Championing Education, Art, and Equity: Elissa Tenny's SAIC Legacy
by Sophie Lucido Johnson (MFA 2017)
When you first meet Elissa Tenny, it is immediately clear that she’s warm, friendly, engaging—and that she knows how to get things done.
Specifically, she knows how to get things done for the students she serves. Tenny is a person who cares about other people, and she will do whatever it takes to support the artists, designers, and scholars of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
Tenny and Vice President for Campus Operations Tom Buechele on campus move-in day.
Tenny and Vice President for Campus Operations Tom Buechele on campus move-in day.
In her seven years as president of SAIC and six years prior as provost, Tenny has an astounding list of accomplishments. She launched the First-Generation Fellows program; helped start a successful initiative to prepare Chicago’s public high school students for college; expanded health and disability services on campus; made tremendous gains in the diversity of student and faculty populations; and stewarded the most successful fundraising stretch in the history of SAIC. She continued to do all this even after the world was brought to a grinding halt with the onset of a devastating global pandemic—a challenge on a scale no college presidents in living memory had faced. All this is more than enough to build a substantial legacy on—but Tenny is also the first woman to lead SAIC in its 157-year history. Quite a legacy indeed.
Tenny didn’t always want to be a college president.
As a child, she wasn’t certain of what she wanted to do at all. She grew up with three siblings in New York City, but her family never took her to a museum or the theater. She did go to the movies from time to time, but she looks back on her childhood as fairly parochial.
When she was 14, Tenny’s family moved to the suburbs of New York, which proved a difficult transition. Tenny’s parents hadn’t attended college, and they sent her to a high school where only 20 percent of the student population went on to higher education. Tenny knew that she wanted to go to college, but getting there would be an uphill climb.
She managed to get into school, but, hard as she tried to find her passion, nothing clicked for Tenny during her undergraduate studies. Then, after a positive experience at a summer job as a film production assistant, she pursued a master’s in media studies at The New School in New York.
“And I just loved it,” Tenny said. “I saw what it meant to really love what you were studying. And I ended up working there and staying there for 25 years.”
While she considered a career in filmmaking, she ultimately saw how crucial education was to making the world work, and she wanted to spend her life helping other people find the things that made them click.
“Education is the key to everything,” Tenny said.
“Your intellectual development, the social mobility college provides, the great satisfaction you have learning anything—whether it's reading an amazing novel or making a new kind of photograph or whatever it might be—is the richness that feeds your soul.”
Tenny presents at the AICAD Conference.
Tenny presents at the AICAD Conference.
Tenny’s love of film and art-making made SAIC a natural home for her. After spending eight years as the provost and vice dean of Bennington College, she found her way to SAIC in the role of provost and never looked back.
Tenny said she’s loved everything about her 13 years at SAIC—from its placement in the heart of downtown Chicago to the daily adventure of riding the campus elevators, where students and faculty often get on board during the busiest hours with large-scale compositions for their studio classes, or come to class in wearable art.
“I so appreciate that students and faculty and staff here are pretty fearless,” Tenny said.
“They don't shy away from taking risks. If you make art, you design, you write, you're a critic, or you’re an art teacher or art therapist, you have to do much of that without fear of failure, because along the way, sometimes you’re going to fail. It goes with the territory. You have to fail to learn, especially in art. You iterate and do better.”
During her tenure, Tenny has led two strategic plans, crafting and implementing ambitious ideological blueprints for SAIC’s future. When Tenny arrived in 2010, a strategic plan had just been completed, so it was up to her to put it into place. Since then, she’s initiated a totally new plan that is impactful, far-reaching—and, crucially to Tenny, centered on students.
“At the heart of a lot of our fundraising efforts has been scholarships,” Tenny said. “They provide access and make SAIC more affordable to students from all kinds of backgrounds.” There are many student-centered fundraising efforts she’s been proud to spearhead or join. Funding paid internships at cultural nonprofits, furthering student wellness efforts, investing in SAIC’s Career and Professional Experience department, and other programmatic initiatives that benefited students were also important to Tenny.
Tenny and Stephanie and Bill Sick Professor of Fashion, Body and Garment Nick Cave at the 2023 Fashion exhibition.
Tenny and Stephanie and Bill Sick Professor of Fashion, Body and Garment Nick Cave at the 2023 Fashion exhibition.
Students know Tenny as a hands-on president who always wants to know what’s happening on campus.
Ye-Bhit Hong (BA 2022) met Tenny during her sophomore year, when she attended open office hours to discuss launching the student-run journal Artists Need Art Historians. “President Tenny provided encouragement and showed genuine enthusiasm for my concept,” said Hong. Tenny even connected Hong to the people who could turn the idea into reality. “I remain deeply grateful for that pivotal moment, as it set in motion a project that would later foster a community amidst the challenges of the COVID pandemic.” During the journal’s inaugural talk—a discussion with Dean Delinda Collier—Tenny tuned in to support. “President Tenny's presence was both heartwarming and empowering,” Hong said.
Tenny impacted more than just the student body: her legacy will be felt by the staff she worked alongside as well. Dean of Faculty T. Camille Martin-Thomsen recalled meeting Tenny prior to her appointment as dean through the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design BIPOC Academic Leadership Institute.
Tenny and Dean of Faculty Camille Martin-Thomsen at the newly renovated Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection.
Tenny and Dean of Faculty Camille Martin-Thomsen at the newly renovated Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection.
“She has made developing and implementing the initiatives to become a more accessible and just institution a cornerstone of her work at SAIC as both the School's first female president and previously as our first provost. Our future as an institution is assured due to her steadfast work,” Martin-Thomsen said.
Tenny addresses a crowd of students at the Art Institute of Chicago's Griffin Court at New Student Orientation.
Tenny addresses a crowd of students at the Art Institute of Chicago's Griffin Court at New Student Orientation.
Though a college president’s job generally includes mentoring, fundraising, and trying to understand the needs of its student body and school community, it doesn’t always include the unique set of global crises that Tenny’s tenure faced.
In May of 2020, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis led to a nationwide reckoning, catalyzing greater awareness around the Black Lives Matter movement and massive protests in Chicago. That consciousness-raising energy was alive among many at SAIC, too, who made their voices heard. In response, Tenny put together the Anti-Racism Committee to try to address the ways in which institutionalized racism had affected the School’s own practices.
This happened in the midst of an already chaotic school year, as the world shut down in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic—SAIC included. There was no playbook or guide; no one knew what to do. Fortunately, Tenny has always been, as she put it, “level-headed in a crisis.”
“I think I knew that I had to stay calm, and I had to show up,” Tenny said. “During the worst part of the pandemic, [Vice President and Dean of Student Affairs] Felice Dublon and I would come downtown once a week and just walk around campus and see who was around and say hello with our masks on. Even if we ran into five people, it was important.” Tenny also praised public health expert Dr. Terri Rebmann, who the School enlisted for guidance during the pandemic. But nevertheless, she never let go of the steering wheel.
Tenny at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Tenny at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Maybe that all comes back to her fierce love of the School itself—of its mission, its veracity, its people, and, of course, the art.
Tenny’s three favorite pieces from the museum (“this week, because it’s always changing”) speak quite succinctly to her legacy.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky above Clouds IV, 1965.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky above Clouds IV, 1965.
The first is Georgia O’Keeffe’s (SAIC 1905–06, HON 1967) Sky above Clouds IV, a massive piece that hangs above a stairwell. It depicts a sea of horizontal, white, rectangular clouds, fading into the distance and disappearing into a peachy ribbon of sunrise. Tenny had an O’Keefe poster in her childhood bedroom as a teenager. Even though her parents didn't take her to museums, O’Keeffe—whose work has inspired generations of artists—made an impact. It reminds Tenny how important it has been for her to fight for other first-generation students to have access to higher education in her time at SAIC.
Archibald Motley, Nightlife, 1943.
Archibald Motley, Nightlife, 1943.
The second is Archibald Motley’s (SAIC 1918, HON 1980) Nightlife. Motley was a Bronzeville resident, and Tenny has worked tirelessly to connect SAIC to the city of Chicago itself, by supporting pathways for Chicago Public School students to enroll at SAIC, among other initiatives.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #56, 1980.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #56, 1980.
Finally, she loves Cindy Sherman’s film stills.
“There are two reasons for this one,” Tenny said. “Sherman's about my age, and so she was kind of coming of age in the same New York City I did. But the other reason is that my daughter, Tess—who went to SAIC—did her undergraduate thesis on Cindy Sherman. So I feel this nice synchronicity connected to Cindy Sherman and my daughter whenever I look at those stills.”
Incidentally, Tenny is excited to spend more time with her daughters (she has two) and grandchildren (she has three) now that she’s retiring. And she and her husband Peter, a retired professor of media studies, might visit France for a spell. The sky’s the limit—may it always look like O’Keeffe’s. ■
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