School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) Visiting Artists Program

06/20/2025

While we may not have any talks coming up until this fall, we have plenty of content in our archive on YouTube! Visit our channel to watch past lectures and conversations. There are over 70 artists, designers, curators, and more that are featured to keep you engaged, entertained, and informed!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdKqJ2LZB-y3kUJRDgy9vCyeEAifjIVtJ

04/25/2025

In case you missed it! Be sure to watch SAIC's Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Sekile Nzinga in conversation with visiting writer adrienne maree brown about the motivations and ideas behind her work. To learn more about adrienne's practice, visit their website at adriennemareebrown.net

adrienne maree brown (she/they) is growing a garden of healing ideas. Informed by decades of movement facilitation, somatics, science fiction scholarship, an...

04/23/2025

Sonder Tracks, an evening of sound, performance, and olfactory works produced as a part of SAIC's Art & Technology/Sound Practices collaboration with Emeka Ogboh, SAIC's Visiting Artists Program, and Sketchbook Brewery, will take place this Friday, April 25 at 7:00pm at Hairpin Arts Center, 2810 N. Milwaukee. Free admission. Be sure to join us! SAIC Art & Technology/ Sound Practices

04/08/2025

Don't miss out on our last lecture of the spring season!

TONIGHT at 6:00 p.m., join us for Otobong Nkanga’s artist talk at the Art Institute of Chicago. Free and open to the public.

Nkanga’s multidisciplinary practice examines the complex social, political, ecological, and material relationships between bodies, territories, minerals, and the earth. Through drawing, installation, performance, photography, textiles, and sculpture, she creates pathways translating the natural world into networked, aggregated situations.

Reframing people and objects as compressed multitudes and as entities that come into being in relation to other entities, she deftly weaves insights from geology, botany, poetry, and non-Western knowledge systems.

Located at the Art Institute of Chicago, Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan Ave. Further event and Visiting Artists Program details available at https://ow.ly/KEoP50VwGLw.

04/07/2025

Congratulations to visiting artist Otobong Nkanga on the opening of her show at the Nasher Sculpture Center! She will be joining us tomorrow in Fullerton Hall at 6:00pm for our final lecture of the spring season. Don't miss out!

04/04/2025

Get to know our last visiting artist, Otobong Nkanga, before she joins us in Fullerton Hall on Tuesday, April 8! Be sure to read the interview below to learn more:

The artist’s debut solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London features a compelling mix of objects, tapestries and installations, creating ritualistic compositions from an array of material

04/03/2025

Be sure to tune in!

TODAY at 12:30 p.m., join us via Zoom for a virtual conversation with adrienne maree brown. Free and open to the public. Event and Zoom details available at https://ow.ly/PkSL50Vq6N4.

is the New York Times–bestselling author/editor of several published texts, a ritual singer-songwriter, co-generator of the Lineages of Change Tarot Deck, and co-creator/host of the How to Survive the End of the World podcast with Autumn Brown. Brown has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination, and Loving Correction as ideas and practices for transformation.

Presented in partnership with School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) Visiting Artists Program and Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on the occasion of SAIC’s Shared Read, "Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements."

Image: adrienne maree brown. Photo: Derrick Beasley

adriennemareebrown.net

04/02/2025

TOMORROW! Join us on Zoom at 12:30pm CT for a talk by visiting writer adrienne maree brown with SAIC's Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Sekile Nzinga.

Read below about their latest book, Loving Corrections. “And then this act of loving correction. Where it was like: “We are off course. We need to course correct together and do that in a way where we are holding each other...”

adriennemareebrown.net

In Loving Corrections, adrienne maree brown advises activists to stay connected through disagreement—and to recognize that building revolutionary politics requires a tolerance of contradiction.

04/01/2025

After our talk with visiting writer adrienne maree brown this week, artist Otobong Nkanga will be joining us for the final lecture of the spring semester in Fullerton Hall on Tuesday, April 8 at 6:00pm! Check out our website for further details:

Otobong Nkanga, Loaded tears turned to rock, 2023, hand-tufted carpet, Murano glass, wood, ceramic, clay, handmade rope, metal connectors, dimensions variable

03/31/2025

Be sure to check out this event, in part organized by and featuring SAIC faculty, staff, and alumni!

Onion City and CCAM co-present the second annual edition of [WE DON’T KNOW YET] WHAT A CINEMA CAN DO, a night of new media live performance.

Early bird tickets available at the link below!

This event explores the resonances of “expanded cinema” today, putting cinematic art to the tasks of resistance, rupture, and reconfiguration of mediatic experience. This year’s iteration centers visual-sonic collaboration, looking to the arts of DJing and live film scoring to embrace transmedia collage. Sound and moving image artists are paired to convene and animate an exquisite co**se of expanded cinema.

Organized by CCAM members Garrett Johnson, Kim Nucci, and Kristin McWharter, alongside Onion City Film Festival Programmers Nicky Ni and Elise Schierbeek and WDKY Curator AJ Mendelsohn (VAP Program Coordinator), with AV Support from Yousif Alzayed.

Featuring work from Tanner Masseth, Blake Robbins, Ralph Darden, Yousif Alzayed, Baudouin Saintyves, Veronica Salinas, Jackie Turpin, Kim Nucci, Cameron Worden and Brook Neilson.

Presented in partnership with Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines (CCAM) and hosted by Public Works Public Works ( 2141 W. North Ave. ) | Friday April 4, 2025 | Doors Open at 7:00PM & Show Starts at 8:00PM Onion City and CCAM co-present the second annual edition of [W

03/31/2025

In anticipation of our next talk with visiting writer adrienne maree brown, watch the video below!

"US democracy needs repair — and care is the answer, says author adrienne maree brown in conversation with writer and activist Baratunde Thurston. In a sweeping discussion on what it means to be an active citizen, they unpack how to design a future for democracy where we all belong."

Learn more: adriennemareebrown.net

US democracy needs repair — and care is the answer, says author adrienne maree brown in conversation with writer and activist Baratunde Thurston. In a sweep...

03/28/2025

Familiarize yourself with adrienne maree brown’s work before their talk with SAIC's Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Sekile Nzinga next Thursday on Zoom! Be sure to read about their most recent book, an extension of their previous seminal works Emergent Strategy (2017), Pleasure Activism (2019) and We Will Not Cancel Us (2020). Loving Corrections explores how to shift ‘critique’ into feedback, guidance or perspective change by engaging love and being in ‘right relationship’ with one another. Adrienne Maree Brown

Even for experienced practitioners such as adrienne maree brown, it’s hard to speak to those we love about t