Illustration by Nat Toner

At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the promise of a vibrant, collaborative community often feels elusive. For students, staff, and faculty alike, the experience of trying to find or build community at SAIC can require work that runs counter to the institution’s own rules and systems. Three SAIC community members — a staff member, a faculty member, and a student — came together to weigh in on the contradictions at the heart of SAIC’s accessibility.

Marium Asif, Student

I found out a few weeks ago that there’s a dean of student affairs who’s different from the dean of student life; the difference in positions did not clarify what these roles actually do. In October I was informed about the Art School’s Consideration committee, which oversees any and all exhibitions taking place at the school. The professor who teaches my novel class is the Non-Tenure Track faculty representative of the writing department — something else I only learned last week.

This school is a maze of offices, deans, administrative titles that feel like they mean nothing, and a system of redirection that’s constantly forwarding emails from one person to another. I’m three semesters into my program, and I have yet to confirm who all make up my cohort. Google search tells me that there are 25 to 33 graduate programs at SAIC, but I’ve interfaced with maybe five. The culture at SAIC is inherently individualistic and is designed for students to meekly go about their degrees and graduate in a way that makes the school as much money as possible, with little to no opportunities to build community.

The ideology of the school is to make us citizen artists; when our practices and interactions are so fragmented and disassociated from the community at school, let alone the larger community, the ideology remains just an idea. Bureaucracy becomes an enormous road block in trying to communicate with even those who inhabit our own school.

Samhita Sonti, SAIC Staff

Samhita is an alum and currently the Coordinator of the Cultural Oasis.

Social life at SAIC is strange. Because the school encourages self-led art practice, it also encourages art as a vehicle for capitalism, and ultimately, that leads to isolation. While collaboration and community are advertised, I haven’t seen them being fostered.. Meeting people from different areas of this wide institution has felt, for me, somehow subversive — maybe because I have only ever done it through community organizing outside the school’s purview.

Staff offices are either located on floors without students, or in entirely different sections of the floor, often with doors that are locked and require key-card access. This reduces chances of stepping out and meeting students or even staff from different teams across campus. 

Community building may not always require physical closeness, but we still need ways to meet new people. It feels like there are rules no matter where you turn. They’re not always explicit, but I can feel them. I feel the fear of saying things honestly; I feel the urge to jump on the bandwagon of other people’s opinions, bland and neutral and peaceful and, more often than not, white. 

Being a staff member feels different from being a student, with some freedoms gained and far more lost. I feel more aware of SAIC as a capital-I Institution.

Kelly Xi, SAIC Faculty

Kelly is an alum and currently a Lecturer in Contemporary Practices and Low-Res MFA

I’ve been at SAIC since 2020, first as a graduate student. Now in my second year of teaching, I have taught 7 classes across 3 departments. I deeply believe in what we’re able to do together at our best, and the way I teach research and studio work is unavoidably married to analysis about the conditions of this work.

A question I often ask myself is: How can a school be simultaneously a refuge for soulful openness and also be fiscally tied to the denial of humanity foreclosed on the rest of the world? I grapple with grave doubts that the training that orients artists to accumulate personal power will lead to widespread good. 

On the eve of a year of genocide, I was walking with my friend to a blockade when we bumped into two painters on a gallery stoop. I greeted them with congratulations on the show, and the artist asked where we were headed. When we said, “The protest,” the artist, puzzled, asked, “Protesting what?” 

All of us there had MFAs from SAIC; three of us are faculty here. It dawned on me that the studio navel-gazing we are encouraged to mine for meaning had severed us from being agents of transformation in the world. 

The privilege of creativity had seemed to prune the need to take risks for the worlds we envision. Does the rigor and soul of our student organizers motivate one to do more as teachers — enable, corroborate, act alongside, or remain spectators?

NTT faculty are still locked in a 16-month fight for negotiation of their first contract. Eighty percent of SAIC classes are taught by NTT faculty. Most are lecturers employed for 15 weeks at a time with no way of knowing if their contract will be renewed.

What do we internalize when education work is devalued in this way? Teaching here can’t lead to anything when there is no path to development or future security! The school’s union is moving closer to a potential strike, and public consensus and institutional transparency are crucial at this stage. We need to be working towards making communities more accessible; we have to be connecting our struggles. rather than allowing the administration to fracture them. The contract is only as good as our collective strength: students and workers must unite!