writer and editor
Allison Halter: I come from a funny performative background — I was a synchronized swimmer as a child, and competed for about seven years. But in undergrad, I considered myself a photographer, and most of the work I made and was interested in was photographic. … It was still a sort of roundabout path: I…
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In her introduction for Catherine Opie, SAIC Dean Lisa Wainwright referred to the artist as “a documentarian and a romantic.” Wainwright’s comments – directed to the near-capacity crowd of students, scholars and admirers gathered at Rubloff Auditorium on September 10 – referred to Opie’s ability to capture and emphasize the beautiful in the commonplace, a…
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Sharon Hayes is the epitome of what formalist and conservative aesthetes hate about contemporary art. Her work is queer, political and feminist but these aren’t the only reasons to love her.
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Gil Riley is an MFA painting candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the Fall of 2011 she was featured in a group show, “My Ghost at Home,” which was titled after one of her paintings at SAIC’s Parallax Gallery. The show featured work by Riley and two of her MFA…
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Graduation is quickly approaching and the only thing on graduating students’ minds, besides completing their thesis or studio work, is what’s next? In February, the U.S. Labor Department issued an encouraging jobs report. It highlighted that 236,000 new jobs had been created in the U.S., far more than many economists’ predictions. Also, the unemployment rate…
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In its modern incarnation, “Midway” typically specifies a section of a county or state fair detectable by the abundance of artery-clogging food, weirdos slinging black light posters, and some form of mud-related entertainment. One might speculate that the word’s origin lies south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but the common noun “midway” in this context actually…
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“How can an artwork claim to represent a queer aesthetic if it does not overtly represent gender or sexuality?” “What are the domains of queerness and how can they expand?” Some of the most interesting strains of queer thought and art practices are developing these themes. The first work inside of the expansive exhibition “The…
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Dorothy Allison — November 3 “By the time I was 10 I had figured out that my hope chest wasn’t aimed in the same direction as everyone else’s and that life was going to be hard and complicated,” explained author Dorothy Allison on growing up gay in South Carolina. Allison, author of popular and critical…
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“Technology is changing our embodiment in really interesting ways,” Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and groundbreaking academic Dr. Susan Stryker explained at the end of her packed lecture at the Sullivan Galleries on October 3. She went on to describe the growing interest transgender studies has in the ways that technology complicates the division between the human…
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