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.

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.

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.

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.

Material Code

with Samantha Bittman
FIBER 626 001 & PAINTING 603 001 | 3 credits
Online | June 14 - 27, 2024 | 10 a.m.- 12:30 p.m. CST

In this course, students will explore how the weave draft technique, often utilized by weavers for the loom, can generate patterned binary code which can then be translated into textile, painting, sound, and many other media. Focusing on the communicative capabilities of their chosen material, students will draft and manipulate algorithmic pattern generators to produce endless patterns of 1’s and 0’s. Works made by artists including Anni Albers, Xylor Jane, Beryl Korot, and kg will lead us into conversations around the origins of weaving, the loom, computers, and algorithmic art making. Discussion will be supplemented by Bhakti Ziek’s The Woven Pixel, Beverly Gordon’s “Cloth as Communication”, and Chris Ofili: Weaving Magic. Assignments will include drafting a “Sample Blanket” with graph paper, colored pencil, and other flat materials and, while contemplating how material choice makes meaning, final pieces of any media that utilize the code will be shared amongst the group.

Samantha Bittman is a visual artist and educator based in the Hudson Valley, NY. In her practice, she works with woven patterning to generate paintings, graphic wallpapers, and tiled installations. She has participated in residency programs at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Ox-Bow School of Art. In 2012, she received the Artadia Award. Recent solo exhibitions include, Ronchini, London, UK; Andrew Rafacz, Chicago; Morgan Lehman, New York; and Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn, New York. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including David Castillo, Miami, Florida; Shane Campbell, Chicago; and Rhona Hoffman, Chicago. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Wall Street International, and The Washington Post, amongst others. She has taught at numerous institutions Rhode Island School of Design, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tyler School of Art, Haystack School of Crafts, and Ox-Bow. In 2022, she founded Catskill Weaving School, an artist-run school that offers in-person and online weaving workshops, based in Catskill, and Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.

Queer Craft

with Wells Chandler
FIBER 629 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
June 9 - 22, 2024

This course will consider queer aesthetics and contributions to the development of visual, literary, filmic and philosophical culture with an emphasis on craft. Queer culture is not a separate or parallel function of a larger culture, but is central to and generative for it. We will address how the inclusivity and resistance of the queer movement offers productive models for artistic production now. Demonstrations and assignments will introduce crochet, dyeing, activist performance techniques and anarchist publishing strategies to the group who will also use collaboration, exploring in nature, narrative, upscaling and play as a way to contextualize queer craft, queer activism, making kin, and queer mysticism. Readings will include Larry Mitchell + Ned Asta’s The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, 1977, Audre Lorde Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1978 and Jose Esteban Munoz Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 2010.  We will look at the work of Vaginal Davis, Sheila Pepe and Joe Brainard and we will screen Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2004 film Tropical Malady and Jennie Livingston's 1990 film Paris is Burning among others. Assignments will encourage surprise, discovery, and world building. In addition to working on proposed personal projects, artists will work collaboratively on polymorphously perverse drawings, mycelium networks, and historical lesbian structures.  The class will culminate in a runway presentation of crafted wearables.

Wells Chandler is a Bronx based artist who explores ecology, community, gender and queer iconography through the mediums of crochet, embroidery, drawing and cake. He received his MFA from Yale University in 2011 where he was awarded the Ralph Mayer Prize for proficiency in materials and techniques. From 2016-17 he was a recipient of the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Eric Mouchet (Brussels, Belgium), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago), Diablo Rosso (Panama City, Panama), and Galerie Eric Mouchet (Paris, France). Recent group exhibitions include International Objects (Brooklyn), Goldfinch Gallery (Chicago), and Helena Anrather (New York). His work has been reviewed by Roxane Gay, Art Forum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, The Huffington
Post, TimeOut, Modern Painters, and Two Coats of Paint. Chandler is a Soloway gallery
member. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Purchase where he has taught for four
years. In the Spring of 2023, Chandler was appointed the Teiger Mentor in the Arts at Cornell.

Papermaking Studio

with Andrea Peterson
PAPER 604 001 | 3 credits | $200 Lab Fee
June 9 - 22, 2024

Paper as an art medium is exciting and elusive. Paper pulp can be transformed into sculptural works, drawings with pulp and unusual surface textures. It can allude to skin, metal, rock or something quite totally different. Explore all of these possibilities. Stretch your artistic and technical skills to create unusual works of art.

Andrea Peterson is an artist and educator. She lives and creates work in northwest Indiana, , Hook Pottery Paper, a studio and gallery co-owned with her husband. She teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She combines paper arts, printmaking and book arts to make works that address the human relationship to the environment. She was recently collected by Whirlpool Corporation in St. Joseph, MI and the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City which recognized her as a 21st century creator of unusual handmade papers and surface design.