Studio Science: Situating Science Concepts in the Studio Classroom
A fixture of interdisciplinary education at SAIC and many art and design schools is the team-taught class, where faculty provocatively mix disciplines into an intertextual experience for the student. Dean of Faculty Lisa Wainwright will introduce the subject, and faculty members Kathryn Schaffer, an astrophysicist, and Paola Cabal, an installation artist, will discuss their team taught course Articulating Time and Space that fused art making strategies and scientific concepts.
ELISSA TENNY
Provost, Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Lecturer
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
A native of Bogotá, Colombia, Paola Cabal has lived in Chicago since 2001. Trained in observational realism, Cabal implements responsive looking in her increasingly diverse practice, which includes site-specific installation, collaborative work, and more recently curating and writing, in addition to more traditional drawing media. Cabal is an active member of the three-person collaborative (ƒ)utility projects and an educator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and DePaul University. Her work has been written about in Time Out, The Chicago Reader, and the Chicago Tribune and is discussed in an essay by Carol Becker published in the book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art. Cabal has exhibited in Bogotá, New York, Omaha, Charleston, and Ft. Lauderdale and has had numerous exhibitions in Chicago. In 2006 she was awarded the prestigious Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Individual Artist Award and was awarded a 2014 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship.
KATHRYN SCHAFFER
Assistant Professor
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Kathryn Schaffer is a physicist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Her scientific research focuses on data analysis for experiments in cosmology and nuclear physics. She’s interested in the process by which physicists transform raw information from detector systems into knowledge about the world, especially the argumentation used to account for sources of uncertainty in the measurement process. She views her classes at SAIC as a laboratory for exploring science communication, science in society, and critical perspectives on the nature of science and the meaning of scientific knowledge. My professional work is expanding to include projects that draw from my teaching and from interdisciplinary dialogue with my SAIC colleagues and students.
