Siobhan McKissic

Siobhan McKissic (they/she) is an artist, archivist, and performer born and raised on the southside of Chicago. Their library work foregrounds the importance of non-textual resources in the research process and considers how a shift away from Western-centric ideas of information literacy can create more engaging learning experiences for students, instructors, and the public.

Their artwork focuses on sites of excavation related to the Black disabled body, nature, built structures, ancestral knowledge retrieval, and power. By searching for images that look like skin and skin related disabilities, McKissic considers their own mediated relationship with nature through collage– a relationship complicated by their family’s history of sharecropping and journey during the Great Migration. By weaving texturally similar images of nature, technology, and architecture, their work reflects the corresponding attempts by the body and the environment to heal from human-made stressors, asking the question, what repair strategies are inherited from generation to generation?