Joan Giroux - Columbia College Chicago

Joan Giroux

Professor

jgiroux@colum.edu

Biography

Joan Giroux, Professor, teaches studio art, art activism, and professional practices in the Art and Art History Department, and co-teaches Chicago: Design of Cities and Social Justice in First Semester Experience with René King, Design Department. Recent projects/exhibits include marking moments, Leigh Block Gallery, Santa Barbara (2019); Saunter Trek Escort Parade (S.T.E.P.) with Lisa Kaftori, Flux Factory, Queens Museum (2018); The Commons Artists Project, MCA Chicago (2018); Take Care, Weinberg Newton Gallery (2017); kaleidoscope of influences with Lisa Kaftori and Whitney Huber, 2017 Terrain Biennial; Ill at Ease: Disease in Art, University of Buffalo (2017); and Anti-Workshop with Karen Finley at Art AIDS America, Alphawood Foundation (2017). In work intersecting and residing in intermediary disciplines such as sculpture, social practice, and performance, she investigates loss, healing, and building connections to and between people and communities. In current work, she explores relationships between bodies, traumas, and the environment. In addition to practice as an interdisciplinary artist, activist, educator, and death acceptance advocate, Giroux has collaborated with curator Alice Maude-Roxby on exhibition catalogs: Resist: be modern (again), (edit. Maude-Roxby and Stefanie Seibold, Univ of Southampton: John Hansard Gallery, 2019), Changing New York: Censored Realities (authors Maude-Roxby and Seibold, publisher Camera Austria, 2018); Anti-Academy (John Hansard Gallery, 2014); Live Art on Camera (John Hansard Gallery, 2007). Giroux received an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from Parsons School of Design, and studied Experimental Sculpture/Multi-Media with Prof. Shinkichi Tajiri at Berlin’s Hochschule der Künste.

Instructional Areas

Sculpture I; Installation/Site-Specific Art; Chicago: Design of Cities and Social Justice; Professional Practice in Fine Arts; Directed Graduate Projects; Senior Fine Arts BFA Exhibition; Foundation Skill: Photoshop; Foundation Skill: Stamps and Stencils

Creative Practice and Research Interests

social practice, ecological and environmental art, art and activism, illness, death and dying in the arts, arts and healthcare, art and design education, arts and civic engagement, educational theory and practice in the arts, civic collaboration

Degrees

B.F.A., Fine Arts Parsons - The New School for Design 1984
M.F.A., Sculpture / Interdisciplinary Arts Bard College-Avery Graduate School of the Arts 1991