A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Sarah Ross smiles at the camera in a black tee shirt. Her salt and pepper hair is cut short and she wears glasses.

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Sarah Ross

Associate Professor

Contact

Bio

Sarah Ross is an artist whose work is centered on the spatial politics of race, gender, class and control. Her projects use photo, video, installation and she works collaboratively with other artists and communities. Since 2006, Sarah has been working with incarcerated artists in IL prisons. 

In 2011, she co-founded the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP), a cultural project that brings together artists, writers and scholars in and outside Stateville prison to create public projects. For more than a decade the project has hosted exhibition, painted community murals around the city of Chicago. In 2018 PNAP began college program at the prison in collaboration with Northeastern IL University. As of 2022, PNAP will be opening a gallery and community space on Chicago’s westside. 

Also since 2011, Sarah has worked closely with local artists, activists, lawyers, torture survivors and scholars on Chicago Torture Justice Memorials—a campaign for reparations for survivors of Chicago police torture. This project developed, in part, as a call to artists to imagine a memorial, and ended with a historic reparations package for survivors of torture by Chicago Police under former Commander Jon Burge. 

In other collaborative projects, Sarah has worked with Ryan Griffis to produce videos, photos and installations around the social and political impacts of land use issues and global agriculture. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, Copenhagen, Rio De Janeiro, among other places. She is a co-author of The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom (2019); Carving Out Rights From Inside the Prison Industrial Complex 2021) and Our Tuesday Girl: An Unfurling for Dr. Margaret T.G. Burroughs. 

Sarah is a Soros Justice Media Fellow and an inaugural recipient of the Leaders for a New Chicago award from the MacArthur and Field Foundations. Sarah has been awarded grants from the Propeller Fund, Graham Foundation, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts and the Illinois Art Council.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

The focus of this course is to support a sense of purpose and agency in prospective art teachers, teaching artists, and cultural workers by exploring how individual and collaborative cultural production reflects and influences conceptions of race, class, ethnicity, geography, sexuality, and physical/cognitive abilities in a diversity of communities and settings. Students will interrogate the cultural contexts¿aesthetics, artmaking approaches, social, political, historical, theoretical, technological, and pedagogical¿that frame the making, interpreting, analyzing, sharing, and teaching of art, design, and visual culture in school and community settings. Students will develop content for art and culture projects and curriculum sequences based upon contemporary topics, issues, and themes.

Students will explore the work of contemporary artists and cultural workers who integrate diverse artmaking approaches, cultural histories, theoretical orientations, and psychological perspectives into their arts-based practices. Artists and readings will be chosen based upon timely and emergent issues, concepts, and themes affecting a diversity of communities. Methods and strategies for integrating various literacies--verbal, visual, media, technological, computational--into cultural projects and curriculum will be explored.

Yes course will ask students to understand how individual and collaborative cultural production reflects and influences conceptions of race, class, ethnicity, geography, sexuality, and physical/cognitive abilities in a diversity of communities and settings. Students will also Understand how cultural contexts frame the making, interpreting, analyzing, sharing, and teaching art, design, and visual culture in school and community settings.

Class Number

2142

Credits

3

Description

This seminar involves readings and discussions of works by twentieth-century social theorists who have had or might have consequences for artists' approaches to their own practices, as well as the interpretation of artistic production in general. It is not intended to be a survey of aesthetic theories, but rather will consider various questions concerning social relations and institutions, as well as basic premises that inform different conceptual approaches to these issues. Students will also read work that deals with the production and consumption of art using particular social-theoretical frameworks. Open to all students senior level and above.

Class Number

1913

Credits

3

Description

Section 001: Thesis Fieldwork - The individual student and instructor will meet at agreed times to provide supervision and dialogue relating to the clinical experience. The choice of field site is agreed upon by student, instructor, and site supervisor. Students will spend 12 hours per week for 3 semester hours credit. This course can be taken for 3 or 6 semester hours. Section 002: Career and Professional Experience Elective Internship - Graduate CAPX education and internships in art education allow students to work in part-time, art-related CAPX positions in approved organizations and institutions. Students are assigned a CAPX faculty adviser. Participation requires a total of 210 hours, with a minimum weekly average of 15 work hours with the internship organization. Call the Career and Professional Experience Program at 312/ 499-4130 for further information. Permission to register for this course must be obtained from the director of the CAPX Program.

Class Number

1912

Credits

3