folk traditions and 1970s craft feminism. He explores the entanglement of ecology, community, gender, and queer iconography through the mediums of crochet, embroidery, egg tempera, and cake. Informed by cultural anthropology and comparative religious studies, Chandler weaves the art historical, esoterica, pop culture, and autobiography to stage heterotopias oriented toward collective healing. His process is repetitive and contemplative. Meditation underlies his hand crafted, labor-intensive, slow practice, embedding time, ritual, and devotion directly into the work. His site-specific, porous paintings—composed of talismanic sigils and guardians—function as living shrines.
Wells Chandler is a Bronx based artist, writer, and curator. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2011 where he was awarded the Ralph Mayer Prize for proficiency in materials and techniques. Chandler was a 2015 Queer Art Mentorship…
Organization: Fiber and Material Studies. Building Address: 37 S. Wabash Ave. Has the department chair or head approved the event and provided approprite funding? TRUE. Have you reached out to the Exhibitions Department for approval? FALSE. Have you reviewed this checklist? drive.google.com…: Yes.
Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 11:15 AM – 12:15 PM.
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.
Queers Teach This: Adam J. Greteman In Conversation With Erica Meiners
Join SAIC professor Dr. Adam J. Greteman and Dr. Erica Meiners for a public conversation about Dr. Greteman’s new book, Queers Teach This: Queer and Trans Pleasures, Politics, and Pedagogues. In a moment of educational backlash against LGBTQ+ inclusion in curriculum, this conversation invites artists, educators, students, and community members to engage and reflect on the pleasures and politics of queer and trans communities as they work to reimagine educational possibilities in schools and beyond. The conversation will examine lessons drawn from Dr. Greteman's book, such as thriving amidst adversity, and highlights how joy and resistance intersect in the classroom. Don’t miss this chance to explore what it means to teach, learn, and thrive together in these challenging times with two leading voices in queer pedagogy. Dr. Erica R. Meiners is Professor of Educational Inquiry and Curriculum Studies and Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.
Organization: Exhibitions. Building Address: 37 S. Wabash Ave.
Wednesday, November 12, 2025, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM.
MacLean 301.
Fritz Horstman: Folded Cyanotypes and Valley Sculptures
Sharing recent sculptures, videos, and works on paper, Fritz Horstman will make connections to his interests in Bauhaus pedagogy, geomorphology, voice experiments, craft, and ecology. The talk will give particular focus to Horstman's "Folded Cyanotypes" and his ongoing series of "U-Shaped Valley" sculptures and videos.
Fritz Horstman is an artist, curator, educator, and author based in Bethany, Connecticut. Recent solo shows of his Folded Cyanotypes, videos, and sculptures have been presented at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, at Planthouse in New York, and at Municipal Bonds in San Francisco. Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, he has curated exhibitions across Europe and the United States, including "Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper" last year at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX. He has lectured and given workshops at Yale University, Harvard University, l'École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Lebanese American University in Beirut, The Royal Academy…
Organization: Fiber and Material Studies. Building Address: 37 S. Wabash Ave.
Friday, November 14, 2025, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM.
Sharp LeRoy Neiman Center LNC1: Event Space 102.