Eight SAIC Alumni and Faculty Receive Grants from the Graham Foundation

The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts was founded in 1956, by a bequest from Ernest R. Graham, a prominent Chicago architect and protégé of Daniel Burnham. Each year, the foundation gives grants to projects that “foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.”

This year 59 grants were given to various projects that include exhibitions, films, publications, and research endeavors. Eight SAIC alumni and faculty members received grants this year.

EXHIBITIONS

Three former SAIC students—Colleen Tuite (BFA 2007), Chelsea Culprit (BFA 2007), and Ben Foch (1995–1999)—won a grant for their exhibition Cross-Sections: Four Views of Emerging Artists and Architects—in which each artist's work is paried with that of an emerging architect. It will be held at 1.5 Rooms in New York.

FILMS

Another group of SAIC alumni and faculty worked together to produce a film called A Machine to Live In, “a feature-length documentary about the imaginative and material processes of building one's utopia, [that] documents the history of highly controlled modernist planning in Brazil alongside radical projects in cult and mystical architecture.” The film was created by alumni Yoni Goldstein (MFA 2009), Meredith Zielke (MFA 2010), and Sebastian Alvarez (BFA 2009, MFA 2011). Zielke currently teaches in SAIC’s Film, Video, and New Media department.

SAIC alum Maura Lucking (MA 2012) won a grant for a film essay called Church of Schnidler, which chronicles the rise and decline of R.M. Schnidler’s Bethlehem Baptist Church, a church for middle-class African Americans in Los Angeles.

PUBLICATIONS

Lori Waxman (MA 2001) received a grant to support her book A Few Steps toward the Revolution of Everyday Life: Walking with the Surrealists, the Situationist International, and Fluxus. The book explores walking-as-artistic-performance in the work of three modern art movements. Waxman currently teaches in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism and New Arts Journalism departments at SAIC.