All Stories

At SAIC, our community is driven by the spirit of engagement and the desire to make positive change in our world. In the weeks to come, we’ll be honoring our citizen artists, taking a look at the way alums, students, faculty, and staff are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In honor of Black Heritage Month, we're sharing stories of the inspiring, powerful work of our Black community members. In high school, Brejenn Allen launched her own line of brightly patterned, functional hospital gowns, which she started donating after the pandemic caused the need for personal protective equipment to skyrocket.

These casts, repurposed molds used in the production of a ceramic data mountain, embody plaster’s dual role as a tool for copying and as a sculptural material in its own right.  The bronze finish follows in the tradition of 18th-century cast galleries where reproductions of earlier masterpieces were displayed as independent sculptures. Here, the patina accentuates both the intricate topography of a digital landscape and the traces of its making.

Election season 2020 is upon us. Polling Place investigates the spatial design and identity of the physical voting stations where we exercise our democracy. Somewhere between architecture, interior architecture, and designed objects, these temporary kiosks populate our communities’ public spaces that serve as polling places, such as school cafeterias and gymnasiums, and provide a provisional degree of privacy to individual citizens as they perform their civic duty. This exhibition asks SAIC’s most recent alumni to speculate on new narratives and identities for these important civic apparatuses. #SAIC_pollingplace

Built at 1/2" = 1' scale, Harold Washington Library becomes a bookshelf for a special collection of texts written by luminaries in prison as well as texts censored from American prisons. This exhibition is co-presented with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Architecture, in partnership with the University of Illinois Library, the Education Justice Project, and the Human Rights Defense Center.

Book Nooks is a pop-up reading room to amplify joy through book-bound storytelling. Each book is selected by a faculty member from Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects, and is on loan from their personal library. Each nook presents a set of books connected through an indicated topic. The temporary collection is at once a snapshot of the department's current interests and an opportunity to expand the community's cultural and literary references. Students and passersby are invited to peruse and explore the books at their leisure and to cozy up in a nook. #booknook