A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
SAIC faculty member Ruby Que.

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Ruby Que

Lecturer

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Bio

Ruby Que (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on site-specific intervention and expanded cinema performance. In their work they open portals and create hauntings. Many projects grapple with absence; with video, sculpture, and installation, they attempt to give shape to what lies within and beyond the perceived void. Drawing from their lived experience as a queer, itinerant immigrant, they meditate on yearning and find home in transit. They believe in the power of collective myth-making, often engaging collaborators and viewers as co-conspirators towards liberation.

They have exhibited and performed at Roman Susan, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Elastic Arts, Comfort Station , Poetry Foundation (Chicago, IL), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, NY), Charles Allis Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), Coco Hunday (Tampa, FL), SOLOS (Karlsruhe, Germany) and elsewhere. They have been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, and Chicago Artists Coalition. Their work has been featured in the Chicago Reader, Performance Review Journal, and Sixty Inches from Center. Newcity Magazine named them one of ten Breakout Artists in 2023. They received a DCASE Individual Artists Program (IAP) grant from the city of Chicago in 2024. Que holds an MFA in Film, Video and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. 

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

In this course we will focus on disciplinary and interdisciplinary art and design practices of contemporary art production. This team-taught, year-long class explores the materials and techniques of surface, space, and time (2D, 3D, and 4D), as well as the connections and interplay of these areas. Core Studio integrates the formal with the conceptual, traditional with the contemporary, and makes visible a variety of approaches in current cultural production in order to foster the development of students? emerging practices as makers and thinkers.

In this interdisciplinary studio course students will be authorized to use a variety of school shops, materials and equipment; including the woodshop, plaster studio, digital lab, sewing machine, hand tools, sound and video production, digital workflows and principles of visual fundamentals. This is a hands-on making class, faculty present artists and content related to a particular toolkit and, or project theme. Every section of Core Studio has shared learning outcomes which are uniquely realized by each Core faculty partnership.

Students should expect a fast-paced studio environment. In Core Studio students will complete short assignments as well as longer multi-week projects. Assignments are designed to help students develop their own ideas in relation to the materials, processes, and themes presented by faculty.

Class Number

1247

Credits

3