Students in the Ceramics Department may seem to be elbow deep in a big-kid’s version of Play-Doh, but the intense concentration on their faces as they hunch over their creations looks far from playful.

“Somebody asked me if I was worried about becoming a one-hit wonder. I said I wasn’t aware that I had a hit.”

The months between spring and fall semesters are a great time to spend a few hours visiting one of Chicago's many renowned cultural institutions.

OPENPORT, an art festival which is the effort of four Chicago-based artists with a variety of conceptual interests and affiliations with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, attempts to initiate this transition by highlighting artists who work outside the traditional boundaries between media.

In order to see how The Guardian’s feature translated to the Chicago art community, F Newsmagazine polled locally-based artists, critics, art historians, and curators to find what happens when they aren’t busy shaping the art world

Music website Last.fm describes Gregg Gillis, who makes music under the pseudonym Girl Talk, as “arguably the nation’s hottest mash-up DJ.” A compliment, maybe, except that Gillis describes his music as “sound collage,” a genre “even more vague” than the practice of combining two often unrelated songs to create a unique product.

One of the great boons of art-making is that you can masturbate in a gallery, stick a Barbie doll in your ass in front of an audience, photograph yourself wearing a strap-on, or paint yourself having sex with your porn star wife without too many people accusing you of being a pervert.

Sally Mann’s photographs, idyllic depictions of both her children and the Southern landscape, are created on an enlarger that is over sixty years old and held together by duct tape. Mann was more than willing to share this and other trade secrets with the sizable crowd that gathered to hear her speak about her work. “It’s like snake handling,” she said, describing her practice, “there’s potential for both danger and transcendence.”