All Stories

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

Queue, an Exhibit about Waiting in Line is a 100’-0” long drawing. The drawing can be read like a graphic novel from two points of view and two different endpoints, exploring the banal and spectacular possibilities faced by citizens moving through a continuous queue line

Danielle Andress, assistant professor of Fiber and Material Studies, is instructing her students on how to make looms from materials in their own home. To continue their art, students have made looms out of stripped bicycle wheels, chopsticks, nails, and wooden crates, a true lesson in resourcefulness and sustainability.