A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Kayla looks to the camera with a closed lipped smile, hair braided and resting on the right shoulder.

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Kayla Anderson

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Kayla Anderson is an itinerant artist, writer, gardener, and organizer. Their work often investigates the ways that culture and subjectivity shape, and are shaped by, technology and more-than-human encounters. Growing up in (San Antonio) Texas, where capitalism and disenfranchisement are more relentless than the sun, they value art as an arena for non-strategic modes of thinking, feeling, and communing with others.

Education: BFA + BA in Visual and Critical Studies, 2014, SAIC; MFA, 2020, Northwestern University. 

Exhibitions: Comfort Station, Nightingale Cinema, Roman Susan, Hyde Park Art Center, <3 etc., Chicago; Center for Contemporary Photography, Detroit; Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids; The Chapter House, Los Angeles; HTMLles Festival, Montreal; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; MELT Festival, Brisbane; Nhà Sàn Collective, Hanoi. 

Publications: “Joiri Minaya unravels social fabrics and draws attention to patterns,” and “Morehshin Allahyari re-figures histories and imagines new futures,” Art21: In the Studio; “Floral Facades,” Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art Magazine; Old Future’s Almanac (book), Flatland; “Mounting the Horizon,” Collaborative Center for Storm Space and Seismic Research; “In Search of a Recuperative Aesthetics,” Art & Education Classroom; “Learning to Live Together,” Temporary Art Review + New Constitutions (book), Academy of Art & Design, Basel; “Twelve Books, One Long Zoom,” Aperture Magazine; “Holding Up the Sky: Art-Science Approaches to an Aero-dialogue,” Kunstlicht Journal, University of Amsterdam; “Future Reliquaries: Outposts,” The 3D Additivist Cookbook (book); "Ethics, Ecology, and the Future: Art and Design Face the Anthropocene" Leonardo Journal + MU TXT, Eindhoven; "Animism: Curating Discourse," Royal College of Art, International Awards in Art Criticism Compendium; “Object Intermediaries: How New Media Artists Translate the Language of Things” Leonardo Journal. 

Awards: Onion City Experimental Film Festival ‘Best in Show’; American Austrian Foundation, Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts; Thoma Art Foundation Envision Grant; Haus der Kulturen der Welt Travel Grant; DCASE Independent Artist Program Grant; Luminarts Cultural Foundation Fellowship; Andy Warhol Foundation Writers Workshop Fellowship; Leadership, Equity, and Action for our Food System Fellowship.

Kayla also teaches art and gardening at a CPS high school on the west side of chicago where they live.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course guides students through the process of creating ecologically-engaged art in a variety of media, from initial inspiration, artistic research, material exploration, construction, and installation / presentation. Emphasis will be placed on working with and responding to the natural world, with the SAIC Sculpture Department's Knowledge Lab as our base. Plant tending and harvesting in the K-Lab Garden, foraging walks around downtown, and trips to nearby art and ecological spaces will provide inspiration. This course is designed in partnership with Knowledge Lab, the SAIC sculpture department’s “living laboratory” with an innovative, green, and sustainable focus.

Class Number

1167

Credits

1

Description

This studio course focuses on themes, practices, contexts, and questions undertaken by contemporary artists and designers. Research Studio I is a course that asks students to begin to develop and connect their own work and ideas with a diverse range of artists, designers, and communities. This course engages with cultural institutions including: museums, galleries, libraries and archives as resources of critical engagement. Students will undertake various types of research activities: a) collecting and classification, b) mapping and diagramming, c) systems of measurement, d) social interaction, e) information search systems, f) recording and representation, and g) drawing and other notational systems. Assignments in this course are faculty directed, open-media, interdisciplinary and idea based. The projects are designed to help students recognize their work habits, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Students will experience a wide range of research methods and making strategies. Critique as an evaluative process used in art and design schools, is a focus in this course. Various methods and models of critique are used in order to give students the tools to discuss their own work and the work of others.

Class Number

1330

Credits

3

Description

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer states ''We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities…the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. There are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.” In this course, we will look to non-human teachers to guide us in the creation of artworks, gaining new perspectives on our own human culture, and the wider world around us. Each student will choose one or more companions (plant, animal, etc.) to make work in conversation with throughout the semester. We will look to the work of artists including Aki Inomata, Ellie Irons, Wawi Navarroza, Jumana Manna, Duy Hoang, Zheng Bo, Dao Nguyen, Jenny Kendler, Lindsey French, Joiri Minaya, Otobong Nkanga, Carolina Caycedo, Cathy Hsaio, Rosana Paulino, Joscelyn Gardner, and Karolina Sobecka; and writers including Octavia Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Donna Haraway, Janice Lee, Heather Davis, JD Pluecker, Jessica Hernandez, and CA Conrad. Students should expect to produce a body of work consisting of 3-5 finished pieces during the semester, along with generative reading and writing exercises. Students may choose to work on a collaborative project / body of work with one or more classmates.

Class Number

1668

Credits

3