In his latest series of paintings and drawings, renowned artist Kerry James Marshall takes up as his subject the presence of the Black artist in his or her studio. Marshall discusses these visually stunning works and invites us to reflect on this question: how do portrayals of famous artists in their studios influence our perceptions of who is an artist? Kerry James Marshall is one of the most important artists working today, known for formally stunning large-scale paintings, drawings, sculptures and other objects that take up the visual representation of race and, specifically, African-American identity and history, as their subjects.

Ilya Kabakov's narrative, collaborative, and performative works, developed over thirty years in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, both presaged and influenced the work of many younger artists today. Throughout his career, he has created ambitious multi-disciplinary works that serve as monuments to history and memory, including a wide range of graphic books, paintings, drawings, installations, public projects, stage sets, costumes, theoretical texts, and extensive memoirs. His wife and collaborator Emilia Kabakov and University of Chicago art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson join him in this talk to reflect on past projects and their place within contemporary art. ...

This monthly lecture series connects local, contemporary art with the vast collection of the Art Institute. Chicago-based artists discuss the work they’re creating today while connecting with the work of artists of the past.

In this talk, artist, filmmaker and writer Renée Green addresses research as a critical aspect of the creative process. Through films, essays, and writings; installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series, and events Green investigates circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories, as well as what has been imagined and invented.

Ryan Trecartin's video practice both in form and in function advances understandings of post-millennial technology, narrative and identity, and also propels these matters as expressive mediums. His work depicts worlds where consumer culture and interactive systems are amplified to absurd or nihilistic proportions and characters circuitously strive to find agency and meaning in their lives. The combination of assaultive, nearly impenetrable avant-garde logics and equally outlandish, virtuoso uses of color, form, drama, and montage produces a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life.

A participant in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Theaster Gates is a potter, musician, and performance artist who has earned national acclaim for his intelligent commentaries on race, the city and the museum.

Chicago artist Daniel Everett discusses his work on view in the UBS 12 x 12: New Artists / New Work series.

Artist talk by Erik Wenzel.

Matt Keegan works mainly with photography, collage, printmaking, and sculpture. Recently, he has been thinking about the myriad possibilities of archives, social history projects, cities, and ways to map and record time.

This monthly lecture series connects local, contemporary art with the vast collection of the Art Institute. Chicago-based artists discuss the work they’re creating today while connecting with the work of artists of the past.

Working within the tradition of conceptual art, Ryan Gander’s multifaceted practice interweaves factual and fictional narrative elements and a wide range of references that encompass early Modernism, architecture, popular culture, art history, design, and children’s literature. Gander’s varied output has included an installation of crystal balls laser etched with the image of a falling sheet of paper, a children’s book that tells the story of a boy who witnesses British modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger build the Trellick Tower, and a fabricated pop band comprised of only a name and promotional materials. Balancing self-reflexivity and humor his installations at times appear ...

Stephanie Syjuco's recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included re-creating several 1950s Modernist furniture pieces by French designer Charlotte Perriand using cast-off material and rubbish in Beijing, China; starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; and searching for fragments of the Berlin Wall in her immediate surroundings in an attempt to revisit the moment of ...

Artist talk by Abelardo Morell.

The Franks (Peter and Marilyn Frank) will talk about their artwork. The Franks have a foot both in the art world and the design world and are participants in the current exhibition TypO in the Gahlberg Gallery.

Colombia-based artist Doris Salcedo explores the significance of everyday objects and their power to implicate history. Her sculptures and installations infuse domestic materials with gestures of political and psychological archeology, and their sense of absence hovers in the space between the empowered and voiceless.

Jan Tichy's installations address the multi-layered narratives of urban spaces and architectural contexts. Using light as his medium, his site-specific commission will animate the ground floor vestibule. His minimalist approach leaves his works open to interpretation, focusing attention on the impact of his materials to transform our experience.

Since the late 1960s, John Knight has utilized existing forms of distribution and communication—including magazine subscriptions, museum mailing lists, travel posters, recipes, and floor plans—to reconsider the social structures and value systems that support the exchange of ideas and commodities. By sublimating expected graphic identities, Knight’s work, as the artist explained, "puts into question how the design affect mediates ones understanding of subjects/objects, within their institutional registers." For example, in Museotypes, 1983 (created for an exhibition at the Renaissance Society and on view at the end of February at the Art Institute in gallery 294) 60 bone-china plates commemorate international ...

Amy Franceschini is a pollinator who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural, and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her projects reveal the ways that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995 Franceschini founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists; in 2004 she co-founded Free Soil, a collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social and political organization of space.

Artist talk by Jorge Lucero.

John Miller is an artist, writer and musician based in New York and Berlin. Among other things, his work considers questions of production, reception, and value as it relates to the making and circulation of art. Using deadpan humor, in combination with everyday debris, fake gold leaf, brown paint, and genre tableau, Miller creates sculpture, photography, painting, and writing that confound the distinctions in the spectacular, the exploitative, the everyday, and the value of craftsmanship. As a critic he is keenly interested in the role of aesthetics within mass culture.

Widely known for his innovative fine art installations, Doug Aitken is at the frontier of 21st-century communication. Utilizing a wide array of media and artistic approaches, Aitken's eye leads us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts. Aitken's work effortlessly slips into our media-saturated cultural unconscious allowing the viewer to experience cinema in a unique way by deconstructing a connection between sound, moving images, and the rhythms of our surroundings.

Lauded in 2008 by New York Times critic Roberta Smith as "one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century," Sterling Ruby explores individual desire, transgression, social power structures, neurosis, and paranoia through a diverse practice that includes richly glazed amorphous ceramics, large-scale spray painted canvases, hypnotic videos, poured urethane sculptures, inscribed Formica monoliths, nail polish drawings, and collage. Fusing sources from various pop culture and art historical references—such as body builders, ancient art, graffiti, maximum-security prisons, modernist architecture, Minimalism, transvestites, pornography, cults, and gang members—Ruby’s art perhaps can be summed up best by his widely quoted ...

Michael Rakowitz's work confronts our shared political consciousness through performance, sculpture, graphic design and derives it particular poignancy from an engagement with the world that is at once pragmatic and poetic.

SAIC alumna Saya Woolfalk (MFA 2004) will present her ongoing project No Place, a multimedia, fictional future that reworks tropes of sexual, racial, and gender difference. The characters and stories in Woolfalk’s constructed reality evoke travel narratives, science fiction, and the rhetoric of anthropology to investigate human possibilities (and impossibilities). Through diverse forms of installation, video, painting, drawing, performance, and sound, she reflects on human life and its future through configurations of biology, sociality, and the environment.

William Cordova is a Peruvian-American artist working in various media to address the layered history of the urban landscape, mixing references to politics, history, race, and pop culture.

Join renowned artist Jason Salavon as he discusses his recent exhibitions Spigot, on view at the Hyde Park Art Center September 23 - February 6, 2010 on the Art Center’s Digital Catwalk Facade. Salavon’s exhibition experiments with the artistic possibilities of information technology and unconventional source materials. In this large-scale projection on the Hyde Park Art Center’s façade, pulsating fields of color serve as the background for rapidly emerging pieces of text; these images alternate with multicolored, interlocking squares that recede and project in a dynamic rhythm.

Joe Hardesty will discuss his current show and the work he created during his fellowship year in Germany and his travels through central Europe.