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.