Join SAIC at EXPO Chicago

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) marks the debut of Chicago’s fall art season with a variety of events centered around EXPO CHICAGO the weekend of September 22–25. Through SAIC and EXPO CHICAGO’s partnership, all current SAIC students can access a free ticket to the fair throughout the weekend.

Xenophilia
Fulton Street Collective
1821 W. Hubbard St., 3rd floor
Opening reception: September 18, 3:00–5:00 p.m.
Conversation and closing cocktail reception: September 24, 4:00–7:00 p.m.
Xenophilia is an exhibition featuring a selection of painting, sculpture, textile and photo-based work by students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The participants are both current students and recent graduates who hail from across India and have relocated to Chicago to study art, build a new body of work, translate their practice to a new public, and call the city home. The exhibition is presented with support from SAIC Printmedia faculty member Shaurya Kumar.

Conceptual Paradise
Wednesday, September 21, 8:15 p.m.
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State Street
Director Stefan Roemer engages in a series of in-depth exchanges with the world’s most prominent conceptual artists in a film that makes up a veritable history of art without an object. Through intellectual and witty conversations, the film establishes the fluid and ever-changing nature of the theory and practice of conceptual art, even as it suggests that the art of the documentary is equally fluid in its form. Interviews include: Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Weiner, Yoko Ono, Gregg Bordowitz, Valie Export, Andrea Fraser, Hartmut Bitomsky, Vito Acconci, and many more. Presented in cooperation with Expo Chicago and the Goethe-Institut, Chicago.

SAIC @ EXPO Booth
September 22–25
EXPO CHICAGO, Navy Pier
SAIC alum, faculty member, and artist Edra Soto (MFA 2000) continues her curatorial practice, organizing this exhibition of 25 artists from SAIC’s 2016 graduating class, including: Rocío Azarloza, Robert Burnier, Hyegyeong “G” Choi, J Michael Ford, Lucia Gonzalez Botello, Katie Halton, Maryam Hoseini, Thomas Huston, Cathy Hsiao, Katie Kirk, Frances Lightbound, April Martin, Yvette Mayorga, Jaclyn Mednicov, Coral Pereda Serras, Michael Rado, Luis Rodriguez Rosario, Erina Shibata, Jenn Smith, Linda Tegg, Ruby Thorkelson, Orkideh Torabi, Elizabeth Van Loan, Omar Velazquez, Cole Walker, and Dan Zhang. The exhibition is coordinated by Graduate Curatorial Assistant, Asha Veal Brisebois (MAAAP 2017).

/Dialogues
EXPO CHICAGO, Navy Pier
Presented in partnership with SAIC, EXPO’s /Dialogues series offers panel discussions, conversations, and provocative artistic discourse with leading artists, curators, designers and arts professionals on the current issues that engage them.

Documenta 14: Looking South
Friday, September 23, 1:00 p.m.
Featuring artists Irena Haiduk, Claire Pentecost, and Angelo Plessas. Moderated by Dieter Roelstraete, Curator, Documenta 14.

A roundtable devoted to Documenta, the quinquennial exhibition of contemporary art held in Kassel since 1955; Roelstraete will moderate a conversation between participants from past Documenta editions and artists taking part in the upcoming 14th iteration, which will take place simultaneously in Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany. Discussing the exhibition’s temporary relocation to the crisis-stricken Greek capital in particular, this panel will focus on large-scale exhibition making and globalized art practice in relation to intensifying socio-economic instability and uncertainty. Presented in partnership with Goethe Institut Chicago.

ART & LANGUAGE: Conceptualism and Rock & Roll
Friday, September 23, 5:30 p.m.
Featuring ART & LANGUAGE’s Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin and Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at SAIC Seth Kim-Cohen. Moderated by Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum Dominic Molon.

Examining the relationship between Conceptual Art and rock and roll music, this panel delves into the collaboration between ART & LANGUAGE and the experimental rock band Red Krayola which began with Mayo Thompson in 1967. Moderated by Dominic Molon, whose exhibition Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 took place at the MCA in 2007, the discussion will focus on the improbable yet historically fruitful relationship between a music genre associated with intensity and excess and an approach within the contemporary visual arts defined by rigorously reductive and administrative aesthetic.

Roger Brown & Andy Warhol
Politics, Rhetoric, Pop
Opening Reception: September 23, 6:00–9:00 p.m.
Kavi Gupta, 219 N. Elizabeth St.

Roger Brown: Pop Artist, Panel Discussion
September 24, 12:00–1:30 p.m.

The first in a three-part series, this conversation, between artist Kathryn Andrews, scholar Lisa Wainwright, writer John Yau, and curator/writer Dan Nadel, aims to draw a connection between Brown and the broader world: politics, popular culture, religion, and his contemporaries in the Pop Art movement.

Roger Brown: Lake Effects (Midwestern Dystopia)
October 19, 6:00–7:30 p.m.
SAIC Ballroom, 112 S. Michigan Ave.

The second panel discussion features Russell Bowman, Chloe Pelletier, Greg Brown, and Lisa Stone

Roger Brown: Decline and fall of the American empire (Queer Politics)
November 5, 4:00–5:30 p.m.
Kavi Gupta, 219 N. Elizabeth St.

The third panel discussion features Jonathan Odden, Will Simmons, and David Getsy (moderator)

The Ashes of Pasolini
Saturday, September 24, 1:00 p.m.
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
The Ashes of Pasolini pays tribute to the poet-filmmaker in the totality of his engagement as a political activist and an artist. Artist, architect, and filmmaker Jaar brings a keen awareness of the leftist political philosophy that informed Pasolini’s work in this moving account of his life and death, inspired by Pasolini’s own poem, "The Ashes of Gramsci."

Preceded by the world premiere of artist Luca Trevisani’s SUDAN, an intimate portrait of the last known Northern White Rhino, kept in captivity under armed guard in a Nairobi wildlife park. Trevisani organized efforts by a group of artists to document the endangered animal whose species has long been hunted for its horn, prized in some cultures for claimed curative and magical properties. Program presented in cooperation with Expo Chicago and the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In Conversation with Joseph Grigely
Saturday, September 24, 1:00 p.m.
Join internationally renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co director of Exhibitions and Programmes, Director of International Projects, Serpentine Galleries, in conversation with Chicago-based artist and academic Joseph Grigely on the legacy and importance of his work. Presented in partnership with Cultured Magazine.

Curating in Place
Sunday, September 25, 2:30 p.m.
Featuring Dan Handel, Curator of Design and Architecture, Israel Museum; Aric Chen, Lead Curator for Design and Architecture, M+, Hong Kong; Zoë Ryan, Chair and John H. Bryan Curator of Architecture and Design, Art Institute of Chicago; and James Zemaitis, Curator and Director of Museum Relations, R & Company. Moderated by Jonathan Solomon, Director of the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at SAIC

This panel will consider contemporary approaches to the collection and exhibition of architecture and design. Considering both how design is influenced by the places in which it is conceived, fabricated and used, and the local and global influences on design exhibition, this discussion will trace current practices of curating in the field today. Presented in partnership with the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet and Mitchell Lecture Series in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and support from the Consulate General of Israel to the Midwest.