Session 3 Abstracts

Reimagining Chicago through Its Museums

Onur Ozturk, Assistant Professor, Art & Design

Chicago has some of the world’s most renowned museums including the Field Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Chicago History Museum. This presentation will focus on how these institutions have been providing various opportunities for Columbia College Chicago undergraduate students to explore, study, and question historical and contemporary curatorial practices. Launched in Fall 2021, the students of the Creative Communities: Rethinking Museums course have been investigating permanent and temporary exhibitions of the Chicago area museums and meeting museum scholars and curators.

A Wandering Studio: Teaching a Chicago-Based Course with Library as Classroom

Luke Joyner, University of Chicago

In Spring 2023, a college class at University of Chicago, Architecture of the Public Library, operated entirely without a base classroom. Every week, we met in a different library on our college campus on Wednesdays, and a different library off campus around the city on Fridays. These meetings were supplemented by a few additional small group explorations, directed in part by students' interest and project selection. Since this was an architecture studio class, the wandering meeting pattern had to hold a series of studio projects, and a range of readings, discussions, guests, and modes of education, not simply a repetitive pattern of traditional "field trips". This session will present some highlights and outcomes from this pedagogical experiment, on both a logistical level and on the level of what students were able to draw and learn. I will also spend a little time talking about a concurrent program, which I run for CPS high school students, that also spent ample time exploring Chicago, with some of the college students helping out, and a few other examples. Ample time will be left for questions, and for conversation about courses at different age levels that use city as classroom.