January 23, 2012—SAIC alumnus Cameron Crawford (BFA 2006) will be included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial taking place at the Whitney Museum of American Art from March 1 through May 27. This year is the 76th in the ongoing series of biennials and annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932.

January 20, 2012—The latest blog post for the Chicago Sun-Times by SAIC alumna Sarah Terez-Rosenblum was published January 7. Rosenblum has been writing the Sun-Times blog Crush of the Month for over a year now. In the latest post she interviews a local couple and shares their life stories with readers.

January 19, 2012—On January 4 Gapers Block promoted a reading by Sara Levine, SAIC’s writing program chair, on its GB Book Club page. The author read from her new novel Treasure Island!!! at Women and Children First on January 5. The book tells the tale of a disillusioned college grad who uses the Robert Louis Stevenson novel as a map for how to live her life.

January 19, 2011—An article by SAIC faculty James Yood (New Arts Journalism) appears in Schantz Galleries’ new exhibition book Dalle Mani del Maestro: The Art of Lino Tagliapietra, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Art Palm Beach January 19–23. ArtDaily quotes Yood in its exhibition announcement, noting, “there are probably no two words more respected and honored in the history of modern sculpture in glass than ‘Lino Tagliapietra’.”

A large-scale A/V installation by faculty member Christopher Baker (Art and  Technology Studies) is reviewed by Richard Dorment in the January 8 edition of London’s daily Telegraph newspaper (circ. 634,113). Baker’s Hello World, Or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise—a video piece featuring 5,000 individual video diaries arranged in a rectangular grid, with some carefully handled sound mixing that “makes the small gallery sound like an aviary”—opened the SAATCHI SCREEN gallery in London on January 3. SAATCHI SCREEN is the Saatchi Gallery’s first-ever dedicated screen room for film and video.

BizBash named SAIC’s THE WALK 2011 benefit gala Chicago’s #1 Fashion event of the year in an article published December 30. The story notes that THE WALK rose from #6 in 2010 to seize first place in the Fashion & Retail events section, calling the evening “one of this spring’s most buzzed-about happenings.” A photo from the fete accompanies the story on the BizBash website.

SAIC alumnus Rashid Johnson, who studied in the MFA program during 2003 and 2004, earned a feature review in the Sunday New York Times (1,645,152) on January 8. Johnson tells reporter Dorothy Spears that he “took as many courses as [he] could” with the “social activist and artist” Gregg Bordowitz, SAIC’s Chair of the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department. The article comes on the occasion of a new solo exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Manhattan, to be followed by another solo show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in April.