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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Paint Makerspace

with Laurel Sparks
PAINTING 669 001 | 3 credits | $50 Lab Fee
May 26 - June 8, 2024

This survey course provides students of all levels with the opportunity to work on their own projects and expand their painting skills. Students will have dedicated access to the painting studio and will be encouraged to experiment with various materials and techniques. Demonstrations may present techniques in acrylic or oil, sketching and planning processes, preparation of painting surfaces, and information on studio safety. The faculty will host presentations and lectures on relevant historical artists as well as contemporary painters, and students will engage in discussions, readings, screenings, and critiques with the group which illuminate painterly concerns and emphasize active decision making. Assignments are designed to build understanding of new methods, and students will conceive projects that reflect their interests. Instructors will be available to help facilitate individual, collaborative, and interdisciplinary projects and this course will culminate in a group critique.

Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work applies esoteric correspondence systems to materialize structures outside of perceptible reality. They hold an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Tufts University. Exhibitions include solo shows at Kate Werble gallery, NYC; Knockdown Center, Brooklyn, NY and group shows at Cheim and Read gallery, NYC; Leslie-Lohman Museum, NYC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. Awards include a MacDowell Fellowship, Elizabeth Foundation Studio Intensive Program at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, NY, Fire Island Artist Residency, NY, Berkshire Taconic Fellowship, SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship and an Elaine DeKooning Fellowship. Sparks lives and works between Brooklyn and Hudson Valley, NY and teaches undergraduate and graduate painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In 2022/23 Sparks received a project grant to produce an immersive installation for Invisible Prairie at Tinworks Art, Bozeman Montana.

Rhythmistic Airbrush

with Turtel Onli
PAINTING 679 001 | 3 credits | $100 Lab Fee
May 26 - June 8, 2024

Taught by an airbrush master and legend of the Chicago-based Wearable Art Movement in the 1970’s, students who enroll in this class have a unique opportunity to enhance their technique with an exciting and versatile tool while considering the radicality of the medium. At the heart of the Wearable Art Movement was the rejection of traditional hierarchies that elevated fine art over craft. With this in mind, students will survey the fundamentals, care, and accessories related to the airbrush to create exceptional wearable and 2D artworks. This is a project based course designed to expand the skills of the beginner and experienced airbrush user. Proper handling, studio safety, and water based methods will be demonstrated for a more errorless experience. We will glean inspiration from the airbrush greats including Terry Hill, Olivia De Berardinis, H. R. Giger, and Pamela Shanteau and available texts will include The Complete Airbrush Book by Ralph Maurello, The Ultimate Airbrush Handbook by Pamela Shanteau. Assignments will familiarize students with both stencils and a freehand technique to achieve an expressive result. Our most complex project will involve precise registration techniques, with multiple colors and spray patterns to achieve an excellent collection of designed 2D and wearable artworks. T-shirts and other fabric will be provided, but students should also bring their own pieces that they imagine could be involved in their final, wearable, presentation.

Turtel Onli was a major -market illustrator for the likes of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Chicago Magazine, Capital Records, MODE Avant-Garde Magazine, and more after graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in BFA Art Ed & M.A.A.T. Art Therapy. Onli taught Air-Brush on fabrics at the Textile Art Center in Chicago plus had an amazing run producing wearable art. All due to the air-brush. Onli uses it still in doing Rhythmistic Fine Art and Illustrations for limited edition Graphic Novels.