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

08/25/2026

Mark your calendars for the Visiting Artists Program's Fall 2026 season!

This fall, we welcome an exciting lineup of artists, designers, and thinkers to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Join us for free, public talks by Catherine Opie, Hamza Walker, Ronald Rael, McKenzie Wark, and Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. Be a part of one of Chicago's leading public forums focused on contemporary art, design, and scholarship.

Learn more: saic.edu/vap

05/08/2026

That's a wrap on another incredible year of the Visiting Artists Program!

Thank you to all of the amazing artists, designers, and scholars who joined us this season. Your generosity, insight, and conversations made a lasting impact on our students and community.

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Mark Pascale

Lee Mingwei
Jennifer Packer






We're so grateful to everyone who attended and supported VAP this year, and we can't wait to welcome more inspiring voices next season!

Special thanks to our incredible campus and community partners for their collaboration and support throughout the year.

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1. Lee Mingwei: Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor Lecture
2. Audience Q&A
3. Cecilia Vicuña with students
4. JJJJJerome Ellis performance
5. Student walkthrough of Collection in Conversation with Pablo Helguera at the MCA Chicago

05/05/2026

TONIGHT!

Join us for a lecture by artist Haegue Yang!

🗓May 5, 6:00-7:30pm
📍Fullerton Hall, The Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave
✨Free and all welcome

Haegue Yang is a prolific artist known for her versatile works ranging from room-scaled installations and performative sculptures, to paper collages and staged performances. Her multisensory environments activate perception beyond the visual, creating immersive experiences that treat issues such as labor, migration, and displacement from the oblique vantage of the aesthetic.

Image: Haegue Yang, Approaching: Choreography Engineered in Never-Past Tense, 2012, dOCUMENTA (13). Photo: Nils Klinger

05/01/2026

Haegue Yang: Leap Year, Hayward Gallery London, October 9, 2024 - January 5 2025

Leap Year is the fist major survey of Haegue Yang in the UK. It presented a comprehensive study of Yang's work from the early 2000s to today, highlighting how her artworks resonate on a personal and sensory level while also speaking to social, political, and spiritual ideas.

Yang (born 1971, Seoul) lives and works in both Berlin and Seoul. Her multisensory environments encourage perception beyond the visual, creating immersive experiences that highlight issues such as labor, migration, and displacement.

Learn more about the exhibition from Hayward Gallery senior curator Yung Ma.

529 likes, 5 comments. "Explore the works of Haegue Yang with Leap Year curator Yung Ma"

04/28/2026

Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous is currently on view at MOCA LA through August 2.

Read about the exhibition below and then come hear Haegue Yang speak about her work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on May 5!

Established in 1979, we are the only artist-founded museum in Los Angeles. We are dedicated to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art.

04/24/2026

Join us May 5 for a free public lecture by artist Haegue Yang!

Haegue Yang (b. 1971 in Seoul, South Korea) creates artworks that span a vast range of media—from collage to kinetic sculpture and room-scaled installations—Yang’s work links disparate histories and traditions in a visual idiom all her own. The artist draws on a variety of craft techniques and materials and the cultural connotations they carry: from drying racks to Venetian blinds, hanji paper to artificial straw. She is known for her multisensory environments that activate perception beyond the visual, creating immersive experiences that treat issues such as labor, migration, and displacement from the oblique vantage of the aesthetic. Ensuring that her references remain wayward and personalized, Yang prizes fluidity over unified narratives. “Maintaining an aporia between form and content, material and subject, abstraction and history, is an act of translating the struggle of one’s life,” she has said.

🗓️May 5, 6:00-7:30pm
📍Fullerton Hall, The Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave
✨Free and all welcome

This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services. The auditorium is wheelchair accessible and hearing assisted devices are available. For additional access requests, visit saic.edu/access.

04/21/2026

TONIGHT!

Join us for a lecture by artist Linda Sormin!

📍 6:00-7:30pm
🗓 Fullerton Hall, The Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave
✨ Free and all welcome

Linda Sormin’s ceramic and mixed media sculptures and site-responsive installations embody vulnerable and fragmented parts of human experience. Since the early 2000’s, Sormin has established a distinct visual and material language, using raw clay, fired ceramics, found objects, and interactive methods. She integrates writing, video, sound, and hand-cut paintings with clay, metal, and wood. Sormin’s research and writing cast light on how her work has always been influenced by cultural practices in her family histories rooted in Thailand, China, and Indonesia.

Images:
1. Linda Sormin. Photo by Sophia Taylor
2., 3., 4. Linda Sormin, Uncertain Ground, 2025, ceramic and mixed media installation, dimensions variable, Gardiner Museum, Toronto. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid

04/16/2026

Watch Linda Sormin talk about the ideas and inspirations for her recent solo exhibition "Uncertain Ground" that was on view at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto (Nov. 6, 2025 - April 12, 2026).

Linda Sormin talking about the ideas and inspirations for her installation "Uncertain Ground" at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto (Nov. 6, 2025 - April 12, 2026).

04/13/2026

Next week we are excited to host a public lecture by visiting artist Linda Sormin!

🗓️ April 21, 6:00-7:30 p.m.
📍The Art Institute of Chicago, Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan Ave
✨ Free and all welcome

Linda Sormin’s ceramic and mixed media sculptures and site-responsive installations embody vulnerable and fragmented parts of human experience. Since the early 2000’s, Sormin has established a distinct visual and material language, using raw clay, fired ceramics, found objects, and interactive methods. She integrates writing, video, sound, and hand-cut paintings with clay, metal, and wood. Sormin’s research and writing cast light on how her work has always been influenced—though at times unwittingly—by cultural practices in her family histories rooted in Thailand, China, and Indonesia.

Recent exhibitions include large scale installations in Ceramics in the Expanded Field: Sculpture, Performance and the Possibilities of Clay at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2021–23) and Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2023). Linda Sormin: Uncertain Ground, her first solo museum exhibition, was on view at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto through April 12. Her work is included in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Gardiner Museum, Toronto; CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art, Middelfart, Denmark; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Sormin lives and works in New York City and is a professor of Studio Art at New York University.

This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services.

Image: Linda Sormin. Photo by David Schmitz

04/07/2026

TONIGHT! Join us for a lecture by renowned artist Cecilia Vicuña!

Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean visual artist, poet, filmmaker, and activist based in New York. She created the autonomous concept of "Precarious Art" in the mid-1960s in Chile to name what disappears. Her poetic work in space, performance, and visual arts is considered a decolonizing vision that anticipates ecofeminism.

🗓 April 7, 6:00-7:30pm
📍 The Art Institute of Chicago, Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan Ave
Doors open at 5:45pm
✨ Free and all welcome

This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services.

Image: Cecilia Vicuña, Cloud-net, 1998, street performance, New York. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by César Paternosto. © 2025 Cecilia Vicuña