Mitchell Visiting Professor: Andrew Schachman
The William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects is appointed to contribute experimental practices to an interdisciplinary community of artists and designers. The Mitchell Visiting Professor holds a full-time, one-year appointment to teach two, three-credit courses or one six-credit course a semester. In addition, the Mitchell Professor delivers a public lecture or organizes a public program as part of the Department's Mitchell Lecture Series.
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The Mitchell Visiting Professor for 2020-2021 is Andrew Schachman. Andrew is a designer, artist, critic and educator whose work addresses the socio-political and cultural consequences of infrastructures, environments and networks. Trained as an architect, Andrew designed and managed projects for the offices of Zaha Hadid, Perkins and Will, Carol Ross Barney, and Doug Garofalo. His projects have received numerous awards including the Distinguished Building Award from the American Institute of Architects and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design. Today, Andrew is the co-founder and co-director of three complementary, experimental practices for art and design:
Floating Museum - floatingmuseum.org - creates new models and protocols for cultural engagement and conversation in public space, relating artists, constituencies, infrastructural networks, public institutions, and municipal authorities. Recent projects include large-scale transformations of civic networks and activations of museum collections. In 2017, River Assembly activated spaces from Calumet to Navy Pier, crossing neighborhoods and communities as a drifting museum and performance stage. Examining the Chicago River as a space in flux, the project acknowledged the river’s industrial past while directing attention to an inchoate network of cultural real estate. In a 2019 partnership with the Chicago Transit Authority, Cultural Transit Assembly temporarily transformed Chicago’s Green Line into a distributed institution, activating a necklace of parks adjacent to the line, transforming active railcars into itinerant exhibition and performance sites.
Fieldwork Collaborative Projects - fieldworkcollaborative.com - is a trans-disciplinary research and exhibition platform focused on changing notions of publicness and the infrastructures that organize it. Recent work has been exhibited at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, funded by and exhibited at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies, and received generous support from the Clarence S. Stein Institute at Cornell University.
Studio Andrew Schachman - schchmn.com - designs infrastructures, environments and objects. Recent collaborations include the realization of large scale artist installations, scenography for the Palais de Tokyo’s off-site exhibition, Singing Stones, and design planning for large-scale civic institutions.
Andrew is also the Editor of Visual Art for Bridge - https://bridge.submittable.com/submit - an independent intersectional journal published in Chicago since 1999.
Previous Mitchell Visiting Professors
Matylda Krzykowski (2018-2019)
Stuart Candy (2016-2017)
Eric Ellingsen (2015-2016)
With her Stories by Strangers project, student Nitya Mehrotra uses her skills as an artist to tell the stories of sexual and mental abusive survivors.
