Please join us on Friday, April 6 for the opening reception of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Visual and Critical Studies 2018 graduate exhibition helps it to feel, compels it to make. 

The evening will begin at 5PM with a keynote lecture by Doug Ashford- visual artist, curator, member of artists’ collaborative Group Material, and Associate Professor at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. 

Together we will toast the exhibition at 6PM.

Saturday, April 7, public symposium presentations will take place from 10AM – 5PM among the thirteen graduating scholars and makers. The cohort will be in conversation with one another, as well as invited guests, as they share their work in a variety of forms, including film screenings, performances, readings, lecture and dialogue.

helps it to feel compels it to make presents works which call upon the contrast between epic and dramatic theater set out by Bertolt Brecht as means to celebrate and contemplate personal and collective histories, ideas and identities. The scholars and makers on view put pressure on this distinction by engaging both the dramatic and the epic to form new, critical positions that reimagine how knowledge is visualized, written and shared. Both experiences and insights are communicated; suggestions and arguments are used. There is an interest in what drives and in what motivates; events which move in a straight line and in irregular curves. Stepping across the line between what we feel and what we do, they simultaneously undertake creative investigation and propose gestures of the world as it is and the world as it is becoming.