Field Trip / Field Notes / Field Guide

Field Trip / Field Notes / Field Guide is a trans-disciplinary consortium of Fellows from The University of Chicago (UChicago), The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Northwestern University (NU), and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Field Trip / Field Notes / Field Guide is a platform for communication across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and an initiative to move these conversations off-campus and into the urban environment.

The consortium will provide an open framework for graduate students and recent alumni to explore and digest their local environment as a collective body, while outlining the unique perspectives and methodologies of their disciplinary studies—whether that be art, architecture, art history, the humanities, social science, or science. The consortium is intended to augment the institutional support offered to MFA alumni and PhD candidates as they pursue their research “in the field,” asking that they consider sharing, communicating, and formulating their work within the context of an interdisciplinary community.

Beginning in fall 2017, and meeting on a monthly basis over the course of an academic year, graduate students from the participating institutions will be asked to partake in and self-initiate a series of seminars, expeditions, lectures, readings, and discussions. A series of field trips, initiated by the consortium Fellows, will be organized to explore the proximities and intersections of the Fellows’ distinctive approaches to research and practice while out “in the field.” The field trips are intended to provoke unexpected exchanges, allowing for unique encounters that would not typically occur within a university setting. An exhibition, catalog, or other publication format (to be determined through the course of the consortium’s meetings and discussions) will collect the field notes from the consortium’s trips and combine them with Fellows’ research projects and bodies of work, creating a “field guide” that documents and critically examines the year’s activities.

Affiliated institutional representatives and administrators:

University of Chicago (UChicago)
–Julie Marie Lemon, Program Director/Curator, Arts, Science & Culture Initiative, UChicago
–Naomi Blumberg, Program Coordinator, Arts, Science & Culture Initiative, UChicago

The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)
–Jennifer Reeder, Associate Professor, School of Art and Art History, UIC
–Beate Geissler, Associate Professor, Department of Art, UIC

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
–Douglas Panacost, Director, Earl & Brenda Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration, SAIC
–Jaclyn Jacunski, Research Associate, Earl & Brenda Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration, SAIC

Northwestern University
–Lane Relyea, Associate Professor, Department of Art Theory & Practice, Northwestern University
–Matt Martin, Program Assistant, Department of Art Theory & Practice, Northwestern University

Contact: Julie Marie Lemon, T 773 702 8029, jmlemon@uchicago.edu