Saida’s Story: How Salt’s College Visits Made an Impact
Salt High School Residency Student 2013-2016
BFA@SUNY Purchase 2016-2021
MA@The Art Institute of Chicago - Current
Every Spring before the pandemic, we rented a van, packed all our juniors and seniors in, and whirled through a section of the Northeast visiting 10 colleges and universities in 5 days. It's important for students to understand the differences between big and small schools, urban and rural, private and public, and to see a school before investing four years and a lot of cash into an education - even with many scholarships!
Salt Residency Alumnus Saida Blair, Class of 2016, benefited from Salt's Spring College Tour, went on to SUNY Purchase to study Photography, graduated in 2021, and was just named one of 8 Black Female Photographers to watch in 2023 by PHMuseum. She is currently an MA candidate in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
"Being able to leave the city and visit colleges, which I knew financially I wouldn’t be able to visit, was very exciting. It was cool just being able to leave my neighborhood or the city and see that there were a bunch of options for where I could be for college. For example, I knew Boston was sort of like a college town, but I didn’t realize how intense it was – the fact that every other building is a whole new college or a whole dorm.
I realized what type of environment I wanted to be in because when I visited UMass Amherst, which has 30,000 students, I knew I did not want to be on a campus like that at all. I felt like I could not breathe. If I hadn’t seen how different campuses felt and what art programs were available, I might have just gone to a school that was that big, and I would have been unhappy."
Saida Blair - is a photographer and oral historian. She uses a mixture of contemporary and archival images from various timelines to create a dynamic narrative of the past. Born and raised in Harlem, storytelling is instrumental to Blair’s identity. As a Black woman of Afro-Caribbean descent, the tradition of passing down information and lessons through storytelling is engraved in her culture. This is a critical idea that pushes her work as a storyteller. Using her passion for art, Blair creates conversations centering on topics and events that affect her and her community. Saida holds a BFA in Photography and Art History from SUNY Purchase. She is currently a MA candidate in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.