Jan Tichy

Color is essential for artists and designers, carrying meaning and shaping choices in materials, techniques, and combinations. This course delves into color's physicochemical properties and its impact on light and human perception. Each session merges color theory with hands-on creative experimentation. Participants will explore color sources from plants, minerals, animals, and synthetic materials, applying them to diverse surfaces to transform their meaning. Led by artist Jan Tichy and scientist Maria Boto, the course fosters creative growth by blending theoretical and scientific insights into color, broadening the scope of artistic research and conceptual color exploration.
This course will introduce artists and designers renowned for their use of specific coloring techniques, situating their work within a broader historical context. We will explore how contemporary creators, such as Atelier NL, have revived traditional coloring methods, while others, like Faber Futures, are pioneering the use of innovative materials. Additionally, we will examine the work of artists like Ann Veronica Janssens and Olafur Eliasson, whose practices focus on manipulating viewers' perception of color. The exploration of structural colors will begin with the traditional use of natural elements, such as feathers and insects, seen in the work of artists like Jan Fabre and Damien Hirst, and extend to cutting-edge innovations in color nanotechnology, exemplified by artists such as Anish Kapoor. As a visiting artist, we would like to invite Matthew Schreiber, who worked at Holographic Images after studies of holography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Royal College of Art in London, to talk to the students about use of holography in contemporary art.
Coursework will be based on weekly assignments involving readings and self-reflection on specific aspects of color. Students will actively apply their newly acquired knowledge to their experimental assignments. They will be encouraged to integrate the tools and concepts learned into their own practice, gradually developing a final project. 

Sensitivity & Exposure explores the intersection of photography and printmaking through concepts and processes activated by pressure and light. Students develop technical skills while considering print as a site-responsive medium¿sensitive to contact, light, time, material, and context. Beginning with embossing and frottage, the course moves through cyanotype and gelatin silver printing to digital fabrication, laser-engraved linoleum blocks, and photogravure, with each process building conceptually and materially on the previous one. Historical and contemporary artists provide critical frameworks for examining indexicality, contact, transfer, exposure, and reproduction. Through projects, experimentation, readings, and critiques, students learn to use these processes in support of their artistic ideas. The summer session focuses intensively on cyanotype and photogravure.

Sensitivity & Exposure explores the intersection of photography and printmaking through processes activated by pressure and light. Students develop technical skills while approaching print as a site-responsive medium¿sensitive to contact, light, time, material, and context.
Beginning with embossing and frottage, students consider pressure as a means of recording the scale, texture, and topography of objects, surfaces, and sites. These direct forms of contact introduce questions of indexicality and documentation that carry into cyanotype and gelatin silver printing, where photosensitive materials replace physical pressure as a means of registering objects, surfaces, duration, and space. Building on these analogue processes, students use digital fabrication to translate photographic images into laser-engraved linoleum blocks and photogravure plates, extending questions of exposure and reproduction into relief and intaglio printing.
Historical and contemporary artists provide critical frameworks for considering how these techniques developed and how their material and conceptual possibilities matter today. Jennifer L. Roberts¿s Contact: Art and the Pull of Print provides a key framework for examining contact, transfer, pressure, reversal, and reproduction across photography and printmaking.
The course combines demonstrations, studio experimentation, projects, readings, discussions, and critiques. The summer session is offered as an intensive, lab-based version focused on two processes: cyanotype and photogravure.

This course embraces the concept of projection as a broad field of art practice. Starting with the magic lantern, the course investigates the history of projection related practices that shape the parameters of visual perception and communication. Deconstructing the concept of the screen, the course focuses on projection in sculptural and installation contexts.

Microcontrollers and Adobe software is used in unorthodox ways to shape visual elements for digital light projection. History of visual, technical and conceptual use of light is accessed to investigate the interactions of projections with objects and space.

This course embraces the concept of projection as a broad field of art practice. Starting with the magic lantern, the course investigates the history of projection related practices that shape the parameters of visual perception and communication. Deconstructing the concept of the screen, the course focuses on projection in sculptural and installation contexts.

Microcontrollers and Adobe software is used in unorthodox ways to shape visual elements for digital light projection. History of visual, technical and conceptual use of light is accessed to investigate the interactions of projections with objects and space.

Public Light and Space explores how artists use light to shape public environments, creating works that invite interaction, alter perception, and transform shared spaces. The course engages with histories and theories of public art while critically examining the dynamic role of light in selected movements and practices. Students will conceptualize and plan site-responsive projects for specific locations across Chicago, with attention to methods such as digital projection, controlled light sources, and light-responsive materials.

The course offers a distinctive opportunity: a collaboration with Public Sound & Space (led by Austen Brown) to produce new large-scale projection and sound works for Art on the Mart, the monumental projection site on the historic Merchandise Mart building. Each student team will design an original artwork to be exhibited nightly for six weeks, reaching an audience of nearly 300,000 viewers.

A sequence of technical workshops supports skill development, while visiting artists, critics, and community members provide feedback throughout the creative process. The semester culminates in the public debut of student works on one of the world's largest projection canvases.

Public Light and Space explores how artists use light to shape public environments, creating works that invite interaction, alter perception, and transform shared spaces. The course engages with histories and theories of public art while critically examining the dynamic role of light in selected movements and practices. Students will conceptualize and plan site-responsive projects for specific locations across Chicago, with attention to methods such as digital projection, controlled light sources, and light-responsive materials.

The course offers a distinctive opportunity: a collaboration with Public Sound & Space (led by Austen Brown) to produce new large-scale projection and sound works for Art on the Mart, the monumental projection site on the historic Merchandise Mart building. Each student team will design an original artwork to be exhibited nightly for six weeks, reaching an audience of nearly 300,000 viewers.

A sequence of technical workshops supports skill development, while visiting artists, critics, and community members provide feedback throughout the creative process. The semester culminates in the public debut of student works on one of the world's largest projection canvases.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.