WELCOME: Lisa Wainwright

Lisa Wainwright is a professor in SAIC’s Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism. She previously served as the Dean of Faculty and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For the past 15 years, Lisa has held major leadership roles for the institution including Dean of the renowned Graduate Program. Wainwright has authored numerous articles in books and international professional journals, as well as developed an extensive list of exhibition catalogues. She has lectured on topics from Rauschenberg and the history of the found object in art, to Contemporary Art and the rise of a neo-decadent movement at the turn of the 20th century, and has curated multiple exhibitions. Lisa Wainwright received her Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, from Vanderbilt University and earned both a Masters and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: David Getsy

David J. Getsy is a historian of art and performance whose research focuses on queer and transgender themes in modern and contemporary art. His books include the award-winning Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (Chicago, 2022); Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale, 2015/2023); Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (Yale 2010); and Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art (MIT 2016), an anthology of artists’ writings that includes the work of Barbara DeGenevieve. He was curator of the retrospective exhibition Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble for the Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York, and the research for that exhibition informs his current book project, preliminarily titled Street Addresses: Performing the Queer Life of the Street in 1970s New York. He is currently the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. Previously, he taught for sixteen years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is, since 2022, Professor Emeritus. 

INTRODUCTORY SPEAKER: Alan Labb

Alan Labb is a lens-based visual artist currently working in Chicago, IL. While earlier work focuses on the dynamics between autobiography, body image, and gender, his recent work focuses on Environmental justice and explores historical contextualization through site-specific projects and installations. Labb was the chair of the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2018-2024. From 2017-2021, he served as a Distinguished Visiting  Professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts. Labb’s work has been exhibited at the Setouchi Triennale (Kagawa, Japan), SF Camerawork (San Francisco, CA), Schneider Gallery (Chicago, IL), Contemporary Art Gallery (Storrs, CT), Avu Academy of Fine Arts (Prague), Temple Art Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), and Bridge Center of Contemporary Art (El Paso, TX). His work has been featured in numerous publications, including SF Camerawork Quarterly, Luna Cornea Quarterly, AfterImage, and Hyphen Magazine. His work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum.

Pedagogiphilia

MODERATOR:  Adam Greteman

Adam J. Greteman, Ph.D. (He/Him) is a philosopher of education whose work explores ethical questions raised by expanding understandings of sexuality and gender in education. He is the author of Queers Teach This! Queer and Trans Pleasures, Politics and Pedagogues (Bloomsbury, 2024), Sexualities and Genders in Education: Toward Queer Thriving (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2018), and the the co-author of On Being Liked: Queer Subjects and Religious Discourses (Myers Education Press, 2021) and The Pedagogies and Politics of Liking (Routledge, 2017). Greteman is the co-founder of the LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project, a school community partnership that brings together LGBTQ+ younger and older folks for sustained intergenerational dialogues. Further information about the project can be found at: generationliberation.com. Greteman is currently the Chair and Associate Professor of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sean Fader (he/they) is currently an Assistant Professor and the Associate Chair in the Department of Photography and Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  Fader received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his MA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and his BFA from the New School in New York City.   Fader is represented by Brigitte Mulholland Gallery in Paris.  Fader’s most recent solo show, Sugar Daddy: Dear Danielle, was at Denny Gallery in NYC.  Fader’s work Insufficient Memory is currently touring in Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art, which originated at the Buffalo AKG Museum.  Fader will be included in the bicentennial show for the Brooklyn Museum in 2024.   Fader has been awarded prestigious residencies at Art Omi, Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts, Yaddo, Stove Works, and The Wassaic Project. He has received press coverage in MOMUS, NYTimes, Hyperallergic, British Journal of Photography, Art F City, Humble Arts Foundation, the Huffington Post, WWD, and Slate.

Through performance, Amber Hawk Swanson’s work explores care, animacy and desire as they function in the context of queerness and disability. Hawk Swanson has exhibited nationally and internationally for the span of her twenty-year career, with recent venues including Performance Space (New York, NY), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), PS2 (Belfast, UK), Denny Gallery (New York, NY), Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY) and Locust Projects (Miami, FL). Hawk Swanson is the Creative Director and one of three Co-Creators of The Harmony Show. She holds an MA in performance studies from Brown University and an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Hawk Swanson teaches in the sculpture department of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Jennifer Reeder (she/her) was recently named by Bong Joon Ho as a filmmaker to watch in the 2020s. She constructs nuanced genre films about relationships, trauma, and coping that borrow from a range of forms including after-school specials and amateur music videos and could be classified as NOIR CAMP. These films have shown at festivals and museums around the world, including Sundance, Berlin, Rotterdam, SXSW, Tribeca, BFI-LFF, and The Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale.  She received the 2024 Tour De Force Award from the Chicago International Film Festival. She has been an advisor at the Sundance Indigenous Program and the Sundance Ignite Program.  She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the USA Fellowship, the Alpert Film Award residency at MacDowell Colony, a Creative Capital Grant and the SFFIM/Rainin Foundation award. With Barbara DeGenevieve as her advisor, Reeder received an MFA from SAIC in 1996, and her shorts can be found on The Criterion Channel.

Oli Rodriguez (they/he) is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography, performance, installation and poetry. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department (Photography) at California State University, Los Angeles. His intersectional research and interdisciplinary projects conceptually focus on queerness, notions of passing, visualizing the performativity of gender, explorations in appropriation, performative interactions with the public as collaborator, visualizing other representations of the AIDS pandemic while referencing historical movements in gender, racial and feminist histories. He curated the exhibition, The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He is a part of the monograph Confronting the Abject, named from his research themed class that he co-taught with Catherine Opie at SAIC. His publication, Papi, archives the AIDS pandemic through his queer family in Chicago during the 1980s. He also just finished his short documentary film, LYNDALE, exploring toxic masculinity, cyclical familial trauma and queerness, currently distributed by Video Data Bank (VDB). ​​​​​​​Rodriguez has screened, performed, lectured and exhibited his works internationally and nationally.

Celebrating the Erotics of Art – Theory and Practice

MODERATOR:  Jeremy Biles

Juliana Huxtable (she/her) is a writer, artist and musician living and working Between New York and Berlin. She has had solo exhibitions at Reena Spauls, New York, Project Native Informant, in London, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. Her work has been exhibited and collected at The Guggenheim, The New Museum, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The ICA London. Her forthcoming poetry collection will be published with Wonder Press in 2025. Her first collection of texts, Mucus In my Pineal Gland, was co-published by Wonder Press and Capricious in 2017, and she co-wrote Life: A Novel with Hannah Black, which was published in 2018 with Buchhandlung Walther König.

John Neff (he/they) is an artist, curator, and teacher living in Chicago. He is a founding curatorial board member of Chicago’s Iceberg Projects, a teaching artist at the non-profit Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, and a core faculty member in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Low-Residency MFA Program. Neff has his exhibited in galleries and museums nationally since 1999, including Artists Space (New York), King’s Leap (New York), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Renaissance Society (Chicago), Scherben (Berlin), Donald Young Gallery (Chicago), and Regards Gallery (Chicago).

Amina Ross is an artist whose practice scrutinizes the subtle workings of systems of power and their influence on sense perception and behavior. Ross’ creative output spans video, sound, sculpture and installation, emphasizing nonlinear storytelling, free association and plural meaning. Their work has been recently exhibited at MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Ruffin Gallery (University of Virginia), Someday (New York, NY), the Hessel Museum of Art (Hudson, NY), the Tang Teaching Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY) and Sentiment (Zurich, CH). In the summer of 2023 they were a featured artist at the 68th annual Flaherty Film Seminar: Queer World Mending and in 2024 they were a Macdowell Fellow. Ross was the 2023-2024 Estelle Lebowitz Artist in Residence at Rutgers University. They recently completed residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Fire Island Artist Residency, Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting, Wave Hill, Abrons Art Center, and Harvestworks. They hold a BFA from SAIC and an MFA from Yale School of Art, where they received the Fannie B. Pardee Prize in sculpture.

The Panhandler Project and Interclass Contact

MODERATOR:  Kirin Wachter-Grene

Kirin Wachter-Grene (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in English with a focus on 19th -21st century African American literature and gender and sexuality studies. Her research and teaching interests include Black feminist thought; Black sexuality studies; Black queer studies; African American literature and paraliterature; BIPOC speculative fiction; queer studies and history; BDSM and kink; censorship; and Samuel R. Delany. Dr. Wachter-Grene is the guest-editor of two special issues of The Black Scholar: “At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure” (50.2), published in 2020 in honor of the journal’s 50^th Anniversary, and the double-issue “Edgeplay: Black Radical Pleasure II” (53.3/4), published in 2023. She sits on the journal’s Active Editorial Board. Dr. Wachter-Grene’s academic writing is published in African American Review, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, Feminist Formations, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and is forthcoming in Social Text, Palimpsest, Cultural Critique, and Post45. Additionally, her work is included in various edited collections.. Dr. Wachter-Grene was the 2017-18 Visiting Scholar at Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum. While at the LA&M she conducted research into Black women’s historical, manifold involvement with leather, kink, and fetish communities which inspired her monograph Black Kenosis: The Erotic Undoing of African American Literature, forthcoming from Fordham University Press. Her second monograph, on sex work in crime fiction, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Keren Moscovitch is an artist, philosopher and curator based in Brooklyn, NY and the Shenandoah Valley. Her practice explores radical intimacy through psychoanalytic, ontological and ecological lenses. Most recently, her book Radical Intimacy in Contemporary Art: Abjection, Revolt, and Obejcthood was published by Bloomsbury Academic. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at Penumbra Foundation, Sydney International Film Festival, Experimental Forum and BEAVER the book project. She serves on the faculty at the School of Visual Arts, and at Parsons School of Design at the New School.

Clifford Owens is a visual artist. His solo museum exhibitions include Anthology at MoMA PS1 (2011) Better the Rebel You Know at the former Cornerhouse in Manchester, England (2014), and Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2011). His performance-based projects have been featured at the Museum of Modern Art (2017), Baltimore Museum of Art (2019), Brooklyn Academy of Music (2014). Owens’ art is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Owens was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1971, and he lives and works between New York City and Jersey City.

Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down, and 100 Boyfriends, a collection of stories. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award in Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band The Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. Born in Triana, Alabama, he’s lived in Oakland, California, for more than two decades.

Avgi Saketopoulou (she/her) is a psychoanalyst and serves on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU press, 2023), co-author of Gender Without Identity (UIT, 2023), and at work on a book manuscript provisionally titled Sadisms. Her interview on psychoanalysis is in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum in Vienna.