We are delighted to announce that artist, educator and art worker Danny Giles will join us as interim Master Fine Art course director from January to September 2020. During this period, Danny Giles will be responsible for advancing the pedagogical and research priorities of our programme, as well as managing the day-to-day running of the MFA.
In his own practice, Danny uses varied materials and performative approaches to address the dilemmas of representing and performing identity to reveal hidden languages of power within mundane objects and spaces. His work has been exhibited, performed and screened at venues including The Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle WA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Evanston, IL, El Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. He has recently worked as part-time faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and as Academic Director of the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Saugatuck, MI. The permanent position of MFA course director will be re-advertised soon in the upcoming months.
Danny Giles: "In my work, I'm concerned with making experiences that connect our collective experiences of identity and social being to larger histories and structures of power and belonging. My research often begins with a cultural artefact or a historical narrative from which I can expand my thinking to consider how human experience is shaped by visual and material culture. To do this, I find it important to begin with thinking on an individual human level, finding ways to centre the effects of culture in real bodies and communities. Because my work often requires other people to participate or collaborate in the process, my challenge is to make the form of my projects correspond ethically to the communities and individuals with which I collaborate. I bring the same kind of human considerations to my graduate advising and teaching, bringing a perspective that reckons with the confluence of humanity, criticality and rigour. I want to engage and collaborate with my advisees to come to a greater understanding of how their work participates in the world and ways of building a sustainable practice that considers the whole person."
