Irina Adina Bucan

This seminar consists of weekly studio visits, discussions, and small group critiques. Students are expected to arrive with completed and semi-completed works and be prepared to make and re-make new works throughout the summer sessions. A wide variety of readings chosen by faculty will guide discussions that concentrate on problems concerning methods of artmaking, distribution, and interpretation. Readings will include examples drawn from the emerging category of conceptual writing as well as crucial art historical texts, literature, and poetry.

Over the course of each six-week summer residency period, all students in the Low- Res MFA program engage with a series of world renowned artists and scholars to expand our collective conceptual frameworks and discourses. Invited speakers participate in our Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series. They deliver a public lecture open to the entire SAIC and Chicago community and the general public, and then participate in a Colloquium the next day exclusively for Low-Res MFA students. Each Colloquium takes place with the artist present, and is a space where the artist¿s work and concepts (direct or adjacent) are discussed, questions are raised, and topics are debated. Colloquium asks for consensus, but rather a dynamic and in depth discursive exploration of ideas. This form allows for a multiplicity of voices to build on concepts through questioning, contributing, challenging, and listening to each other. The colloquium is considered a Gift anchored with the presence of the visiting artist. This Gift is generated by enacting full attention to the concepts present in the artist or scholar¿s work. In the spirit of Lewis Hyde, the Gift is an exchange which generates or propagates further attention and exchange in culture. Thus, the Colloquium is a Gift meant to propagate further exchange in the world, as artists and citizens.

Students in their final residency enroll in Thesis Studio: Public Presentation, a two-part course that guides students through their thesis presentation that will be given in the Sullivan Galleries during the MFA Thesis Exhibition. The first portion functions as a seminar, during which students learn about historical modes and forms of the Artist?s Talk and prepare for their own presentations. The second portion of the course consists of the thesis presentations themselves, a culminating statement in the form of a public talk delivered to the entire graduating cohort along with visiting artists and SAIC faculty.