Lou Mallozzi

Support (SAIC faculty)

Lou Mallozzi is an interdisciplinary artist and educator in Chicago. He dismantles and reconstitutes gesture, sound, image and language to poetically destabilize our relationships with the familiar through performances, installations, interventions, fixed media works, improvised music, drawings, and collaborations. His work has been exhibited and performed in many venues in the US and Europe, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, The Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago and the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, TUBE Audio Art Series in Munich, Radiorevolten Festival in Halle, Constellation in Chicago, and many others. Mallozzi co-founded Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago in 1986, and for the next 30 years facilitated the presentation of exploratory sonic art works by more than 500 artists in festivals, exhibitions, performances, and transmissions throughout Chicago. Concurrently he began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now professor in Art + Technology / Sound Practices. Recently he has been researching Japanese visual artists who experimented with non-musical sound in the 1950s-1970s, for which he was awarded a fellowship through the Ishibashi Foundation/Japan Foundation, with the research subsequently published in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture. Mallozzi has been awarded grants, fellowships, and residencies in support of his work, including the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center, The Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice), and the Illinois Arts Council. In 2020, NewCity named him as one of thirty artists “foundational to the art world of Chicago.”