Student Work

Visual Op-Ed | Fall 2020 

Given the reality of Covid, our school has variations of in-person, remote, online and hybrid learning. This semester I am teaching Graduate Critique in our graduate program, a required class for our first and second year students that creates a rigorous space for meaningful feedback to push their work forward. For an introductory assignment for our class to learn more about each other, students were encouraged to go out into the world and into the streets of Chicago, online or wherever they were to collect images, media, or make sketches, and drawings. Given how so many artists and voices took to the streets, They were asked to read some texts that address the question:

What will our successors one hundred years from now, deem we were trying to say or give voice to, by studying evidence within our current public sphere? 

Using Seph Rodney’s essay in the NY Times about New York’s sidewalk prophets, and Jennifer Billock’s article from Smithsonian magazine about artist responses to Covid19 as jumping off points, their assignments spoke to themes of justice, fear, resistance, and patriotism.

Shoutouts to former undergraduate & graduate students:

Colleen McCulla, interdisciplinary designer, futurist, creative strategist

Hannah Bastel, Book artist, writer, illustrator 

Viktor Le. Givens, performance, installation, author of Mo’Lasses.

Nola Hanson, performance, socially-engaged practice