Scott Sikkema
Scott Sikkema is Education Director at CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education). At CAPE, he has oversight for all programs, partnerships, and professional development, and spearheaded the development of research at the organization. In particular, he has focused on research as an aesthetic and pedagogical practice. With the superb CAPE program and research staff, he explores via inquiry site, space, time, process, and other queries, moving from the immediacy of set answers towards the generative struggle of not knowing. Prior to CAPE, he worked at the Terra Museum of American Art, Kohl Children’s Museum, and Illinois State University. For the past 4 years, he has been co-lead faculty for the Teaching Artist Development Studio at Columbia College. He is a recent contributor to the Chicago Social Practice History Series from the School of the Art Institute.
In his residency at CAD this year, Scott is working in an equal partnership with artists, educators, and longtime collaborators Margy Stover and Phil Cotton on a project involving a closed elementary school.
Phil Cotton. Phil Cotton is a practicing multimedia visual artist and an Arts and Design teacher at Williams Prep High School in Chicago. His Bauhaus influenced Arts/Design classes explore the contemporary art world, highlighting the global influences of the arts on past and present modern civilizations. Students are given fine art and societal-directed projects that will aid them in taking positive ownership of their lives. Class projects are designed to educate and inspire students to use the arts to make a lasting productive contribution to our world.
Margy Stover. Margy Stover is the recipient of several Chicago Community Arts Assistance Program Grants, a Japan Fulbright Grant and China Fulbright Grant. She has taught and exhibited regionally and internationally, including a residency as a teaching artist in Ireland and a visiting and exhibiting artist in Slovenia. Margy Stover teaches for the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust and CAPE, and is Visual Arts Department Chair at the Chicago Academy for the Arts.
Margy Stover and Phil Cotton have collaborated together as a team on curricular projects with students for over 10 years. Some of their past projects include developing community-based “Identity Museums”, neighborhood needs assessments, community center design, family history/relations symbolic mapping art works, the development of affordable prosthetic design products to aid handicapped individuals, and proposed new uses for the historic Rosenwald building at 44th and Wabash.