I took my first sabbatical during the 2022-2023 academic year. During my sabbatical I had a number of international opportunities that expanded my scholarly networks and deepened my scholarship on LGBTQ+ issues in education. During the fall semester of 2022, I was a visiting scholar at the University of Iceland Reykjavík where I spent six weeks doing research on my book Queers Teach This! and exploring Iceland. In the spring of 2023, I was a Hunt-Simes Fellow in Sexuality Studies and Junior Chair of the Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies (HISS) at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC) at the University of Sydney. I spent two months in Sydney, starting my time there as one of the inaugural faculty members of HISS, an experimental queer school that took place during World Pride 2023. While a fellow, I worked with a number of Sydney based scholars and continued to conduct research for my book Queers Teach This! Finally, I had the Krems Residency in Krems, Austria. This residency gave me five weeks to complete a draft of my book as well as begin conducting an oral history project on elder LGBTQ+ friends. Throughout all of these travels and professional opportunities, I continued to support and engage in the ongoing work of The LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project which was in its 4th year and concluded with our first public art exhibition Iridescent Footprints at the Center on Addison, the project’s community partner. The opportunities I had during my sabbatical continue to influence my work, increase my scholarly reach, and have opened up new collaborations with scholars across the globe. Since my sabbatical, I was invited to return as Chair of the Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies in 2024 and 2025. The LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project received a Spencer Foundation Large Research Grant that subsequently funded the project’s 5th and 6th years. And my book Queers Teach This! was published open-access by Bloomsbury press in the Fall 2024. I found the time and opportunities that emerged from my sabbatical to breathe new energy not only into my scholarship but also my teaching practice. I think my sabbatical provided me with space and time to reconnect with my scholarship and explore ways of teaching in conversation with colleagues across disciplines and the world. While the year flew by, the relationships that emerged from that year have continued to develop and thrive.
Sabbatical is an honor , when you are given a period of time to work on only your work, and either start from a block of Marble, or in my case continue a deep dive into the middle of a sprawling piece, working to finish with your present mind and hands, something you started 10 years ago.
This will be my fifth and final sabbatical. as I will teach for several more years, I pass the baton of making and teaching to those younger than I.
I spent my sabbatical in 2023-2024 as the inaugural Lenore Tawney Fellow researching the Tawney archives at both the John Michael Kohler art Preserve and at the Tawney Foundation in New York City. It was the most curious and productive research. I also visited medieval castles in the South of France and spent some time hiking and looking at trees.
Reflections on curating Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits
My 2022 sabbatical supported the curation of the exhibition Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits at the Garden Museum in London. This opportunity not only marked a pivotal moment in my curatorial trajectory but also reaffirmed the indispensable role sabbaticals play in the intellectual and professional lives of faculty, especially for those of us engaged in research-intensive, time-sensitive projects that extend beyond the studio or classroom.
The exhibition, based on my book Lucian Freud Herbarium (Prestel: 2019) was the first to explore Freud’s lifelong yet overlooked relationship with the plant world. Drawing from decades of scattered evidence like paintings, drawings, interviews, and archival references, it required extensive and methodical research to identify and bring together over 30 works spanning the artist’s career. Given that Freud’s paintings now command extremely high market prices, reaching the collectors and institutions that hold them is not a straightforward task. Many owners remain intentionally elusive, reluctant to lend or even confirm the possession of works. Tracking these down required persistent outreach and diplomacy, supported by trips to London where face-to-face conversations often proved more fruitful than virtual ones.
Balancing this level of commitment while based in Chicago demanded an extraordinary amount of coordination. I spent countless hours on Zoom with the Garden Museum team, conservators, art handlers, potential lenders, and researchers. Every decision, from the sequencing of the exhibition to wall colors, conservation conditions, and even the height of hang, was deliberated across time zones, requiring careful planning and flexibility.
Perhaps most crucially, the sabbatical gave me the uninterrupted space to write a 10,000-word catalogue essay that framed Freud’s plant paintings in light of broader aesthetic and philosophical questions about realism, intimacy, and vegetal life. I also authored over thirty interpretive labels for individual works, each requiring precise language and historical sensitivity. These texts formed the narrative backbone of the exhibition and demanded an immersive writing process that could never have been achieved amid the full cadence of teaching and institutional responsibilities.
Beyond writing, my role involved extensive public engagement: preparing and delivering multiple talks, meeting with journalists to frame the show’s significance, and liaising with the Freud estate and curatorial partners. These forms of outreach were not only crucial for the exhibition’s visibility, but also provided opportunities for intellectual exchange that enriched my teaching upon returning to SAIC.
This sabbatical has affirmed that time away from regular teaching duties is not a retreat but a great opportunity to grow for the individual as well as the institution. The experience not only enhanced my research profile but allowed me to return to the classroom with renewed energy, fresh insight, and expanded networks that directly benefit my students. I was able to translate aspects of the Freud project into seminar discussions, visual culture analysis, and curatorial strategies shared with graduate cohorts.
That SAIC offers sabbaticals to part-time faculty is both forward-thinking and commendable. In a time when many institutions overlook the deep contributions of part-time educators, this policy recognizes the necessity of providing time and space for critical projects that otherwise could not unfold. Sabbaticals allow faculty to take risks, to pursue complex lines of inquiry, and to engage with the broader cultural field in ways that ultimately enhance the learning environment we build together.
Time is one of the most precious of commodities; a paid leave is a gift of time. It’s a chance to leave the structure of a semester to plan for more expansive endeavors. One of those was a trip to the northwest corner of Uganda, the West Nile region, where, among other things, I researched contemporary cloth and basketry traditions. I shared my experience and learnings with the School community during a Mitchell Lecture sponsored by the Department of Fiber and Material Studies in the fall of 2024.
The Zone of Pure Doubt, or, How I Formulated a Certain Sabbatical
Judd Morrissey, August 2025
It has long been my practice to follow language. When I began to contemplate, after nearly 20 years of teaching at SAIC, the horizon of my first sabbatical in 2022-23, I noted the connections between the words sabbatical and sabbath, their shared etymological rooting in the enactment of a structured rest. Beginning with this pairing of words, I began to contemplate a poetics of rest, one that might enable me to put obsolete works and fading memories to rest, to make space, as I cross through the middle of life, for what is still to come, the rest of my body of work.
A sabbatical is clearly not an idle rest but an active one with expectations of professional enhancement, particularly in the present day with its emphasis on productivity over other temporalities. It occurred to me that rest is always entangled with the agitated shivers of its homophonic double, the word wrest. Does the past need to be wrested awake, once more wrestled with, in order to finally go away quietly?
Because the sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and ends the following nightfall, its clock is set not by the mechanical tick of hours but by the slow arc of the sun. Its arrival drifts with geography, sliding across latitudes and time zones. More curiously, I learned that its moment can be elusive—uncertain to the point of vanishing. This uncertainty springs from an ancient dispute over the halakhic dateline, the boundary in Jewish law that marks where a day turns. That invisible meridian does not align with the international dateline of global timekeeping. To reconcile the two, allowances are made: in Hawaii, for instance, one may keep the sabbath on Saturday in step with the local week. Yet beyond every rule lies a zone of pure doubt—a thin longitudinal swath of Pacific water and islands where the sabbath’s hour, the hour of rest, cannot be precisely found.
In researching the history of the dateline(s), I came across nautical line-crossing ceremonies that date back to at least the 16th century. These elaborate rites have often taken the form of violent hazing scenarios in which sailors undergo a symbolic metamorphosis from polywog to shellback as they cross the equator for the first time, hardening into a manhood presumably armored for colonial conquest.
But when we cross the line
It will bend us
Because our bodies are becoming softer
While I was pursuing this line of inquiry, my collaborator of a decade now, Ava Aviva Avnisan, in the early days of gender transition, had become preoccupied with Disney princesses and was learning to cover the song How Far I’ll Go from the animated film Moana on guitar. In the song, Moana famously sits on the water’s edge of a Polynesian Island, gazing out to where the light meets the sea, and asks: Will I cross that line?
For my year of wrest, I arranged an artist’s residency at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where I stayed in a Signalman’s House, the former station of one who hoisted configurations of coded flags to direct ships in the harbor. I then traveled backwards in time for a second residency at the Center for Biographical Research in Honolulu. During this time, Ava Aviva and I met on the Big Island of Hawaii, where we circumnavigated the trans-temporal volcanic landscape and wrote poems and songs in dialogue with one another. We Lidar scanned ourselves in the primeval abundance of the rainforest surrounding our cottage, choreographing our bodies into a pose inspired by the painting Jacob Wrestles with the Angel (1855) by Paul Gustave Dore.
The work included in the Triennial, drawn from a larger body of writing and performance, The Zone of Pure Doubt, symbolically traces the course of our relationship and its evolving poetic vocabulary through the fascination and uncertainty of radical transformation. As the exhibition neared, we had the opportunity to work with a talented producer, Mario Ávalos, at Resonante Estudio in Mexico City, where we fleshed out two of our original acoustic songs into a debut musical release under the band name, Nobo’s Muse. In the installation, the two songs play in alternation on two turntables so that at any given time, one turntable plays a song while the other emits ambient bird recordings. The turntables are placed in relation to a 30 foot wallpaper panorama made from Lidar scan data, and a collaboratively interwoven text upon the floor that winds through the work in the shape of the international dateline.
In a time and place where academia is existentially threatened and administrative responsibilities can eclipse the essential commitments of an artistic practice, sabbatical is a more progressive and necessary institution than ever before, enabling unencumbered creative inquiry and art-life balance against the precarity of creative and intellectual vocations in America.
Special thanks to the many hosts and collaborators who helped materialize this installation and the larger body of work from which it comes: Lisa Samuels and Alys Longly at the University of Auckland; John Zuern at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa; and artistic collaborators on the music release: Mario Ávalos, Diego Mier, Pedro Ángel, Sarah Lutkenhaus, Eugene Tang, Kyle Dunn, Danielle Franco, and Saumitra Chandratreya.
During my 2024–2025 sabbatical, I worked within Kohler Company’s pottery division, an industrial ceramics facility. The scale of operations—marked by continuous production and an abundant supply of ceramic slip—enabled both material experimentation and the realization of a major corporate commission. Immersed in the rhythmic discipline of factory processes, I engaged a scale and infrastructure wholly unattainable in a conventional studio setting. This residency not only expanded the physical possibilities of my practice but also recontextualized my relationship to labor, repetition, and materiality.
After nearly 28 years of teaching as an adjunct faculty member at SAIC, I was thrilled to take a much-anticipated semester off in Fall 2024 to focus on long-delayed research. For years, I had tried to pursue this work in the margins—reading and experimenting during the summer, in between professional projects and family commitments—so having dedicated time for it was truly invaluable.
Being invited to participate in the Sabbatical Triennial was an incredible and unexpected bonus. It marked the first time I had the opportunity to exhibit my own work, and I’m deeply grateful to the Frank family for the 2024–2025 Karen and Jim Frank Excellence in Teaching Award. Their generous support provided the time and resources that made my participation possible.
Together, the sabbatical and the exhibition became essential platforms for sharing my discoveries—with colleagues, students, architecture peers, and clients. Through this work, and especially through a hands-on workshop I attended in France focusing on natural materials such as hemp, clay, and straw, I’ve deepened my exploration into sustainable, durable, and recyclable construction methods. These materials show real promise in improving thermal insulation, increasing biomass, and creating carbon sinks in building practices.
Returning to Chicago with this experience has also connected me to a growing network of like-minded architects across the U.S. and in the local community, all driven by a shared commitment to environmentally responsible design.
I look forward to continuing to integrate and share these insights with my students in the semesters ahead.
The work of teaching is simultaneously intellectual, creative, emotional and relational. At a place like SAIC, which offers students individualized attention, specific, often specialized content and approaches one wouldn’t find elsewhere, the work of teaching is deeply meaningful and intense. Coupled with expectations of a high level of creative and professional accomplishment in one’s personal practice, as well as linkages between one’s creative and pedagogical work, teaching here is both enormously rewarding and personally and creatively draining.
Thinking about my classes and my students tends to flow into all my available mental and emotional space, making carving out time/capacity to develop new directions or reimagine my current practice difficult. My sabbatical enabled me to explore new possibilities and build new creative muscles. It was a critical, much needed time of reflection, exploration and freedom.
During my AY 22/23 sabbatical, and after a long absence due to the pandemic, I returned to Mexico for an extended five-month period of research and reflection.
While in Chiapas, I continued my embodied research into pre-Columbian Mayan art and imagery. We traveled to the archaeological site of Yaxchilán to study its iconic lintels and to investigate pre-Columbian practices of bloodletting and sacrifice. Human sacrifice has long been part of the folklore surrounding pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and some anthropologists have proposed that these ceremonial acts functioned as forms of performance.
My research in Mexico explores sacrifice and the bleeding body—ancient and contemporary, ceremonial, medicinal, and spiritual. This investigation informs new images and performance tableaux—living portraits in which the performer morphs between iconic figures representing those often called leeches in our society.
In my performances, the leeches—and the dramatic flow of blood they incite—become a ritual of performed sacrifice, creating space for resistance, witnessing, and healing.
This year was the first year I’ve ever been on a sabbatical or been on an artist residency. Both experiences were really amazing and opened up new considerations for the work I do and the classes I teach at SAIC. The bulk of my work during my sabbatical was starting a new non-profit organization called Walls Turned Sideways. The space is a gallery and community space dedicated to people impacted by incarceration. Our work at Walls Turned Sideways is organized into 4 areas: Exhibition & Studio; Political Education; Community Care and Community Building. Through this work we have created a really vibrant space that hosts regular exhibitions, art workshops with formerly incarcerated folks and families, book talks, film screenings and reentry circles for families and people coming home from prison. In particular this year I was able to start a project called “Liberation Lab”. This started when the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights commissioned us to create media tools for a campaign to end solitary confinement. We created a collaborative project where were able to hire a SAIC graduate who taught 8 formerly incarcerated artists how to create stop-motion animations. The artists collaborated and shared their stories of their own experiences with solitary confinement. The work is being used for a national campaign to pass the Nelson Mandela Act. Other important work I’ve been able to do this year with Walls Turned SIdeways is a) work with a theatre troupe of formerly incarcerated writers and actors who organized reentry circles to act out new ways of being in the free world, as returning home from prison after 15-20-and 30 years is a huge struggle b) work with a curator who organized a show around environmental justice and incarceration c) work with a Palestinian artist to organize a show from Gaza. However, tragically, the artist Ismail Abu Hatab, was killed in an Israeli bombing during the organization of the show.
Finally– during this sabbatical I was honored to go to the Krems Residency in Krems Austria. This residency gave me five weeks to work on a hand-drawn animation project that was started between 2023-2024 at Stateville prison. The project was never completed with all the artists because of a historic and welcomed closure of the prison due to environmental hazards. With permission of the artists who started the project with me, I was able to finish the animation during the residency.
Throughout the residency and my sabbatical at large, I have also dug into reading about pedagogy and the changing landscape of now. As I write the US Dept of Education is being dismantled and this is a time that many educators like myself are asking deep questions about the future of art and education in the coming years.
In the 2022–2023 academic year, I undertook my first sabbatical. I’m deeply grateful for the time it afforded me to focus on research and studio work with a level of depth and continuity I hadn’t experienced since graduate school.
Over the course of the year, I worked on Gestural Traces and Material Memory, a collaborative project with composer and pianist Amy Wurtz. The project centers on a community of senior citizens, whose choir Amy accompanies. After spending time attending their lively rehearsals and getting to know the members, I invited volunteers to participate in the project. I recorded and transcribed their stories about home and used motion capture to document their hand gestures. These recordings became the foundation for a body of visual work I developed throughout the sabbatical.
In fall 2022, I undertook a residency at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences in Georgia, where I began creating the artwork inspired by the seniors’ stories. In the quiet of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the residency allowed for a balance of daily hikes and immersive studio practice.
In winter 2023, I received a Visiting Teaching Fellowship at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, within the School of Built Environment, School of Arts, Design & Architecture. There, I co-taught with Dr. Cristina Garduño Freeman, integrating visual art exercises into an introductory architectural theory course. I also led a faculty workshop on teaching visual ideation and conducted materials-based research in UNSW’s fabrication labs. My visit coincided with WorldPride 2023, which filled the city with celebration and color.
From Sydney, I traveled to Bali, Indonesia, where I had previously conducted year-long research as a Fulbright Scholar. During my brief trip, I was able to follow up on that research, which provided the seeds for a project I hope to pursue in the future.
As a culmination of my work with Amy Wurtz, I produced an artist book in collaboration with SAIC faculty member Riesling Dong, which we gave to each member of the seniors’ choir who participated. The choir performed a concert at their community center, attended by over 200 people, where I exhibited related drawings and they performed Wurtz’s composition incorporating lyrics drawn from their own stories.
In spring 2023, I participated in SAIC’s Roger Brown Residency, where I created a sculpture for Words to Grasp, an exhibition at Riverside Art Center curated by Anne Harris. This sculpture is part of the Gestural Traces and Material Memory series and is featured in SAIC’s Faculty Sabbatical Triennial Exhibition.
The full body of work I developed during my sabbatical was presented in a solo exhibition titled Space Has Become This Material Thing at the Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College Chicago, curated by Meg Duguid and Cecilia Vargas. In preparation for the show, I was awarded a position as Visiting Artist in Creative and Media Spaces, where I produced work with technical support from Columbia College staff. The exhibition also included a public lecture and graduate critiques as part of the college’s Art Now! series.
Additionally, I collaborated with artist Jeff Carter on a two-year commission for Illinois Art-in-Architecture—a large-scale hanging sculpture for architect Carol Ross Barney’s new building at McHenry County College.
As I reflect on the sabbatical, I’m struck by the breadth of work, new experiences, and meaningful connections that emerged from this time. The opportunities afforded to me were ones I could not have pursued without this leave. Significantly, the work I completed contributed directly to my promotion to Professor in Contemporary Practices and my receipt of a 2024 Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council, among other honors.