Building Big

with Nick Fagan & Mark Schentzel
SCULPTURE 686 001 | 3 credits | $200 Lab Fee
August 11 – 24, 2024

This class will focus on building large, sculptural structures in wood and metal. Cost effective and beginner friendly methods will be employed to empower students to overcome the intimidation that can accompany a wish to work large. Together, we will consider the steps required to complete a large sculpture including drafting, model making, fabrication, safety, and budgeting. We will draw inspiration from sculptures by Phyllida Barlow, view Robert Snyder’s1974 documentary The World of R. Buckminster Fuller, and readings will include Robert Smithson’s “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic”. After completing a small-scale balsa wood model, students can expect to complete one large-scale sculpture. This class will culminate in a presentation of monumental sculptures in the landscape.

Nick Fagan is a multimedia artist based in Cape Cod. He has exhibited work in a number of galleries and shows across the United States, most recently the Egg Collective in New York, Massey Klein Gallery in New York, Tops Gallery in Memphis, Tennessee as well as the Seattle art fair with FFT and Future Art Fair with ADA Gallery. He has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MASS MoCA Studio Program and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has been featured or reviewed in a number of publications, including Burnaway, NPR, Divergents Magazine, New American Paintings, and The Rib. Awards include a Kennedy VSA Artists with Disabilities Award, and Foundation of Contemporary Art Grant. He received his MFA in sculpture from Ohio State University in 2017.

Mark Schentzel holds a BFA in Sculpture and Functional Art from Kendall College of Art and Design, He received the program’s sculpture excellence award. Mark appreciates the craft school experience, and has attended workshops at Ox Bow School for the Arts (MI), Penland School of Craft (NC), and Peters Valley Craft Education Center (NJ). He has over 25 years of welding and custom metal fabrication experience and is co-founder and co-owner of EA- Craftworks in Grand Rapids MI; a custom metal shop providing unique metal works to Michigan and surrounding areas. Mark’s large-scale public sculptures in Michigan and the Midwest carry notions of material identity, sustainability considerations, and infrastructure issues.

Glassblowing

with Ekin Aytac & Joshua Davids
GLASS 681 003 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
August 11 - 24, 2024

This course will cover the fundamentals of glassblowing and is designed to develop a student’s foundational knowledge and skill upon which more advanced ideas can be built. Students will learn to gather hot glass out of the furnace and how to manipulate it with a variety of tools and techniques in both the hot shop and the cold shop. Productive practices including working as a team, timing and choreography, and using natural elements to execute ideas will be demonstrated. This course may include readings from Ed Schmidt’s Beginning Glassblowing and a screening of Glassmakers of Herat. We will investigate glassblowing from a historical approach and look at objects from different periods in history, including works made by Pino Signoretto, Bill Gudenrath, and Karen Willinbrink-Johnsen. Assignments will range from functional cup making, executing complex abstractions, and methods for coloring and patterning. This course will culminate in the completion of a student designed sculpture or installation to be exhibited in the hot shop.

Ekin Deniz Aytac and Joshua Davids are a collective husband and wife team of artists creating glass sculpture. Hailing from Edremit, Turkey and Colorado, USA respectively, this dynamic duo draws from a unique combination of culture, heritage, and experience to elicit profound expression in new works of glass art. Drawing on both modern and ancient mythos as well as their own meditations on the causal relationship between set and setting, the artists weave a new visual tapestry of form, light, and color. Shared interests in the glass medium, architectural and geometric pattern, nature, and narrative help guide the formal elements of their explorations in sculptural objects. In their work, traditional vessel forms are manipulated into unconventional objects used to evoke landscapes viewed from a unique perspective. A variety of hot glass color applications, diamond cutting, and sand engraving coalesce and together represent the visual rhythms of a world we inhabit together.

Moon Jars: Throwing Large Vessels

with Dave Kim
CERAMICS 664 001 | 3 credits | $225 Lab Fee
August 11 - 24, 2024

The moon jar, a notable piece of traditional Korean white porcelain created during the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), is the inspiration of this class. Originating in the fifteenth century, it earned its name due to its resemblance to the moon and the creamy hue of its glaze. Comprising two hemispherical halves seamlessly connected at the center, the moon jar exhibits a subtly irregular shape, which was intentionally incorporated to heighten its organic charm. During this class, we will explore several techniques employed in crafting this distinctive pottery form including shaping and throwing large vessels, unique and historic glazing techniques, trimming and edge refinery, and systems for successful firing. Students will be encouraged to incorporate these techniques into their own practices and ceramic goals and the class will culminate in a group reflection on the wares made.

Dave Kim the Potter’s ceramic practice explores precolonial Korean pottery traditions. Currently based in New York, Dave is devoted to carrying on an ancient tradition that has been passed down generationally, working to preserve a craft and culture that is slowly dissipating in the contemporary conversations. Kim’s practice is research-based. Through extensive study and labor intensive apprenticeships under master potters, Kim has mastered the key visual elements—form, surface, color, and material— that define traditional Korean ceramics. He has a specialized focus on the techniques of Sang-gam (inlay), Baek-ja (porcelain-ware), and Bun-cheong (stamps). These techniques were originally developed during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897) and were used to create functional ware for a variety of contexts that ranged from mundane household affairs to ancestral ritual practices to royal ceremonies. Prioritizing refined subtly over ornate embellishments, they signify the distinctive aesthetic philosophy of that time– simplicity as an embodiment of natural and unpretentious beauty.

Natural Dyes & Wearable Sculpture

with Joey Quiñones
FIBER 625 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
August 11 - 24, 2024

Prior to 1856, all dyes used on textiles came from natural sources. In this course we will explore multiple ways of adding color to cloth, with particular attention paid to patterning created through resist methods such as pastes, waxes, stitching, and binding. As a class we will use cotton and incorporate methods such as printing with mordants. We will also explore the metaphorical components of color and the use of fiber as an act of resistance and self-expression. In this course we will read excerpts from Maggie Nelson's lyric essay, “Bluets” as our meditation on color. The Art and Science of Natural Dyes by Joy Boutrup and Catharine Ellis will provide us technical guidance, and by examining the work of artists such as Pia Camil and Nick Cave we will draw inspiration for our final wearable sculpture project. Screenings will include, "In Conversation: Jim Arendt". Assignments will include a Kanga inspired textile to showcase the use of patterning and layering of natural dyes and a wearable sculpture collaborative project. 

Joey Quiñones is a mixed-media artist who primarily uses fiber and ceramics to explore Afro-Latine identity in a global context. In their fiber work, they use natural dyes, silkscreening, and fiber manipulation to create their figurative sculptures. They have an MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. Their work has been shown at venues such as the Akron Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, and they have had residences at Vermont Studio Center and Kohler Arts/Industry Program. They currently are the Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Fiber Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

DRAW, PAINT, PRINT

with Michelle Grabner, Fox Hysen, Brad Killam, & Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
PAINTING / PRINT 677 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
August 11 - 24, 2024

This class champions the interrelationship and the experimental nature of drawing, printmaking, and painting and will invite artists to move fluidly between Ox-Bow’s painting studio and the print studio, providing students with the opportunities to actively combine printmaking, drawing, painting, and collage techniques and materials. Methods demonstrated will include monoprinting, etching, screen printing, frottage, collage, grattage, decalcomania, and fumage. In the painting studio, students can work in watercolor, gouache, acrylic, and/or oils. This course is meant to challenge traditional drawing, painting, and printmaking techniques and focus directly on the spirit of the process and its relationship to contemporary contexts. Chance operations and collaboration will be encouraged. We will review the work of many artists who experiment successfully with a multidisciplinary approach including Dottie Attie, Squeak Carnwath, Judy Pfaff, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Synder, Mickalene Thomas, William Weege, Jeffrey Gibson, and Louisa Chase and discussions will be supplemented by The Slip, 2023 by Prudence Peiffer and “Alex Jovanovich on Peter McGough”, Artforum 2023. Assignments will develop and expand mark-making and compositional vocabularies in relationship to the concepts of expression, attention, histories, form, and social arrangements. Students will be split into 2-groups, one group will have a home-base in the painting studio and the other in the print studio. As the group progresses through content, they will switch studios and focus on assignments specific to those facilities. On the weekend, both groups will come together with all faculty to have group critiques and discussions. The class will culminate in a final presentation of works installed at Ox-Bow.

Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, Oshkosh, USA) holds an MA in Art History and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. Grabner is the 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and a National Academician in the National Academy of Design. She joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996, and currently is the Crown Family Professor of Art and Chair of Painting and Drawing department. She is also a senior critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Modern Painters, Frieze, Art Press, and Art-Agenda. Grabner also runs The
Suburban and The Poor Farm with her husband, artist Brad Killam. She co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and served as the inaugural artistic director of FRONT International, a triennial exhibition in and around Cleveland, OH in 2018. She co-curated the 5th edition of Sculpture Milwaukee titled there is We in 2021. Grabner currently lives and works in Milwaukee, USA.

Fox Hysen works between the flat schematics of a horizontal picture plane such as floor-plans or writing and illusion of space such as a landscape. This formal tension between the illusion of depth and the diagrammatic is a way of teasing out other kinds of tension: personal versus cultural meaning, experiences versus ideas, subject versus object, feeling versus thought, past versus present, etc. Hysen has a need for a connection between things. Hysen works from observation and from memory. They look at the room or whatever is out their window or remember the space of a walk. They recycle ideas from old paintings. They have worked in many different ways so there is a lot to rediscover. A painting is like a double mirror, it reflects itself (and you simultaneously). Hysen currently teaches full-time at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA in Baltimore and lives and works in Norfolk. Awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022 and the Tournesol Award at the Headland’s Center for the Arts in 2016.

Brad Killam's work has been featured in over 30 solo and two-person exhibitions (collaborations with artist Michelle Grabner) and more than 60 group exhibitions since receiving an MFA from University of Illinois Chicago in 1993. In 1999 he co-founded (with Michelle Grabner) and currently co-directs The Suburban, an artist’s run space in Milwaukee, WI. In 2008 he co-founded (with Michelle Grabner) and co- directs, Poor Farm Exhibitions and Press, an artist run space in Wisconsin.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter and writer from Olympia, Washington. She was a riot grrrl and worked in used bookstores and bars until her thirties, when she attended the School of the Art Institute for graduate school, and now she is working in Norfolk, Connecticut. She is opening her attention to composting, depth psychology, differance, climate change, doppelgängers, permaculture, New England furniture, rural transfer stations, daily rhythm, the effects of soul lag on humans, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the color of sunlight through smoke from fires 3,000 miles away, and the emotional landscapes of the people around her. She has shown all over, including at The Blaffer Museum in Houston, TX, The MCA in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She is a frequent lecturer at schools across the country, including, Hunter College at CUNY, UCLA, The University of Ohio, Cranbrook, University of Alabama, the SAIC Low Residency Program, and Cornell College. Zuckerman-Hartung is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago.

Drawing Place in Watercolor & Gouache

with Carrie Gundersdorf
PAINTING 672 001 | 1.5 credits | $50 Lab Fee
August 4 - 10, 2024

This course explores materials and methods of transparent and opaque watercolor (gouache). Watercolor is historically associated with observing the natural world through works such as botanical and wildlife illustrations, J.M.W. Turner’s ethereal landscapes, Charles Burchfield’s transcendental images, and Joseph Yoakum’s reminisced locations. This course celebrates the ease and transportability of working in watercolor and gouache and transforms the landscape into the studio. We will use the Ox-Bow environment as a source of material for developing a personal approach to drawing the space around us. This course will help students build a basic understanding of watercolor and gouache – its materials: paint, brushes, and paper, how to mix color, layer washes, build compositions while masking out areas, and how to use mark-making to articulate surfaces. We will look at artists including John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keefe and contemporary artists, Dawn Clements, Shazia Sikander, and Amy Sillman. Exercises involving color, observation, and mark-making will help familiarize students with the medium. Students will demonstrate creating color with value, layering washes, and mixing color. They will learn to mask a foregrounded object, build a drawing with layers of color, and techniques for painting wet into wet.

Carrie Gundersdorf’s works on paper reference early modernist painting and natural and astronomical phenomena. In recent work, Gundersdorf transcribes patterns found on seashells to create pictorial compositions, while leaving the test patterns on the edges of the paper to reveal process. Her work aims to expose small moments of discovery. Gundersdorf has had solo exhibitions at the Korn Gallery, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at 106 Green, New York; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California; La Box, Bourges, France; Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles; and Loyola Museum of Art, Chicago. Gundersdorf’s work has been reviewed in Art Review, Artforum.com, Artnet, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Artadia Award in Chicago and the Bingham Fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Gundersdorf received her BA from Connecticut College and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Rhyming the Land

with Hai-Wen Lin & Manal Shoukair
SCULPTURE 688 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 Lab Fee
August 4 - 10, 2024

This course is an exploration of land art, installation, and performance art that uses poetry as a framework to think about sculpting. As a class, we will consider the poem and its structures (rhyme, meter, stanza, verse) as form, material, and method. We will begin with a series of exercises that develop a relationship between writing, the land, and our bodies. Techniques demonstrated will include mold making, field recording, movement mapping, basic metal and woodwork. This is not a poetry class, but a class of poetic making and will entail mapping, listening, walking, sharing, caring, speaking, humming, singing, dancing, and meditating as forms of writing and research. We hope to challenge conventional understandings of the separation between body and environment by situating ourselves directly within the land. We will consider the works of artists such as Ana Mendieta, Liu Bolin, Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Mierle laderman Ukeles, and Rebecca Horn. Readings and screenings may include Braiding Sweetgrass, the Tao Te Ching, and Leaning Into the Wind. The final project is the construction of a duet poem wherein one part originates from the artist’s body and one part originates from the landscape.

Hai-Wen Lin is a Taiwanese-American artist whose work explores constructions of the body and its surrounding environment. They are an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, previously a LeRoy Neiman Fellow at the Ox-Bow School of Art, and earned a Master of Design in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where they were selected as a Fashion Future Graduate by the CFDA upon graduating. Lin has published research on smart textiles and taught origami technique workshops at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and MIT. They have performed publicly at the Chicago Cultural Center and MU Gallery, and have exhibited work in a variety of places including the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, 3S Artspace in New Hampshire, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, the walls of their home, their friend’s home, within an envelope, on a plate, on a lake, and in the sky.

Manal Shoukair is a Lebanese-American artist whose work in video performance, sculpture, and site-specific installations explore the complex intersectionality of her multicultural identity, Islamic spirituality, and contemporary femininity. Shoukair’s installation work directs the viewer in space that is only partially physically accessible, forcing the feeling of being left out or cut off. It prompts the viewer to explore a space physically, psychologically and culturally; methodologies that parallel her intuitive practice. The work navigates a conscious space of being and reflection of place and directs awareness inward, engulfing its audience in the stillness of its gesture. Manal has been featured in art publications, including Hyperallergic, Sculpture Magazine and the Detroit Metro Times. Manal holds a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and is a recent MFA graduate from the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a recipient of the Master’s Thesis Grant from Virginia Commonwealth University, the Gilda Award from the Kresge Foundation, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship and the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship.

Flameworking: Finding Form in Translation

with Carmen Lozar
GLASS 649 001 | 1.5 credits | $175 Lab Fee
August 4 - 10, 2024

This class is an introduction to working and thinking with glass. Focused on contextualizing flameworking within contemporary sculpture, this workshop is ideal for artists crossing over from other disciplines who would like to translate their ideas into glass. The goal of the class is to complete two finished sculptures, which are both structurally sound and conceptually tight. Blending traditional and unconventional flameworking techniques, students are encouraged to explore the material and expand their artistic vocabulary. We will consider the material qualities of glass in the context of drawing, painting, sculpture, and performance. Students can use glass as an opportunity to connect materiality to related disciplines such as literature, psychology, optics, poetry, and architecture. The coursework will include a combination of technical exercises designed to improve hand skills, contextual presentations, and group critique.

Carmen Lozar is a glass artist and a faculty member of the Ames School of Art at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois. During summers she often travels to teach and share her love for glass - most recently to England, Turkey, Italy, and New Zealand but always returns to her Midwestern roots. A BFA graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she completed her post-graduate degree at Alfred University, New York, and is represented by Ken Saunders Gallery in Chicago. She is included the permanent collections of the Museum of Art and Design(MAD) in NY, The Museum of Glass, WA and the Bergstom Mahler Museum in WI.

Papermaking in Time & Place

with Megan Diddie & Aya Nakamura
PAPER 631 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 Lab Fee
August 4 - 10, 2024

This class will explore paper’s origins and invite artists to consider the source of paper fiber, explore the ways techniques have evolved over centuries, and negotiate their own relationship to this ancient art form. Reviewing the methods that cultures throughout time have utilized to make paper, students will identify, responsibly harvest, and process prairie plants for various paper projects. We will utilize the Sugeta to explore Japanese papermaking, molds and deckles for Western papermaking, and freestanding molds for Nepalese papermaking. We will consider the work of other papermakers including Hong Hong, Zarina Hashmi, and Yoonshin Park and readings will include Dard Hunter’s The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft and Anish Kapoor’s “Silence and Transition”. Assignments will invite students to harvest natural materials, including bark, and explore the possibilities for turning what they forage into paper. In addition to demonstrations and assignments, students will have time to design and complete their own paper project. The artist's relationship to material, ritual, and history should be considered for the portfolio completed in class.

Megan Diddie is a Chicago-based artist working with drawing, animation, video, and paper-making. Her work explores relationships between human bodies, plants, landscapes, and built environments. Drawing is at the heart of her practice. For Diddie, drawing is a language used to work through ideas, curiosities, and messages from the unconscious. Her work with video and animation elaborates upon the drawings and is a tool for complicating ideas and refining stories. Material exploration of paper has been a huge part of her practice. She is currently creating a paper-making studio with artist and collaborator Aya Nakamura called Switch Grass Paper. This studio aims to explore local fibers and the roll they can play in art making. Diddie is received a post baccalaureate degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Aya Nakamura is a Chicago-based visual artist. Nakamura was born in Japan and educated in France and the US. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nakamura is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago. She has shown at venues in the United States and abroad, including The Hangar and Dawawine in Beirut, Lebanon; Supa Salon in Istanbul, Turkey; Mana Decentralized in Jersey City, New Jersey; MPSTN in Fox River Grove, Illinois; and Western Exhibitions in Chicago. She is the recipient of the DCASE Individual Artist Program, the Rex Abandon Fund from Chop Wood, Carry Water, the Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, and the George and Ann Siegel Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the co-founder of Switch Grass Paper, a paper making studio based in Chicago.

Multi-Level Glassblowing

with Hoseok Youn
GLASS 641 001 | 1.5 credits | $175 Lab Fee
July 28 - August 3, 2024

A hands-on studio workshop for those with some glassblowing experience. Students will learn a variety of techniques for manipulating molten “hot glass” into vessel or sculptural forms. Lectures, demonstrations, videos, and critiques will augment studio instruction.

Hoseok Youn is a South Korean glass artist specializing in glassblowing. Youn holds his B.F.A. degree in glass and ceramic major from Namseoul University, Cheon Ahn, Korea and earned a M.F.A. in glass from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Illinois, USA. He has worked at Toledo Museum of Art and taught at Bowling Green State University as an adjunct professor. Hoseok is currently a studio lead and educator at Belger Art Center in Kansas City, Missouri. Youn’s work has received various scholarships and awards including Corning Museum of Glass, Pittsburgh Glass Center, Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, Penland School of Craft, Niijima Glass Center, Pilchuck Glass School, and Glass Art Society. He is 2023 SAXE Emerging Artist Award recipient of Glass Art Society and he was resident artist at Museum of Glass Tacoma in 2023. His work has been exhibited broadly and internationally in Illinois, Missouri, Texas, California, Ohio, Michigan, Washington, Indiana, China, Italy, and Poland.

Considering Comics: Graphic Narratives in Ink

with Mark Thomas Gibson
PRINT 670 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
July 28 - August 10, 2024

From their inception, comics have been complicated. They are often brash, have political use, and a special ability to record the civic passions of their time. In this course, we will consider this history and use it as inspiration to tell the stories of our own personal and meaningful experience. We will engage with techniques including starting a narrative, storyboarding, sketching, inking, lettering, coloring, and do-it-yourself publishing techniques including the risograph. We will consider the work of cartoonists and screenwriters including Eleanor Davis, Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rodney Barnes, discuss Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and Will Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, and screen Stan Lee’s How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. In addition to a call and response activity where paired students explore their communication skills by completing an eight panel comic together, this class will culminate in a presentation of original artwork and self-published graphic novels to the Ox-Bow community.

Mark Thomas Gibson's (b. 1980, Miami, Florida) personal lens on American culture stems from his viewpoint as an artist, a professor, and an American history buff. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his exploration of contemporary culture through the language of painting and drawing, revealing a vision of America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within the story. Gibson has released two books: Some Monsters Loom Large, 2016, with funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; and Early Retirement, 2017, with Edition Patrick Frey in Zurich. Gibson has been awarded: residencies at Yaddo; the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency; a fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia; a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University; a Guggenheim Fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York; and was named a 2022 Grantee by The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York. In 2023 Gibson had solo exhibitions at Sikkema & Jenkins Co. in New York and MOCAD in Detroit, and was included in the exhibition Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Gibson is represented by M+B, (Los Angeles) and Loyal, (Stockholm, Sweden). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and lives and works in Philadelphia.

Field Illustration

with Josh Dihle
PAINTING & DRAWING 678 001 | 1.5 credits | $50 Lab Fee
July 28 - August 3, 2024

Inspired by the landscape and wildlife of Ox-Bow, this class invites students to develop an illustrative portfolio in pencil, ink, watercolor, and gouache. Students will build effective and inventive travel easels to explore campus and, working both outside and in the studio, will develop a personal approach to rendering and responding to the plants and animals that call Ox-Bow home. Demonstrations will cover methods for effective color mixing and composing in the field as well as techniques for recreating botanical structure, basic animal anatomy, and biological textures including bark, shell, and feathers. We will review the work of John James Audubon, Walton Ford, Evelyn Statsinger, and Kiki Smith and students will carry a naturalist pocket guide for reference. Onsite and studio drawing assignments will be accompanied by readings and discussions of naturalist poetry by Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, and Sharon Olds. Assignments will challenge students to notice the nuance in nature and will include a bug hunt, with invertebrates sketched in graphite, and a watercolor assignment that gives visual expression to a work of poetry or literature. Students will be encouraged to propose a final project inspired by their observations.

With a hand for detail and an eye on the natural world, Josh Dihle blends painting, carving, drawing, and sculpture to open visionary portals into the heart. He is the cofounder of experimental art/performance platforms Color Club and Barely Fair and teaches painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dihle has had solo exhibitions at M+B (Los Angeles, CA), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago, IL), 4th Ward Project Space (Chicago, IL), McAninch Arts Center (Chicago, IL) and Valerie Carberry Gallery (Chicago, IL). Dihle's work has been exhibited in group shows nationally and internationally, including MASSIMODECARLO Vspace (Milan, Italy), University of Maine Museum of Art (Bangor, ME), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), Rover (Chicago, IL), Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, IL), IAM Gallery (New York, NY), Flyweight Projects (New York, NY), Essex Flowers Gallery (New York, NY), Ruschman (Mexico City, Mexico) and Annarumma Gallery (Naples, Italy). His work and curatorial projects have been written about in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, New City, Artspace, The Washington Post, and Artsy, among others. Dihle lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Crochet, Gifts, Friends: The Politics of Softness

with Falaks Vasa
FIBER 630 001 | 1.5 credits | $50 Lab Fee
July 28 - August 3, 2024

Often, we crochet as something else happens – a class, a Netflix show, a catastrophe. Often, we crochet objects we don’t keep – a silly frog, a hundredth granny square, a scarf. Often, we crochet with friends, for friends – community, gifts, softness. In this class, we will turn our full attention to the gestures of labor and generosity that can enable a fiber art practice. We will learn the basics of crochet, practice it as individuals and in community, and create works that consider the audience and the gift of gifting carefully. Discussions and presentations will consider the work of Wells Chandler, Faith Ringgold, and Nina Katchadourian. Readings will include excerpts from Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Sara Ahmad's Queer Phenomenology, and we will screen the film Wool 100%. To enhance the communal nature of our discussions and learning, students will also be able to propose relevant screenings to host throughout studio work time. Assignments will invite students to unpack what gift-giving means to them while building technical skills, and the class will culminate in a critique and/or exchange of final crocheted projects.

Falaks Vasa (they/she, b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist, emerging writer, and award-winning educator from Kolkata, India, based currently in Providence, Rhode Island. Their work spans everything from crochet, 3D animation, and fiction, to performance, video, and stand-up, but always relates to the position, orientation, and experience of their own body. She graduated from Brown University with an MFA in Literary Arts in 2023, and from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 2018. Falaks has also attended artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and ACRE. They have published a poetry chapbook with the unnamed zine project, and written a speculative fiction novel, awaiting publication. They won the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence for the course ‘Queer Strategies of Resistance: Fools, Tricksters, Shapeshifters’ in 2022, and have shown their artwork internationally at spaces like the Queer Arts Festival, Vancouver, the Queens Museum, NYC, and BARTALK, The Hague. Currently, Falaks is thinking about what to have for lunch today, although it is way past lunchtime.

Clay at the Table

with S. Lantz & Amanda Salov
CERAMICS 667 001 | 3 credits | $225 Lab Fee
July 28 - August 10, 2024

In this class, artists will engage with techniques in the ceramics studio to adorn a celebratory dinner event on the final day of class. Students will utilize handbuilding, throwing, and other formation techniques to make plates, bowls, cups, candle holders, and wearables, as envisioned by the group for the party. Participants will also learn how to add pigment to glaze to create ombre (color to color blend) and gradients (color tinted gradually). The class will culminate in an delightfully colorful meal and celebratory installation. We will review the work of artists who have successfully merged social practice with exceptional ceramic wares including Judy Chicago, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and Jennifer Ling Datchuk. Readings will include Ashley Anastasia Howell’s research on utilizing color in dining spaces and we will screen Pete Pinnell’s Thoughts on Cups. Assignments will invite students to design a ceramic jewelry piece for the event and consider vessel specificity by designing a platter for a specific dish or item of food.

S. Lantz is an artist working primarily in ceramics. Drawing upon histories of adornment and communications of individual and collective identities, their work explores explicit or encoded identities, context, care, and the ownership and telling of stories and histories. They are fascinated by in-between points in the continuums of fitting and not fitting, clarity and obscurity, and the complexities inherent in visual languages of communication and documentation. S. Lantz has exhibited ceramic work nationally and abroad, and have most recently participated in residencies at the Penland School of Craft and the International Artists Residency Exchange. They received a Bachelor of Arts in 3D4M (ceramics+glass+sculpture) at the University of Washington, Seattle. Born in Seattle, Washington, Lantz has spent the past few years in Maine, where they held the positions of Studio Coordinator at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts and Administrator of The Color Network. They are currently based in Northwest Arkansas.

Amanda Salov’s work examines the qualities of a moment, or the idea of a moment in physical form: temporal, fragile and fleeting. With her porcelain sculptures, installations, and paintings, she uses natural phenomena as metaphors and anchors for the transitions we all face. Raised in rural Wisconsin, she received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater and her MFA from the University of Missouri - Columbia. She has shown work throughout the United States and has earned a number of awards, including the Oregon Art Commission Grant (2013, 2016, 2017), Ford Family Foundation Grant (2016, 2017), a Washington State Artist Trust Grant (2018), and an Allied Arts Grant (2022). Salov has received residencies and teaching opportunities around the globe including at the Reykjavik School of Visual Arts in Iceland, Tainan National University of the Arts in Taiwan, the Archie Bray Foundation, the University of Washington, and the University of Arkansas. She currently resides in Seattle, Washington with her semi-feral cattle dog and partner.

The World is One. The Human is Two: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Objects

with John Preus
SCULPTURE | 684 001 | 1.5 credits | $50 Lab Fee
July 28 - August 3, 2024

This course will challenge students to work across two hand-made designed objects, one chosen and one randomly procured, to create a third sculpture which creatively considers form, function, destruction, and collaboration. Students will provide the items, which must be made by a human and no bigger than 3 feet on any side, and participate in an object swap to secure their second subject. Demonstrations including chop saw, band saw, jig saw, and other basic building tool usage will introduce students to a variety of processes they can utilize in constructing/deconstructing their object. Throughout the creation process we will discuss the object as sacrament, fetish, scapegoat, and as matter of hermeneutics. We will look at the work of contemporary artists such as Brian Jungen, Edra Soto, Amanda Williams, Theaster Gates, Doris Salcedo, and others. Because of the short length of time we have together, some short limited readings will be assigned, but a more extensive list of resources and texts will be made available. Susan Sontag, Laura Kipnis’s Against Love, Joan Didion on desire, Peter Rollins on the Lacanian subject and the church that believes in nothing. Colby Dickinson on the Sacrament and the Fetish object, Rene Girard on the scapegoat and mimetic desire. Students should be prepared for a robust collaborative experience as this course will dedicate significant time to the ritual and performance of the object exchange, so as to set the stage for considering the relationship between forms. This course will culminate in a final presentation of sculptures thoughtfully installed indoors or out.

John Preus works with broken things in 2-dimensional, sculptural and functional formats. His earliest memories are of running barefoot dodging cow pies in Tanzania, child to Lutheran missionaries. His work reflects on the nature of trauma and memory, the capacity of material to store psychic and emotional content, the history of religion and its use of imagery to convey meaning and influence. He is currently thinking about the relationship between the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders used by psychiatrists) and its relationship to demonology. He studied at the School of the Art Institute, and received his MFA from the University of Chicago. He shows currently with Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco.

Wild Sounds

with Skooby Laposky
SOUND 603 001 | 1.5 credits | $50 Lab Fee
July 21 - 27, 2024

Sounds are vibrations that carry intelligence, ideas, feelings, and memories. In this class students will become acoustic ecologists, sound designers, and deep listeners. We will use various microphones (contact mics, hydrophones, geophones, and binaural systems) to harvest and listen to the sound textures of Ox-Bow’s vibrant ecosystem and amplify its unheard activities and patterns. We will build listening stations around the Ox-Bow campus to immerse ourselves in the daily rhythms of the non-human world that go largely unnoticed. Additionally, we will create sculptural instruments out of foraged materials found on walks that will become the source for our electroacoustic recordings. These newly discovered rhythms of nature will be the foundation and inspiration for our sound compositions and visual works. 

The act of listening is crucial to our creative process and progress. We will engage in the deep listening and discussion of Chris Watson’s Cima Verde, Bernie Krause’s The Great Animal Orchestra, and John Cage’s Child of Tree (for amplified plant materials) to unlock new patterns of thought. This class aims to create a meaningful listening practice by engaging with the environment using various sound technologies that aid in pulling us closer to the natural world. Using amplification and sound editing software we’ll unlock the hidden languages surrounding us and use this to start our dialogues. Students should bring their own laptops for editing purposes and will be introduced to open source software to complete this part of the project. Assignments will invite students to compare field recordings as captured by their own ears versus through the microphone, create a listening station that will broadcast its live mic feed via short range FM transmission, and collaborate with the landscape in a final, sound station on display for the Ox-Bow community.

Skooby Laposky, as a film composer and field recordist, has enriched numerous documentary films, bringing depth and resonance to their subjects. His DJing and music production for the club space delivers a visceral experience, igniting communal movement and euphoria on the dancefloor. His uniquely designed sounds for consumer products infuse them with essential character, seamlessly integrating these devices into people’s daily lives. Laposky’s recent work in biodata sonification music has helped support environmental stewardship programs and the restorative practices of yoga and meditation. Recent projects include the public art project Hidden Life Radio and his ongoing site-specific project, Palm Reading, with Los Angeles-based guitarist Charles Copley. Palm Reading’s debut location releases were Malibu: Point Mugu and Joshua Tree National Park on the Myndstream wellness music label. Upcoming location releases include oases from Palestine and Israel. Hidden Life Radio was awarded NYFA’s Tomorrowland Projects Foundation Award in 2022 to support its 2023 broadcast location in New York’s Hudson Valley. Laposky is currently a Neighborhood Salon Luminary at the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum.

Color

with Mario Romano & William Sieruta
PAINTING 658 001 | 3 credits | $50 Lab Fee
July 15 - 27, 2024

This course investigates a series of color problems to sensitize students to the interaction of color and color phenomena. Considering the puzzles of color use and color composition, this course emphasizes hue, value, and chroma and the application of such knowledge to the visual arts. Students are encouraged to work in the 2-d media of their choosing (acrylic, oil, pastels, etc) and will be provided with a list of colors to construct their palate prior to the beginning of class. Students will practice looking at color, and in the first week of class will take inspiration from a presentation of one hundred paintings, including work made by David Hockney, Joan Mitchell, Milton Avery, Jacob Lawrence, Stuart Davis, Josef Albers, Karl Wirsum, and Georgia O’Keefe. We will consider how they have all playfully explored the power of color. Assignments will invite students to complete both simple and complex color wheels, with the goal of discerning the sometimes unintuitive interaction of pigments. Students will work in the studio and in the landscape, observing, utilizing, and manipulating color in nature. This is a basic course about seeing and using color that can be applied to all disciplines.

Mario Romano is an artist and educator who currently resides in Upstate New York. He graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago with his Master of Fine Arts in 2012. Mario has shown at galleries both Nationally and Internationally including Chicago, New York, Austin and Germany. In addition to his dedicated teaching practice, Mario has continued his investigation into drawing and painting and often looks at his surroundings for inspiration. In addition to both his teaching and art career, Mario is also part of the College Art Association as well as the Scholastic Arts Association in Upstate New York.

William Sieruta (he/him) can’t decide if he’s a painter, a sculptor, a writer, or a designer, so instead of committing to one discipline, his time is haphazardly dividede between all of these pursuits. He studied Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned an MFA in 2012. He was also awarded a fellowship to Oxbow School of Art, an experience he draws inspiration from to this day. After several stints as an artist assistant and studio manager in New York, William returned to his native Massachusetts where currently he teaches painting classes and workshops. He was awarded a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for his “Thinking in Color” studio workshop in 2018. These days WIlliam lives and makes art on January Mountain with his wife Jennifer and his son Ziggy.

Words, Music, Action!

with Richard Hull, John Yao, & Ken Vandermark
PAINTING 668 001 | 3 credits | $100 Lab Fee
July 15 - 27, 2024

In this interdisciplinary course, participants will invite music and poetry to inform their efforts in painting, drawing, and performance. The group will explore painterly strategies that foreground intuition within a structure and embrace poetic rhythm and syntax. In service of this creative integration, esteemed guests including poet and critic John Yao and musician and composer Ken Vandermark will lead students through demonstrations related to their fields. Pulling from the rich history of painters, writers, and musicians in concert, the class will look at the work of Joe Brainard and John Ashbury, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauchenberg, Joan Mitchell and John Schuyler, Katharina Grosse and Barry Schwabsky, and Alain Kirilli. Assignments will ask participants to practice the interpretation of words and sounds through painting and drawing techniques. The class will culminate in a symphonic performance of spoken and written word, music, and visuals designed by the students, faculty, and class guests.

Richard Hull’s paintings, drawings and prints can be found in the collections of many museums, including, the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Smart Museum, Chicago. Hull has presented more than forty solo exhibitions dating from 1979 to 2023, along with countless group exhibitions. He has exhibited his work at the, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Nelson- Atkins Museum, Kansas City; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. He lives and works in Chicago and is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1950 to Chinese emigrants, Yau attended Bard College and earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1978. Yau’s many collections of poetry include Corpse and Mirror (1983), Edificio Sayonara (1992), Forbidden Entries (1996), Borrowed Love Poems (2002), Ing Grish (2005), Paradiso Diaspora (2006), Exhibits (2010), and Further Adventures in Monochrome (2012). His collections of stories and prose poetry include Hawaiian Cowboys (1994), My Symptoms (1998), and Forbidden Entries (1996). Yau has written on artists such as Andy Warhol, Joe Coleman, James Castle, and Kay Walkingstick. He has also collaborated with artists Archie Rand, Thomas Nozkowski, and Leiko Ikemura in poetry and art books like Hundred More Jokes from the Book of the Dead (2001), Ing Grish (2005), and Andalusia (2006). Yau has received many honors and awards for his work including a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, the Jerome Shestack Award, and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France. Yau has taught at many institutions, including Pratt, the Maryland Institute College of Art and School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and the University of California-Berkeley. Since 2004 he has been the Arts editor of the Brooklyn Rail. He teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts and Rutgers University, and lives in New York City.

Ken Vandermark (USA 1964) is an improviser, composer, saxophonist/clarinetist, curator, and writer. In 1989 he moved to Chicago from Boston and has worked continuously from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America and Europe, recording in a large array of contexts, with many internationally renowned musicians. In 1999 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in Music.

Cuteness Overload

with Chase Barney & Emily Yong Beck
CERAMICS 663 001 | 3 credits | $225 Lab Fee
July 15 - 27, 2024

Cuteness and humor can be used to convey serious topics in a palatable way. Artists such as Robert Arneson, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Ruby Neri, and Beth Lo utilize these tactics in their clay practice to tell us stories from unique points of view. Students will learn hand-building techniques such as coil building, slab construction, pinch pots, and various surface design techniques, combining these skills with their interpretation of “cute” to achieve their desired result. This course allows students of all levels to work on projects, improve their ceramics skills and develop their visual vocabulary. Participants will have access to all materials in the ceramic studio and demonstrations will include hand-building, vessel creation, construction methods, proper firing methods, and encourage an intermediate understanding of drying times, methods for building sound pieces, techniques for minimizing loss, and studio safety. Taking inspiration from the California Funk movement and ideas about the aesthetics of optimism, as coined by curator Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, students will be encouraged to listen to episodes of Vizcarrondo-Laboy’s podcast “Clay in Color”. Group readings and discussion will focus on Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”, we will screen episodes of Art 21 and Craft in America, as well as classic cartoons such as Looney Tunes and Hello Kitty. Assignments are designed to build an understanding of hand-building techniques, ceramic tradition, cuteness's place in the present art canon, and how to introduce humor and play into your practice. Assignments and exercises may include clay-exquisite-corpse, pinch pot coffee cups, and a narrative vessel. Instructors will be available to help facilitate individual projects and class critiques.

Chase Barney is an artist working with clay to create vases adorned with flowers, animals, and bright colors. The narrative in his work is loose, a mish-mash of Mormon dogma, fairy tale, and fable, as well as a deep love for cliché, pop culture, and family lore. Barney graduated with a BFA from the University of Minnesota and his MFA at The School of the Art Institute Chicago in 2022. Barney has exhibited across the United States and received numerous grants and scholarships supporting his work, including a 2020 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and the New Artist Full Merit Scholarship from SAIC. Barney is originally from Utah. He lives and works in Chicago.

Emily Yong Beck is an interdisciplinary ceramic artist who received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2021. Currently based in Chicago, Illinois, her works are largely inspired by significant cultural pieces of craft, cartoon and kawaii culture. The appropriation of certain motifs are an attempt to create a dialogue about forgotten histories and propaganda. Beck’s work has been featured in the solo exhibitions Lions & Lambs, Gaa Gallery Provincetown, Massachuesetts, Spoonful of Sugar at New Image Art, Los Angeles, and a two-person presentation with Gaa Gallery and a solo exhibition at Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany. Beck has been awarded residences such as The Residency Program in Versailles, France where the work made was featured at Lefebvre et Fils in Paris, France in a solo exhibition, Gimbap Paradise.

Glassblowing

with Yashodhar Reddy & Will Hutchinson
GLASS 681 002 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
July 15 - 27, 2024

This course will cover the fundamentals of glassblowing and is designed to develop a student’s foundational knowledge and skill upon which more advanced ideas can be built. Students will learn to gather hot glass out of the furnace and how to manipulate it with a variety of tools and techniques in both the hot shop and the cold shop. Productive practices including working as a team, timing and choreography, and using natural elements to execute ideas will be demonstrated. This course may include readings from Ed Schmidt’s Beginning Glassblowing and a screening of Glassmakers of Herat. We will investigate glassblowing from a historical approach and look at objects from different periods in history, including works made by Pino Signoretto, Bill Gudenrath, and Karen Willinbrink-Johnsen. Assignments will range from functional cup making, executing complex abstractions, and methods for coloring and patterning. This course will culminate in the completion of a student designed sculpture or installation to be exhibited in the hot shop.

Yashodhar Reddy is an Indian-American glass artist from Central Pennsylvania. His work focuses on the traditional aspects of glass craft and design from a functional viewpoint. Refining form and technique through the study of tableware, lighting fixtures, and abstract sculpture. He draws inspiration from the aesthetics of historical glass objects, with the intention of rendering his works with more relevant and personal styles. His education began at Harrisburg Area Community College where he was introduced to the medium and from there continued to travel the world to study with prestigious glass artists such as Raven Skyriver, Kelly O’Dell, Darin Denison, and Davide Fuin. He has a diverse working experience ranging from design studios such as Niche Modern and AO Glassworks to educational organizations such as the prestigious Corning Museum of Glass, where he has been on the team of many reputable artists such as Swedish maker, Fredrik Nielsen and Head of Glass at SIU, Jiyong Lee. He was previously working at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist’s Residency as Glass Studio Manager. Since his time away from Ox-Bow he is continuing his education, working as an apprentice glassmaker in Venice, Italy for one of the last few living Masters in Murano, Italy, a small island located in the Venetian lagoon that is well renowned for its centuries long artistic glass making history.

Will Hutchinson holds an MFA in sculpture from The University of Montana and BFA in drawing from The Art Academy of Cincinnati. He is a former smokejumper and all around adventurer. Invested in the truth of experience, his practice is mainly focused on functional objects that attempt to facilitate and enhance experiences from the mundane to the extraordinary. Currently Will works as a full time knife-maker and teaches glassblowing workshops in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana.

Alternative Armatures

with Elena Ailes
SCULPTURE 685 001 | 3 credits | $200 Lab Fee
July 15 - 27, 2024

In this class, we will build armatures from wood, metal, and found manufactured and natural objects. Working in Ox-Bow’s Metals Studio, students will explore three-dimensional design concepts and sculptural projects at any scale and repurposing and recycling materials will be encouraged. We will integrate unconventional materials including glue, foam, items foraged from Ox-Bow’s campus, and use play, intuition, and memory to design a unique and expressive body of work. Demonstrations on technical skills will include methods for effective welding, joinery, installation, and finishing. Slide lectures will review the work of Barbara Hepworth, Leonardo Drew, Bob Cassily, and Niki de Saint Phalle and discussions will cover contemporary sculptural practices, sustainable sculpture, and current 3D scanning and printing technology. Assignments will invite students to use abstract shapes, forms, and textures to fabricate 3D self-portraits. In week one students will learn how to craft sturdy and expressive armatures and in week two we will focus on the “skin” that covers the armature. Students will be encouraged to consider how their design and patterns, textures, and materials used affect our emotions. This course is a great way to be introduced to a variety of techniques in a sculpture shop, beginners are welcomed.

Multi-Level Painting: Form, Process, and Meaning

with Josh Dihle
PAINTING 605 001 | 3 credits
Online | July 11 - 24, 2024 | 10 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. CST

This course for beginning to advanced students will include extensive experimentation with materials and techniques through individual painting problems. Emphasis will be placed on active decision-making to explore formal and material options as part of the painting process in relation to form and meaning. Students will pursue various interests in subject matter. Students may choose to work with oil-based media. Demonstrations, lectures and critiques will be included.

With a hand for detail and an eye on the natural world, Josh Dihle blends painting, carving, drawing, and sculpture to open visionary portals into the heart. He is the cofounder of experimental art/performance platforms Color Club and Barely Fair and teaches painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dihle has had solo exhibitions at M+B (Los Angeles), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago), 4th Ward Project Space (Chicago), McAninch Arts Center (Chicago) and Valerie Carberry Gallery (Chicago). Dihle's work has been exhibited in group shows nationally and internationally, including MASSIMODECARLO Vspace (Milan, Italy), University of Maine Museum of Art (Bangor, Maine), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Rover (Chicago), Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, Ilinois), IAM Gallery (New York), Flyweight Projects (New York), Essex Flowers Gallery (New York), Ruschman (Mexico City) and Annarumma Gallery (Naples, Italy). His work and curatorial projects have been written about in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, New City, Artspace, The Washington Post, and Artsy, among others. Dihle lives and works in Chicago

Virtual Lyric Books

with Lee Blalock
ART & TECH 604 001 | 3 credits
Online | July 5 - 21, 2024 | 10 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. CST

As humans, we perpetually process a great deal of information from every direction, in every form, and often it isn’t kind enough to come in linearly, for easy digestion. Processing this noise doesn’t always happen in a thorough and organized manner. Instead, we often sample bubbles of thought that float between fiction and perceived reality. This course invites artists to explore practices that allow for bursts of thought using software and text. On our way to skill-based workshops, we will discuss contemporary media artists working with text, computation, and technology including Mendi + Keith Obadike, Allison Parrish, Nick Montfort, and Judd Morrissey. The generative poetry of early computer artists, excerpts from The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and the experimental text practices of different art movements will all supplement and inspire this class experience. We’ll look at art that marries text with technology and discuss how this affects how language is understood. Artists will create two works-in-progress that take cues from algorithmic techniques, song lyrics, combinatorial writing, and concrete poetry and receive hands-on experience placing these ideas in virtual environments using the game engine software Unity and code software p5.js. Students should provide their own computers and will be given access to the softwares.

Lee Blalock is a Chicago-based artist and educator presenting alternative and hyphenated states of being through technology-mediated processes. Interested in how technologies support the idea of impossible anatomies, behaviors, and performances, her work is an exercise in body modification by way of amplified behavior or "change-of-state". Lee’s interests include embodied cognition, anatomy and biomechanics, bionics, mechatronics, human/non-human entanglement, retro technology, and computational abstraction. She has presented work domestically, internationally, and virtually at many institutions including Feral File (online), Ars Electronica (online), the wrong biennale (online), NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), ICA (Philadelphia), 205 Hudson Gallery (New York), and the Art Institute of Chicago. Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Art and Technology Studies / Sound Practices Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and practices various forms of embodiment as an everyday athlete.

Dreaming Community: Immersive 3D World Building in New Art City

with Hiba Ali
ART & TECH 606 001 | 3 credits
Online | June 28 - July 11, 2024 | 1 - 3:30 p.m. CST

Dreams have the ability to activate our imagination. In this class we start with dreams as an inspiration point, and translate them via a collective 3D collage in New Art City, a 3D interactive platform. Demonstrations will prepare students to use 3D objects, images, and soundscapes to create a collective dreamland. We will use software including Blender, GIFs, and Bandlab to build an immersive collective collage on New Art City. Inspired by the work of Tabitha Rezaire, Ruha Benjamin, and Mariame Kaba, in dreaming with community, we will create a digital portal of inspiration and activate our collective imagination. We will screen Tabitha Rezaire, Neema Githere, Merriam Bennani, Amina Ross, and Hito Steyer's video work and discuss them. We will read chapters from We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (2021) by Mariame Kaba, We "Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022) by Ruha Benjamin and I Will Survive (2021) by Hito Steyerl. Assignments will invite students to locate their sense of comfort online, and arrange images, 3D objects and text, and sounds to translate those feelings into a space of virtual relaxation. Students will present a final project to the group. Students should supply a laptop with Blender software installed and create an account in New Art City (links will be provided upon enrollment). This class is open to students of all levels.

hiba ali is a producer of moving images, sounds, garments and words. they use principles of game design, 3d animation and immersive installations to create liminal spaces where they engage in world building, storytelling and digital poesis. in their practice, this term means a way to call forth more loving and healing into our world. they use virtual reality, 3d animation and augmented reality to slow down time and create portals of solace and care. they are an assistant professor at the college of design in the art & technology program at the university of oregon in eugene and they teach on decolonial, feminist, anti-racist frameworks in digital art pedagogies. their work has been presented in chicago, stockholm, vienna, berlin, toronto, new york, istanbul, são paulo, detroit, windsor, dubai, austin, vancouver, and portland.

The Portrait and the Figure in Ceramics

with Rodrigo Lara Zendejas
CERAMICS 668 001 | 3 credits | $225 Lab Fee
June 23 - July 6, 2024

This studio class for beginning and experienced students addresses the evolution of the figurative object as a consistently potent vehicle in the art continuum. Emphasis is placed on students’ personal investigations of the human form as a subject in contemporary ceramics, beyond the study of anatomy. An examination of a variety of ceramic construction strategies and techniques are explored through demonstrations and class projects concentrating on hand building without an armature. Firing and post-firing processes, surface treatments, and the incorporation of other media with clay will be covered. The figure in architecture, its relationship to vessels, and three-dimensional figure will be examined.Historical and contemporary concepts and artists related to ceramics and the figurative object in general will be included. Readings will include Mark Manders’ “My Work is Always Totally Silent” and we will screen “Stories” by Kiki Smith. Students will analyze and learn mass, form, and proportion in 3-5 projects focusing on portraits and figures. The work developed during class time could be approached as either proportionate and detailed; or whimsical, stylized, and hilarious.

Born 1981, Mexico. Rodrigo Lara Zendejas, Assistant Professor/Area Head of the Ceramics Department; University of Notre Dame. He received an MFA from SAIC in 2013 and his BFA, from the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico in 2003. Lara has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museo de Arte Moderno in the state of Mexico; Museo de la Ciudad in Querétaro, Mexico; Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago; C.G. Boerner in New York City; Kruger Gallery in Marfa, Texas; among others. Lara has two monographs of his work, Máscaras y Artefactos and Memorials. He won the first price in sculpture at the Premio Nacional de las Artes Visuales in Mexico in 2010. He has received several awards including: IAPG, DCASE, Chicago; Proyectos Especiales and Jóvenes Creadores, FONCA, Mexico City; Emerging Artist Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation, NYC; James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, 2013 SAIC; PECDA Estudios en el extranjero, IQCA; International Graduate Scholarship, SAIC; and the John W. Kurtich Travel Scholarship, SAIC, Berlin/Kassel, Germany, among others. He currently lives and works in Chicago.

The Dinner Party

with Corey Pemberton
GLASS 676 001 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
June 23 - July 6, 2024

There’s nothing more satisfying than eating and drinking from handmade wares with friends. This course, open to students of all levels, will focus on establishing a strong foundation in form and function in service of manipulating molten glass into items for a communal table setting. We will learn the processes involved in making objects including drinkware, pitchers, serving bowls, plates, and candlesticks and consider the works of Judy Chicago, Beth Lipman, and Joe Cariati. Underscoring the social nature of the glassblowing process in the studio, our objective will be to create a tablescape to use for a social mixer at the end of the class, bringing everyone together to celebrate one another’s hard work and individuality. Students need only bring a good attitude, an open mind, and a hunger to learn!

Corey Pemberton (American b. Reston, VA 1990) received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. He has completed residencies at The Pittsburgh Glass Center (PA), Bruket (Bodø, NO), Alfred University (NY), as well as a Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Crafts (NC). He has exhibited work at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art (CA), The Contemporary Museum of Art in Raleigh (NC), and has work in the permanent collections of The Museum of Art and Design (NY), The Boston Museum of Fine Art (MA), and The Chrysler Museum of Art (VA). Pemberton currently resides in Los Angeles, California where he splits his time between the nonprofit arts organization Crafting the Future, painting, and his glass practice. He strives to bring together people of all backgrounds and identities, breaking down stereotypes and building bridges; not only through his work with Crafting The Future but with his personal artistic practice as well.

Blacksmithing: Sculptural Forms

with Natalie Murray
SCULPTURE 672 001 | 3 credits | $250 Lab Fee
June 23 - July 6, 2024

This intensive will start with the fundamental techniques of forging, and move quickly into more advanced projects.  We will focus on the processes of moving material while hot, and the forge and anvil will be the primary tools of achieving form.  As a corollary, the history of forged ironwork (architectural, tools, and sculpture) will serve as a source of inspiration.  Each student will also be encouraged to make an inflated sheet metal sculpture.

Natalie Murray is a sculptor and fabricator with a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she continued to work as a foundry manager post-graduation. Beyond collegiate instruction, she teaches welding classes, including the 'Women in Welding' course at the Arc Academy. Natalie's time and talents have taken her from her Midwestern roots all the way to the largest women's university in the world in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; building some of their first maker-space facilities.

RISO-relations & Bookish Behaviors

with Madeleine Aguilar & bex ya yolk
PRINT 668 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
June 23 - July 6, 2024

This course is an introduction to the RISOgraph as a tool for high volume printing, editioned objects, and bookmaking to produce publications in printed bookish form. Students will experiment with a range of binding, printing, and sculptural tools to create publications while learning a variety of book structures and binding techniques. Equipment and praxis include but are not limited to: the RISOgraph printer, screen printing, xerox copier, comb binder, Epson scanner, laminator, spiral bound machine, and hand bookbinding tools. Daily in-class technical demonstrations in tandem with lectures on independent presses, zine makers, works by artists and publishers that utilize the RISO as both an economic and artistic tool, and prominent book artists will all be explored. The class will culminate in the production of a publication for the Ox-Bow Artists’ book and Zine Library (est. 2023). Each student will donate at least one book from their edition(s) to the collection. This gesture in fostering community by means of leaving ephemera and art objects for future artists to engage with, is the very core of what arts publishing can be.

Madeleine Aguilar tells stories, builds archives, maps spaces, constructs furniture, records histories, organizes data, catalogs objects, prints publications, creates frameworks, collects imagery, acquires trades, ties knots, re-purposes materials, imitates structures, utilizes chance, plays instruments, follows intuition, prompts participation, guides observation, leaves evidence, develops routines, takes walks, breaks habits, and makes lists. Using the archive as form, she acknowledges the passing of time by cataloging lived spaces, collected objects, familial histories, personal relationships, natural phenomena, mundane routines, and ephemeral moments. She runs bench press, a collaborative Risograph press based in Chicago, and is currently Print & New Media Studio Manager at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency.

bex ya yolk (they/them) is a transdisciplinary visual artist, book maker, scholar, and professor. yolk runs an independent artists’ book bindery, THUNGRY founded in Atlanta, GA now residing in Chicago, IL. With a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a full merit scholar—yolk has received grant endowment and recognition from the Atlanta Contemporary, the College Book Art Association, CODEX International Biennial Artists' Book Fair and Symposium, and the Judith Alexander Foundation. To date, THUNGRY operates as a publishing initiative focused on disrupting what we’ve come to understand qualifies a Book, complicating traditional ways of book building + semantics, through experimentation and queering praxis. yolk also maintains an extensive, generative, multi-year research study into the 'maternal complex', made up of subgenres like mothernism, the maternal identity, care work, reproductive design, rematriation, reproductive justice, container technics, matrescence, and the gestational state especially in queer folx exploring the intersectionalities between the Book + this kind of body.

Soft Compositions

with Chris Edwards & Lauren Gregory
FIBER 627 001 | 3 credits | $50 Lab Fee
June 23 - July 6, 2024

This course celebrates handicraft and invites students into the sewing circle in service of solving compositional problems with the language of quilting. Serving students at all levels of experience, participants will learn traditional, nontraditional, machine, and hand-sewing techniques to produce soft objects including quilts, banners, windsocks, dolls, and installations. Demonstrations on mapping 2D and 3D images, piecing, applique, dyeing, and additive image making will encourage the exploration of the alternative and whimsical sensibilities in soft sculpture. Platforming the loose and improvisational mark-making possible with traditional stitch and applique techniques of quilt-making, this highly collaborative and social course will be inspired by the works of Rosie Lee Tompkins, the Gees Bend Quilters, Claes Oldenberg, RuPaul, David Byrne, and Lee Bowery. Screenings may include True Stories (1986), Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), and readings may include “Knitting, Weaving, Embroidery, and Quilting as Subversive Aesthetic Strategies: On Feminist Interventions in Art, Fashion, and Philosophy” (Michna 2020). Students will conceive and construct original fiber works in response to assignments that focus on the expressive, personal, and comical possibilities of these materials. Assignments will include completing piecing, construction, binding, and quilting of a full personal quilt project, collaborating on group textiles, even with artists in other classes, and students will make a wearable item for Ox-Bow's Friday Night Costume Party. The course will culminate in a group quilt show installed in the landscape.

Chris Edwards makes work that focuses on practicing caring about things and being at home. He currently makes quilts and pottery in the pursuit of making art that depicts objects found in his space alongside imagined elements that add layers of humor, glamor, and mysteriousness. His work reflects his interest in creating objects that become part of his environment and interact with the real objects and life they represent. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from SAIC in 2011 and his Master of Social Work from the University of Iowa in 2014. He is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and works as a psychotherapist in addition to his art practice. He lives in Chicago with his husband, dog, and two cats. He has exhibited work at Adds Donna, Tusk, LVL3, Oggi Gallery, Dreamboat, Western Exhibitions, and Julius Caesar in Chicago.

Lauren Gregory (she/her) is a painter, animator, director and quilter who is best known for her technique of oil paint stop-motion animation, a way of making her paintings move. Born and raised in the mountains of East Tennessee, she began as an observational portrait painter, capturing friends and family in quick one session sittings. Lauren is the third in a lineage of southern female painters, following in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009, and since then has created GIFs, looped video installations, and narrative animated shorts that have screened at MoMA P.S.1, the New Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, and at museums and film festivals around the world. She has directed and animated music videos for Toro y Moi, Leonard Cohen, and Uffie, and has been awarded artist residencies in Italy, Hungary and in upstate New York. Quilting, another art form she learned as a child from the matriarchs in her family, has resurfaced as a major part of Lauren’s practice in recent years. She teaches Experimental Animation at Parsons School of Design and teaches quilting at Ox-bow School of Art. She is represented in New York by the Elijah Wheat Showroom, and in Nashville by Red Arrow Gallery. Lauren lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

Black in the Woods

with Krista Franklin & Ayanah Moor
FIBER & PRINT 652 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
June 23 - July 6, 2024

This interdisciplinary seminar and studio course examines notions of blackness and the woods. We will discuss art works and readings related to concepts of the gothic, identity, race, cultural studies and the landscape. In addition to more traditional processes including papermaking, sun printing, monoprinting and creative writing exercises, faculty will support and cultivate diverse approaches to media, such as performance, site-specific installation, and field recording. In this course, students will view and discuss works by artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Ana Mendieta, and David Hammons. They will be required to read a number of works such as selected poems and essays from the anthology Black Nature, edited by Camille T. Dungy, and will screen short films and an episode from the FX television show Atlanta. Student assignments are varied and will range from creative writing and text generating exercises both in and out of class to hand papermaking, drawing, collage strategies, and conceptual prompts informed by student driven research.

Krista Franklin is a writer, performer, and visual artist, the author of Solo(s) (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Too Much Midnight (Haymarket Books, 2020), the artist book Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018), and the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012). She is a recipient of the Helen and Tim Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her visual art has been exhibited at DePaul Art Museum, Poetry Foundation, Konsthall C, Rootwork Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Studio Museum in Harlem, Chicago Cultural Center, National Museum of Mexican Art, and the set of 20th Century Fox’s Empire. She is published in Poetry, Black Camera, The Offing, Vinyl, and a number of anthologies and artist books.

The poetics of Blackness and queerness are centered in Ayanah Moor’s approach to painting, print, drawing, and performance. She earned a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Her exhibition venues include Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, (Davis, California); Museum of Contemporary Art; DePaul Art Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, (Chicago); The Studio Museum Harlem, New York; Andy Warhol Museum, (Pittsburgh); ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives—University of Southern California Libraries; Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, (New Zealand); Proyecto ‘ace, (Buenos Aires); daadgalerie, (Berlin), among others. Moor’s publications include, Incite: Journal of Experimental Media, SPORTS (2017) edited by Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere, Nicole Fleetwood’s, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011), and What is Contemporary Art? (2009) by Terry E. Smith.