Patterned & Printed Textiles

with Elnaz Javani
PRINT 628 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
June 1–14, 2025

In this course, we examine a range of traditional and contemporary approaches to surface designing and mark making on fabric, using materials both pure and crude, to generate images. Drawing will be used as a device to access ideas, as a weapon against stunted creativity and will encourage accidental discovery. We will focus on the physical relationship between drawing and printing and will use silkscreen to translate images quickly onto cloth. Direct printing techniques, such as mono printing, will be employed to transfer drawings onto unique surfaces, as well as photo‐silkscreen, hand painting, and fabric reactive dyes. In this class fabric will become an extension of the paper; thick, thin, ridged, brittle, opaque and transparent. Instruction will be supplemented by relevant lectures on fiber and print artists and readings such as Prints Now Directions And Definitions, by Gill Saunders and Rosie Miles, Amanda Williams’ Color Theory, Hive Mind Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, The Tiling Patterns of Sebastien Truchet and The Topology of Structural Hierarchy by Cyril Stanley Smith and Pauline Boucher, Handbook of Regular Patterns: An Introduction to Symmetry in Two Dimensions by Peter Stevens, and Randomness Rules and Compositional Structure in Design by Michael Eckersley. Students will engage in sampling and experimentation, and demonstrate an ongoing commitment to independent studio practice and projects. This class will importantly include in‐depth discussion about students' work, concepts, material and technical choices, and thematic interests. Students are expected to work independently on relevant works of their choosing. This course gives students different approaches on image‐making and process‐based work framed with specific conceptual and historical readings on how artists and craftspeople have used dye, print and drawing to create complex surfaces.

Elnaz Javani (she/they) is an artist and educator who works across textiles, sculpture, and drawing. Her practice delves into personal and cultural memory, reflecting on migration and identity. Javani’s works frequently incorporate traditional textile techniques, exploring how material and process can serve as storytelling. Javani often addresses themes of displacement, the body, and the intersection of personal and collective histories through the lens of craft and fiber art. Javani holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Tehran University of Art. Javani is the recipient of the New Voices 2024 award from Print Center New York, a 2024 CSU Professional Development award, a 2023 Chicago Individual Artists Program grant, and the 2023 Center for Craft Artist Cohort Grant. She was also named one of Chicago’s Breakout Artists of 2022 and has received a Spark Grant from the Chicago Artists Coalition (2021), the Kala Art Institute Fellowship Award, and Residency Grant (2020), the Define American Art Fellowship Grant (2020), and the Hyde Park Art Center Flex Space Residency Award (2019).

Queer Craft

with Feather Chiaverini
FIBER 629 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
June 1–14, 2025

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.

Feather Chiaverini (he/they) explores how queer theory, horror, class, and pop culture shape our identities and how these tools can be used flexibly to shape the self. Inspired by the theater and everyday hustle of their family’s costume shop, they use costumes as material, rather than adornment. They make sculptures out of trash and trash out of sculptures, all mingling in a teeming mass, creating immersive installations, soft sculptures, and digital environments that reimagine our horizons. Feather is a fiber and performance artist from South Florida currently based in Philadelphia. They received a BFA from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia. They have shown work nationally at Trout Museum of Art, N’namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Temple Contemporary, ROY G BIV Gallery, and more. Feather is currently the Residency Director of the Queer Materials Lab and adjuncts at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Hard Lines: Drawing with Steel

with Devin Balara & Abigail Lucien
SCULPTURE 663 001 | 3 credits | $250 Lab Fee
June 1–14, 2025

This hybrid sculpture and drawing course will focus on steel fabrication and the translation of line on paper to line in space. Students will learn to use steel as a drawing material with demonstrations in hot and cold bending, modular construction, welding, and finishing strategies. Technical demos and work time will accompany discussions about daily sketchbook practices and the ways in which literal weight can be given to simple doodles or cartoon graphics. This course is suitable for all levels of shop experience; students will quickly gain confidence with equipment and be encouraged to play and improvise independently with the material at as large a scale as they choose. Students are required to complete 3 assignments over the course of the week, one which will reinforce basic knowledge of linear steel fabrication and safety, and two further assignments, utilizing linear steel drawings at the scale of the student’s choosing. Ultimately, students may deploy work into a particular site or landscape and let their sketches stretch their legs.

Devin Balara (she/her) is an artist from Florida currently based in New Orleans. She received a BFA in sculpture from the University of North Florida in 2010, an MFA in sculpture from Indiana University in 2014, and has been pretending to be a geologist since 2020. Her work has notably been exhibited at Atlanta Contemporary, Ortega Y Gasset and Spring Break in New York, Roots & Culture in Chicago, the International Sculpture Center in New Jersey, and most recently at Coco Hunday in Tampa, Florida. She has worked for over a decade as a metal shop manager for various institutions including eight years at Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan. She currently is working as a freelance stained glass artist and educator.

Abigail Lucien (they/them) is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist. Working across sculpture, literature, and time-based media, their work addresses themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, and place by considering our relationship to inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care. Lucien received the 2023 Sondheim Award, was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, is a recipient of a 2023 Ruby’s Award, 2021 VMFA Fellowship and the 2020 Harpo Emerging Artist Fellowship. Past exhibitions include SculptureCenter, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; MoMA PS1, New York; MAC Panamá, Panamá; Tiwani Contemporary, London; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta; Frost Art Museum, Miami; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Madison, Maine; Amant Studio & Research Residency, New York; the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts, Wrocław, Poland; The Luminary, St. Louis; Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe; ACRE, Steuben, Wisconsin; and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency, Saugatuck, Michigan. Lucien is currently based in Queens, New York and teaches as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Hunter College in New York.

Papermaking Studio

with Andrea Peterson
PAPER 604 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
June 1–14, 2025

In this class, we will use paper pulp, an incredibly malleable material, to create works of art. Pulp can be transformed dimensionally, made into drawings and unusual surface textures and used to lock elements into a state of timelessness. It can evoke skin, metal, rock, or something totally different. We will use a wide range of fibers from all over the world to present perspectives unique to location. Chosen for their flexibility in the artmaking process, these fibers include cotton, abaca, flax, kozo (paper mulberry) for Eastern techniques, wheat straw, and sisal, an agricultural by-product sourced from a regenerative farm. All fibers used in the course are grown organically and in raw states. We will process the material using a sustainable cooking method in a cauldron over a wood fire. Utilizing Eastern and Western traditional techniques, we will push the boundaries of the medium. Students will hear stories about Ts’ai Lun, the inventor of paper; designer and historian Dard Hunter; and painter David Hockney, and their global influence on paper, fiber, and pulp. This course will emphasize a sustainable approach in the studio and how it can be addressed in one’s own practice. It is designed as an open dialogue generated by students’ ideas, resulting in a body of work inspired by the medium and the natural beauty of Ox-Bow.

Andrea Peterson (she/her) is an artist and educator based in Laporte, Indiana. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 1994 and BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently teaches paper arts and papermaking at The School of the Art Institute in the Fiber and Material Studies Program and from her studio Hook Pottery Paper. She co-operates Hook Pottery Paper with her husband, ceramic artist Jon Hook. She creates paper art works and relief printed images on handmade paper that utilize pulp-drawing techniques. She combines these efforts to make works that address human relationship to the environment. Her work has been collected by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and can be found in many private and corporate collections such as Hollister clothing, Chicago as well as exhibitions in Beer Shiva, Israel; Deggendorf Museum, Germany; Steyermuhl Paper Museum, Austria; Scoula di Grafica, Venice, Italy; and Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana. She has conducted workshops and lectures at Paper Museum in Steyermuhl, Austria; University Georgia Athens; Cortona, Italy; Scoula di Grafica, Venice, Italy; and University of Syracuse, New York.

Rhythmistic Airbrush

with Turtel Onli
PAINTING & DRAWING 679 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
June 1–14, 2025

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 (Mr/him/he) 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 in Art Ed & M.A.A.T. in Clinical Art Therapy. Onli taught Air-Brush on fabrics / textiles at the Textile Art Center and Fashion Illustration at Columbia College in Chicago plus had an amazing run producing limited-edition fashionably versatile wearable art and dynamic fashion shows at the Limelight Club. All due to the air-brush. Onli uses it still in doing Rhythmistic Fine Art for his thematic visual art gallery exhibitions, custom murals, and l Illustrations for his break-out limited edition Graphic Novels.

Woodfire: Ancient Methods & Contemporary Applications

with Henry Crissman & Virginia Rose Torrence
CERAMICS 660 001 | 3 credits | $300 Lab Fee
June 1–14, 2025

This course will explore the many histories, methods, and potentials of using wood as fuel to heat and transform clay into ceramic. Presentations will survey ceramic science, the history and logic of kiln design, and the range of objects made with wood fired kilns. Demonstrations will include handbuilding and wheel throwing techniques as well as experimental methods with found ceramic materials and objects. Films and readings including Maria Martinez: Indian Pottery of San Ildefonso and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass will offer insights as we engage and form the material of the Earth. Conversations throughout will aim to assist students in finding creative agency with ceramics. Students will work on independent projects and the class will culminate in a nearly two day long firing of Ox-Bow’s 50 cubic foot catenary-arch wood-kiln; a massive group effort that will involve loading the kiln, and methodically stoking it with wood for the duration of the firing until our desired temperature is reached throughout. While the kiln cools we’ll explore ways in which the techniques covered might be applied outside of the workshop, and build and fire a small and temporary kiln which students could easily recreate independently. Once cool, the big kiln will be unloaded and cleaned, results will be finished and analyzed, and we'll hold an exhibit of the works created.

Henry James Haver Crissman (he/him) is an artist and educator who thinks of his art as a means, not an end. Crissman earned a BFA in Craft from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan in 2012, and a MFA in Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, New York in 2015. He now lives and works in Hamtramck, Michigan where he and his wife and fellow artist, Virginia Rose Torrence, founded and co-direct Ceramics School, a community ceramics studio and artist residency. He regards teaching as an integral aspect of his creative practice, and in addition to teaching at Ceramics School, he is currently an adjunct professor in the Studio Art and Craft Department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan.

Virginia Rose Torrence (she/her) co-owns, operates, and teaches at Ceramics School, a community ceramics studio and Artist Residency in Hamtramck, Michigan. Virginia’s art practice is sometimes making pottery, and sometimes making sculptures. She received her BFA in Craft/Ceramics from the College for Creative Studies (Detroit) in 2013 and her MFA in Ceramics from Alfred University (Alfred, New York) in 2016. Virginia lives and makes art in Hamtramck, Michigan with her partner and co-teacher Henry Crissman, two dogs, two cats, and a parakeet.

The Transparent Self: Working in Glass

with Minami Oya and Nate Watson
GLASS 666 001 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
June 1–14, 2025

Glass embodies a fluidity, range, and nuance well suited to expose the truths that every person holds. Through a series of material inquiries, and personal reflections, we’ll find the methods by which the stories that define us can best be made visible through glass. This workshop will examine the qualities that make glass such a powerful mode of expression and help students refine an honest and natural relationship with the material. We'll cover a range of foundational techniques including basic glassblowing, adhesives and assemblage, color application, basic coldworking, and sculpture techniques— A balancing of traditional and nontraditional processes will help you access the expression that comes from a harmony between you and the material. Through a series of short lectures, brief writing assignments, and thoughtful experiments, students will come to understand the range, immediacy, and responsiveness that glass can offer the creative process. Instructors will introduce contemporary artists like Vanessa German, Tavares Strachan, Fred Wilson, Team Lab, and many more who mine the material of glass in wildly different ways to alter how we observe the world and how we envision ourselves within it. Experiencing and reflecting on the material in its purest form while constantly checking in with how we tell our own truths through short writing prompts, we’ll consider where the language of glass and the stories that make us, overlap. Ultimately we’ll seek a merging of ourselves with the making process in a way that allows for our truths to melt into the spaces where we live and work and create together. The course begins with students responding to a series of writing prompts designed to produce short autobiographical excerpts. These expressions of self reflection are to be presented, discussed, and distilled into personal methodologies for approaching glass. Inquiry is the mechanism for refining individual paths in this course, as each unique story is transformed into a series of experiments and challenges through which each student builds a foundational understanding of how glass works.

Minami Oya (she/her) is a Japanese artist, glassmaker, and educator, who currently lives and works in San Francisco, California. Born and raised on the island of Sado in Japan, Minami grew up surrounded by nature, art, and the ancestral consciousness. Her work that employs glass and mixed media as metaphorical instruments, installations, and works on paper have been shown in solo and juried exhibitions in the United States. She began her deep passion for glass in 2008 at San Francisco State University and has trained with maestros in studios such as Pilchuck Glass School, Pittsburgh Glass Center, Corning Museum of Glass, and D.F. Glassworks in Murano, Italy. Minami holds a MFA in Spatial Art from San Jose State University and has taught in several institutions including California College of the Arts, San Jose State University, and Public Glass in San Francisco.

Nate Watson is a visual artist and cultural organizer currently working between San Francisco and Louisville. Before pursuing his graduate degree at the California College of Arts in 2004, Nate received a BA in history from Centre College and was awarded grants from the Rhode Island Foundation, and the Rhode Island Council For the Arts for his work investigating intersections between immigration, labor, and craft traditions. In 2012 Nate co-founded Light A Spark, a collaborative glass focused arts program that provides rare opportunities and resources for youth in marginalized communities of San Francisco. Nate has lectured nationally and held teaching positions at San Francisco State University, The California College of Arts, and the University of Washington. Projects have been exhibited and supported by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, University of San Francisco Thacher Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at Parsons School of Design, Southern Exposure Gallery, Chinese Cultural Center, The Corning Museum of Glass, The Tacoma Museum of Glass, The San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, and The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

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

with hiba ali
ART & TECH 606 001 | 3 credits
June 2–15, 10:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. ET/9:00–11:30 a.m. CT

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 Annika Hansteen-Izora, 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 Steyerl'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, "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 (they/them) 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.

Material Abstraction in Painting

with Laurel Sparks
PAINTING 683 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
June 15–28, 2025

This course explores the principles and practices of material abstraction in painting, focusing on the transformative qualities of paint and tactile media. Students will engage in a rigorous studio environment, experimenting with various materials and techniques—including acrylics, oils, collage, object assemblage, fabric, and industrial materials—to discover how texture, color, and form can convey meaning beyond representation. Through a combination of hands-on projects and critical discussions, participants will investigate the relationship between materials and visual language. Explorations of works by historical and contemporary artists such as David Hammons, Lynda Benglis, Jack Whitten, and Niki De Saint Phalle will expose students to practices that foreground tactility over narrative. Abstract experimental films and analog animations by Harry Smith and Jan Svankmajer will offer time-based theaters of alchemy and bricolage. Catalog essays from LA MOCA’s 2012–13 exhibition Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void 1949–1962 will highlight postwar experiments with the materiality of gesture and the expansion of the painting medium to incorporate performance, time-based, and assemblage strategies. These examples will span the earliest experiments to the most current practitioners who move the two-dimensional medium of painting toward the three-dimensionality of sculpture. Assignments will be open and experimental, beginning with 10 quick studies that combine three unlikely elements each. These studies will generate a personal aesthetic, culminating in a final presentation of each student’s distinct exploration of tactile abstraction. By the end of the course, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the symbolic and sensory implications of material choices, while expanding traditional boundaries in painting.

Laurel Sparks (any/all) is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based painter whose work intersects queer craft, textile, occult and abstract histories. Esoteric correspondence systems are encoded in patterns and glyphs that reflect mysteries of macro and micro cosmologies. In tandem, elements of decoration and artifice pay homage to queer and feminist counterculture expressions. Exhibitions include recent solo projects at Kate Werble Gallery, New York; Knockdown Center, Brooklyn; and group shows at Cheim and Read Gallery, New York; Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts. Awards include a MacDowell Fellowship, Elizabeth Foundation Studio Intensive Program at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Fire Island Artist Residency, SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship, Berkshire Taconic Fellowship, and an Elaine DeKooning Fellowship. Sparks holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Tufts University. Sparks is an Associate Professor in painting at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

Lithography: Stone & Photolithography

with Danny Miller & Kristina Paabus
PRINT 637 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
June 15–28, 2025

This fast-paced course is designed for both beginners and advanced artists, and will be offered in a two-week sequence. Week one focuses on traditional methods with stone lithography, and week two introduces students to photomechanical lithography using both hand-drawn and digital processes. Students are encouraged to investigate personal directions in their work as they explore lithographic possibilities through editions and unique variants. Emphasis will be placed on both conceptual and technical development, and additional demonstrations will be added based on the specific interests and needs of the participants. Class consists of demonstrations, presentations, work time, discussions, and critiques. Historical and contemporary lithographic examples will be presented in order to clarify the relationships between idea, context, material, and process.

Danny Miller (he/him) is an artist and musician working in Chicago. Utilizing woodblock, lithography, etching, painting, and drawing, he conjures works inspired by sci-fi and crime pulp illustration, film noir, vintage advertisements, comics and music. Miller has taught at Ohio State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of the Art Institute, and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency, and retired from the SAIC Printmedia department in 2021 after 32 years, as the manager and technical coordinator. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has worked in professional print shops including Landfall Press, Normal Editions Workshop, and Four Brothers Press. Additionally, Miller taught traditional fiddle and banjo music at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago for 11 years.

Kristina Paabus (she/her; United States & Estonia) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and printmaker. Her work examines systems of power and control, with a focus on Soviet and post-Soviet histories. Paabus earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited throughout the US, Europe, and China; and her work can be found in numerous private and public collections. Recent solo exhibitions include Meanwhile at Hobusepea Galerii, Estonia; Something to Believe In at the McDonough Museum of Art, Ohio; and From the Edge at Ox-Bow House, Michigan. Paabus has participated in numerous international and domestic artist residencies, and was a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for Installation Art in Estonia, the Grant Wood Fellowship in Printmaking at The University of Iowa, and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Paabus lives and works in Ohio where she is an Associate Professor of Reproducible Media and Chair of the Studio Art Department at Oberlin College.

Blacksmithing: Sculptural Forms

with Natalie Murray
SCULPTURE 672 001 | 3 credits | $250 Lab Fee
June 15–28, 2025

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 (she/her) is a sculptor and fabricator with a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her 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. She is back in Chicago currently working in large-scale, custom metal fabrication serving a variety of different industries around the globe that include: rail, airlines, construction, aerospace, energy, infrastructure, art, and many more. Beyond manufacturing and collegiate instruction, she teaches welding classes, including the 'Women in Welding' course at the Arc Academy.

Glassblowing

with Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez
GLASS 681 001 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
June 15–28, 2025

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 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.

Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez (she/her) combines poetry, images, glass objects, and neon light to create objects and installations that draw inspiration from her Puerto Rican and Persian heritage. She is the inaugural winner of the Adele and Leonard Leight Award from the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. She has been an artist in residence at Blue Mountain Center, Pilchuck Glass School and the Corning Museum of Glass, among others. Her work has been shown in dozens of museums and galleries in the US and abroad including the Museum of Craft and Design, Traver Gallery, Tacoma Museum of Glass, BWA Wrocław, and Glasmuseet Ebeltoft. Victoria is passionate about social change and arts education, and was previously the Director of The Bead Project at UrbanGlass, a program geared towards supporting people of diverse cultural and economic backgrounds as they learn how to work with the material. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Tyler School of Art, from which she received her BFA. She holds an MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Muraling at Ox-Bow

with Alex Bradley Cohen & Nicola Florimbi
PAINTING & DRAWING 605 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
June 15–28, 2025

In this class, students will have the opportunity to design, propose, and implement a large outdoor mural that will beautify and celebrate Ox-Bow. Visible from the main entrance road into campus, the mural will greet all visitors and participants. Students will learn strategies for planning, drafting, scaffolding, and collecting supplies for their collaborative mural. The class will draw inspiration from the style and signage of Ox-Bow and consider the work of muralists Diego Rivera, Ben Shahn, Seymour Fogel, Thelma Johnson Streat, Keith Haring, and Bernard Williams, among others. In the first few days of the course, students and faculty will work together to design three proposals, to be reviewed and approved by Ox-Bow’s Built & Natural Environment Committee. The remainder of the course will center on implementation of the selected design.

Alex Bradley Cohen (he/him) lives and works in Chicago. Alex utilizes painting to visualize the push and pulls of political life. Working with acrylic paint on canvas, he depicts friends, family members, and himself in scenes that foreground everyday moments. Materializing from personal photographs and memories rather than direct observation, each painting serves as an exercise in imaginative world building. Recent group exhibitions include In Relation to Power: Politically Engaged Works from the Collection, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; and Triple: Alex Bradley Cohen, Louis Fratino, and Tschabalala Self, University Art Museum at the University of Albany, New York. Other exhibitions include The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois; and The Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles; among others. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and was an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency.

Nicola Florimbi (she/her) is an artist born in Santa Fe, New Mexico and lives in Chicago, Illinois. Her education includes an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Group exhibitions include Orange Noise, The Capsule, Chicago (2024); Graduate Show I, SAIC, Chicago (2018); Until You Say So, Bolsky Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2017); AHWA, Salafi Cowboy Collective, Los Angeles.

Cuteness Overload

with Chase Barney
CERAMICS 663 001 | 3 credits | $250 Lab Fee
June 15–28, 2025

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 (he/him) 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, Illinois.

Party as Form

with Alberto Aguilar & Maria Burundarena
SCULPTURE 462 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
June 15–28, 2025

Party As Form takes the history of celebration as its point of departure for a class that blends cultural theory with current experiments in curating, social practice and performance. Through a combination of readings, discussions and deployment, students will study the history, aesthetics, labor and conventions for parties from the intimate to the public, religious to the secular. Designed as a theory and practice art history class, Party As Form challenges participants to experience Ox Bow, a site for gathering, community, participation and production, through the lens of readings in sociology, cultural and art theory on ideas that critically address the event, celebration or party as the gathering, hosting and cultivating of a group. Topics include: liminality, community, formation of publics, spectacle, utopias, leisure, play and ecstasy. Class consists of a combination of reading and discussion, lectures and presentations alongside projects that anchor discussion through interpretation, conceptualization and the full design and hosting of on-site events. Students taking the course for Art History credit write critical and/or scholarly papers that locate their party, or event within the context of contemporary art and art history. Students taking the course for Sculpture will be required to design, fabricate, and implement objects and scenarios that relate to the directives of the course. Party forms may include: weddings, raves, galas, Cinco de Mayo, parades, tea parties, debutante balls, masquerades, bar mitzvahs, Mardi Gras, New Years Eve, Chinese New Year, 4th of July, Bastille Day, Burning Man, sleepovers and more.

Alberto Aguilar (he/his/they) is a Chicago-based artist that uses the party as form to create a shared public moment. In "A Personal Dinner Invitation” he invited strangers into his home to experience a normal dinner party with a slightly amplified program. In 2015 he organized “Wedding to Unknown" where a couple was married and celebrated before 200 unsuspecting guests. In 2024 he organized a block party in Pilsen by invitation of the Chicago Humanities Festival. This event happened throughout a single day in and around The National Museum of Mexican Art. The day began with “Museum Church", which was meant to give attendees a sense of grounding. For “Auto Portrait Spectacular,” 24 artists were invited to show their cars as vehicles of public engagement, installation or as artworks themselves in the museum parking lot. Along with the cars there were performances and live music that unfolded throughout the night as well as Aguilar’s signature 50 ingredient mole served to the public by a food truck. Alberto is the recipient of the 2024 Latinx Artist Fellowship. He has appeared in the Creative Independent as well as NYU’s Latinx Project.

Maria Burundarena (she/her) was born in 1989 in Paris, France and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is currently based in Chicago, USA. Maria is a visual artist and educator who has developed work as a textile designer and photographer, printing different narratives onto garments, sculptures, installations, and LED screens. Her current work explores large-scale installations using print media, light projection and reflective materials. Maria has exhibited in ZAZ 10 Times Square, New York; Hope College, Holland, Michigan; Mayfield, the Franklin; MdW Mana Contemporary, Chicago; Athletic Association, Chicago; Heaven Gallery, Chicago; Compound Yellow; Oak Park, Illinois; and the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Chicago. In 2024, Maria was named one of Chicago’s Breakout Artists and received the IAP grant from DCASE. Maria holds a BFA from la Universidad de Buenos Aires (FADU) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is currently a lecturer in the Contemporary Practices department.

Singing to Ourselves: Animating 3D Characters

with hiba ali
ATSP 607 001 | 3 credits
June 16–29, 2025, 10:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. ET/9:00–11:30 a.m. CT 

How can we create digital stories through characters? In this class, we'll be using the 3D software Blender and the Face Cap app to animate 3D characters. We will model and rig our characters and have them speak. Along the way, we'll use rendering to build a sense of digital animation workflows. We will look at Meriem Bennani's 2 Lizards, Morehshin Allahyari's She Who Sees the Unknown, and Tabita Rezaire's Ultra Wet Recapitulation, as well as our favorite cartoons. Our gait expresses our personality and place in the world. In an assignment, students will consider how their character walks and moves. They will create an animation cycle that expresses their character’s personality and write a 250-word reflection on how they interpreted the character's walk. The class will culminate in a presentation of animated characters that move, sing, and speak. Students will be provided with access to the Face Cap app but should have their own access to Adobe.

hiba ali (they/them) 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 Dinner Party

with Corey Pemberton
GLASS 676 001 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
June 29–July 12

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 (he/they) received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. He has completed residencies at The Pittsburgh Glass Center; Bruket, Bodø, Norway; Alfred University, New York; as well as a Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Crafts, North Carolina. He has exhibited work at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, California; The Contemporary Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina; and has work in the permanent collections of The Museum of Art and Design New York’ The Boston Museum of Fine Art; and The Chrysler Museum of Art, Virginia. 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.

Color

with Mario Romano & William Sieruta
PAINTING & DRAWING 658 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
June 29–July 12, 2025

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 (he/him) 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 an architect. Instead of committing to one discipline, his time is haphazardly divided 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 Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency, 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 color- focused painting classes and workshops. He was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant for his popular “Thinking in Color” studio workshop. These days William lives and makes art on January Mountain with his wife Jennifer and two kids, Zigmund and Zinnia.

Faking It: Invented Environments for Painting

with Richard Hull
PAINTING & DRAWING 637 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
June 29–July 12, 2025

In this course, students build their own landscape tableaus in the studio using materials found in the Ox-Bow environs. Students then paint these scenes. The objective of the course is for students to create more dynamic abstract or representational paintings by controlling the subject matter and inspecting how choices are made from a painting’s initial stages. Other subject matter sources include papier-mâché heads (for portraiture), non-representational sculptures and invented environments.

Richard Hull’s (he/him) 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.

Hand-Building Pottery for Plants

with Dee Clements
CERAMICS 671 001 | 3 credits | $250 Lab Fee
June 29–July 12, 2025

In this class, we will use hand-building techniques to create planters, baths, vases, and sculptures specifically designed for growing flowers and ornamental plants. We will pay special attention to the strength, drainage, and outdoor readiness of our designs to best serve our growing needs. Students will have access to all materials in the Ceramics Studio. Demonstrations will cover hand-building, vessel creation, and construction methods, with a focus on developing an intermediate understanding of drying times, building sound pieces, minimizing loss, and studio safety. In addition, students will have the opportunity to explore effective surface techniques using the Ox-Bow glaze lab. We will use coil- and slab-building methods to construct pots and then enhance them with ornamental and decorative surface treatments including carving, sgraffito, incising, feathering, and the addition of other sculptural elements. We’ll also explore colored slips and underglaze techniques. To draw inspiration, we will study various ceramic artists working in similar styles. Assignments will invite students to consider the idea of the clay pot as a container for holding plants, foods, and objects and how decoration and ornamentation can signify an object's use or history, or tell a story. We will consider the idea of "The Carrier Bag Theory" and its application within both ancient and modern pottery.  We will look at examples from early Greek pots to contemporary artists like Betty Woodman, Roberto Lugo, Grayson Perry, and more. Our final installation will be supported by a trip to the plant nursery to buy plants to create a studio installation of living elements supported by our ceramic wares.

Dee Clements (she/her/ella) is a sculptor and designer whose practice uses the language of weaving and ceramics to explore her interests in materials, ethnography, and gender politics. She holds an MFA in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Fiber and Materials Studies and Sculpture from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is currently represented by Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami, Florida.

Wandering Spirits

with Joseph & Sarah Belknap
PHOTO | 615 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
June 29–July 12, 2025

What does it mean to make an image? In this course we will make images and photographs using the Earth’s Sun in collaboration with photographic techniques that emerged in the 1800s and continue to be used in contemporary art. We will play with digital photography, anthotypes, cyanotypes, chlorophyll prints, and other alternative photographic techniques. We will utilize photography, drawing, painting, and collage to make images with depth, vibrancy, and wildness. Our images will be experienced through virtual worlds and platforms as well as physical spaces of the home, communities and other locations through posting, installing, inserting, publishing and other possible ways where images can be transmitted. The acceleration of image production has transformed our understanding of ourselves by folding the horizon in on itself. We will look into phenomenological studies of being while making images that examine our contemporary conditions of the power within our lives that these images can serve, deconstruct and reinvent. From social justice, deep fakes, intimacy, ecology - the political impact of images shape our existence. While we look at contemporary and historical image making we will look at ways of seeing. Artists will include Anna Atkins, Kiki Smith, Candice Lin, Zadie Xa, and Dario Robleto. Readings and screenings for this course will include Rebecca Solnit, Susan Sontag, Jean Painlevé, Sara Ahmed, and Hito Steyerl. Assignments will invite students to respond to the reading and viewing of Hito Steryerl’s work How Not to be Seen and create a series of images using the Cyanotype process. We will also consider the perspective points of the viewer and the processes of concealment that make this object or subject hidden in plain sight.

Sarah Belknap (they/she) and Joseph Belknap (they/he) are interdisciplinary artists and educators. Stretching and playing with pareidolia and image-making, their work draws on conspiracy theories, science, and sci-fi. Working as a team since 2008, their art has been exhibited in artist-run exhibition spaces in Springfield, Brooklyn, Detroit, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and St. Louis. In addition, they have presented performances at institutions throughout Chicago, including the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Links Hall, and the MCA. Their work has been shown in group exhibitions at SFAI Galleries (San Francisco, California) the Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, Ohio), The Arts Club of Chicago, the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, Western Exhibitions, and solo shows at The Arts Club of Chicago and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Their work was included in the book ‘Weather as Medium’ by Janine Randerson in the Leonardo Series through MIT Press.

Time, Chance & Outside Forces

with Heather Mekkelson
SCULPTURE 692 001 | 3 credits | $250 Lab Fee
June 29–July 12, 2025

This multimedia course emphasizes sculpture and site-specificity, providing students with the opportunity to contextualize their practice in the surrounding landscape of Ox-Bow. Coursework will center on the creation of artistic systems that use forces like time, gravity, weather, and decay as process agents. Woodworking and metalworking capacities will be introduced and accessible to students in support of their work. Demonstrations will cover the use of unconventional materials and approaches. A focus on creative forms of documentation will enable students to finish the course with compelling evidence of works that may no longer be in existence. Morning meetings will be devoted to exploring issues of auto-destruction, ephemerality, agency, and uncertainty through readings and discussions. Afternoons provide the opportunity for material and process demonstrations, as well as studio work in the shop or the field with instructor support. Artists we will look to include Leonardo Drew, Mark Dion, Ana Mendieta, and Paul Rosero Contreras, among many others. In addition to discussing excerpts selected from Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object and writings by Gustav Metzger, we will view screenings of work by Joseph Beuys, Francis Alÿs, and others. Students will complete a midpoint exercise designed to disappear. The course culminates in an ephemeral project that is individually driven, relevant to material covered, and creatively documented.

Heather Mekkelson (she/her) uses all forms of art but finds sculpture to be the best for speculating on questions with no clear answers. She suspects it comes from thinking through her hands. The work Mekkelson makes has been exhibited throughout Chicago and places beyond, in a variety of spaces, like museums and galleries, but also on street poles and that one time in a medicine cabinet. Over the years people have written about what she does, and sometimes who she is. Some insightful ones can be found in print, in Art Journal and Aperture, and online at Artforum, Art21 Magazine, and Visual Art Source. To hear her speak about her work, podcast interviews with Bad at Sports and Studio Break are available for listening. Mekkelson has received support for her work with fellowships, grants and awards from Artadia, the Illinois Arts Council, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the institutions she has served.

Art as Fashion

with Chris Bogia & Travis Boyer
FIBER 633 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
June 29–July 12, 2025

For artists interested in the intersection of art and fashion, this class will engage with the politics, processes, and history of adornment as jumping-off points for creative making. We will consider how artists translate a personal fascination with fashion and incorporate that into a larger studio practice through learning techniques for fast and fun textile manipulation and creation, producing wearable art, and hosting community activities that stem from our in-class discussions and lectures. We will look at the work of artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Beverly Semmes, Nick Cave, and Anna Uddenberg and designers such as Miuccia Prada, Hussein Chalayan, Rei Kawakubo, and Viktor & Rolf. Readings and screenings will include interviews, daily runway show viewings featuring designers mentioned above, and more. Students will be invited to use any materials they wish, from traditional paint on canvas and textiles with embellishments such as beading, appliqué, and dye to materials like cardboard, found objects, and objects from nature. This is not a sewing-heavy class nor a fashion design class, but students who possess those skills and have an interest in using them to make art are encouraged to apply.

Chris Bogia (he/him) is an artist from Astoria, Queens whose work—spanning works on paper, textile compositions, and sculpture—incorporates materials and strategies from professional design fields including interior design, fashion, and videogames. Recently, Bogia has been considering public spaces, creating outdoor sculptures and permanent institutional commissions. Recent exhibitions include the Dallas Art Fair with Mrs., a solo exhibition with Hermès in Los Angeles; a two-person exhibition at Halsey McCay, East Hampton; and a group exhibition at Ortega Y’ Gasset, Brooklyn; and Perrotin, Paris. Recent public works include a project with the Public Art Fund at LaGuardia Airport, a mural at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens; sculpture installations with The Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, New York and Foreland in Catskills, New York; and a permanent work in the Bronx with the NYC School Construction Authority. Bogia is represented by Mrs. and teaches sculpture at New York University. He is the co-founder and former executive director of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), the first LGBTQ artist residency in the world. His writing has appeared in a Artforum.

Travis Boyer (he/him) was born in Fort Worth, Texas. He lives and works in New York City. He holds a BFA in Fibers from UNT and he received his MFA with a concentration in painting from Bard College in 2012. Boyer’s practice employs a range of media and methods: from painting, textile, sculpture, photography, and is known for making sumptuous paintings using dye on silk velvet. While diverse in form, this body of work is fundamentally grounded in textiles to explore the nature of desire. Boyer's paintings are in the permanent collections of The High Museum, Atlanta; the Portland Museum of Art; and the Hood Museum. Boyer has exhibited internationally at museums and galleries including The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The New Museum, New York; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, California, Palais des Beaux-Arts, France; CAMH, Houston; False Flag Gallery, New York; Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York; Participant Inc., New York;Noon Projects, Los Angeles; The Valley, Taos, and Peter Kilchmann, Paris; among others.

Art Making for the Living and the Dead

with Anders Zanichkowsky
PRINT 673 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 Lab Fee
July 13–19, 2025

When artists make work about death, we are affirming our relationships to the living world. Doing this well requires asking questions, respecting mysteries and ethics, and inviting collaboration: with the living and the dead, the past and future, the human and non-human. This interdisciplinary seminar will show students different ways to engage with death, mortality, and grief in their studio practice. We will discuss readings, films, artworks, and historical burial practices, and develop our own work in response through drawing, creative writing, and monoprint, relief, and cyanotype printmaking. Final projects can also use performance, video, poetry, or other media. A major topic for the seminar is Necropolitics: How social inequality and oppression defines an era of untimely death for people whose lives are deemed “ungrievable” (Judith Butler) and thus not worth saving; and creates communities of “disprized mourners'' (Dagwami Woubshet) whose grief goes unacknowledged and unhealed. We will discuss writings by those theorists as well as Christina Sharpe, John Berger, Teju Cole, and Mosab Abu Toha, and look at artists responding to and resisting the conditions of the Necrocene, including Alfredo Jaar, Tilda Swinton, Anna Campbell, and filmmakers Itziar Barrio and Tourmaline (“Atlantic is a Sea of Bones.”) Students will work through short but complex texts together, and learn to use creative writing to develop their own projects in printmaking or other media.

Anders Zanichkowsky (they/them) is an artist, writer, and activist making work about grief, desire, and our longing for another world. They are equally at home in traditional craft and new media, working primarily in printmaking, textiles, video, and performance. Since 2021 their main studio practice has been the founding and running of their business, Burial Blankets, where they make handwoven shrouds for green burial meant for a lifetime of enjoyment and reflection. Anders has been an artist-in-residence with The Arctic Circle sailing expedition in Svalbard, Røst AiR in Sápmi/Norway, and the Chicago Park District's Cultural Asset Mapping Project. Their work has been exhibited across the United States, Europe, and Australia including the Wisconsin Film Festival, and featured in NewCity, the Chicago Sun Times, and on WBEZ. Awards for their research include a DCASE Individual Artist Grant, a SPARK grant from Chicago Artists Coalition, and a Temkin Award for their MFA thesis show You Are Running Into Danger. Anders has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019) and a BA from Hampshire College (2008).

Wild Sounds

with Skooby Laposky
SOUND 603 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 lab fee
July 13–19, 2025

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.

The act of listening holds a central role in the work of artist and designer Skooby Laposky (he/him). As a film composer and field recordist, Laposky’s contributions have 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. 

Multi-level Glassblowing

with Will Hutchinson
GLASS 641 001 | 1.5 credits | $175 Lab Fee
July 13–19

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.

Will Hutchinson (he/him) 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.

Breaking Good: Improvisational Stained Glass

with Devin Balara 
SCULP 693 001 | 1.5 credits | $125 Lab Fee
July 13–19

This class will provide a full overview of stained glass techniques. Using the copper foil method, students will learn to cut, grind, and solder colorful glass sheets and shards. Emphasis will be placed on experimentation, improvisation, and using what you find among existing scraps. We will explore three-dimensional form construction, template design, and strategies to use stained glass in your own practice. Those with previous stained glass experience will find space in this class to play and take risks, while beginners will come away confidently knowing the rules of glass—and how to break them!  We will engage in readings and ongoing discussions of color theory while considering artists who use color, light, and line, such as Hilma af Klint, Kerry James Marshall, Raúl de Nieves, and Wells Chandler. Assignments will invite students to find their way through a spectrum of glass pieces and arrange them with a focus on color harmony and intentional refraction of light. The class will culminate in a burst of site-specific installations throughout Ox-Bow’s campus.

Devin Balara (she/her) is an artist from Florida currently based in New Orleans. She received a BFA in sculpture from the University of North Florida in 2010, an MFA in sculpture from Indiana University in 2014, and has been pretending to be a geologist since 2020. Her work has notably been exhibited at Atlanta Contemporary, Ortega Y Gasset and Spring Break in New York, Roots & Culture in Chicago, the International Sculpture Center in New Jersey, and most recently at Coco Hunday in Tampa, Florida. She has worked for over a decade as a metal shop manager for various institutions including eight years at Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan. She currently is working as a freelance stained glass artist and educator.

RISO-relations & Bookish Behaviors

with Madeleine Aguilar & bex ya yolk
PRINT 668 001 | 3 credits | $200 Lab Fee
July 21–August 2, 2025

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 (she/her) 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. Madeleine runs bench press, a collaborative risograph press based in Chicago. She is currently a Senior Lab Specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago where she manages the Print Lab in the School of Design. She has performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the DePaul Art Museum, EXPO Chicago, and Experimental Sound Studio. Her work lives in the Franklin Furnace Archive in the Pratt Institute Library, the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the 8-Ball Library in New York, the Art Book Library at Virginia Commonwealth University, and elsewhere.

bex ya yolk (they/them) is a visual artist, designer, book maker, and adjunct professor based in Chicago, IL. yolk received a BFA in Graphic Design from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a full merit scholar. They have received grant endowment from the Atlanta Contemporary, Codex International Biennial Artists' Book Fair and Symposium, the College Book Art Association, VCUarts Adjunct Faculty Research, and the Judith Alexander Foundation. yolk is currently a BOLT artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artist Coalition. yolk is the founder of an artists’ book bindery + publishing initiative––THUNGRY which focuses on disrupting what qualifies a Book, complicating traditional ways of book building + semantics through experimentation and queering praxis. THUNGRY explores historical research, sociology, and speculative theory into 'the Maternal Complex' made up of subgenres like care work, reproductive design, abortion access activism, reproductive justice and health care disparity, maternal identities, and the gestational state especially in queer folx exploring the intersectionalities between the Book + these kinds of bodies.

The Artist’s Collection: Foraging Archives for the Studio

with Kaylee Rae Wyant & Holly Murkerson
PAINTING & DRAWING 604 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
July 21–August 2, 2025

What do you like to collect, and why? From Georgia O’Keeffe’s scavenged bones to the Chicago Imagists’ “trash treasures,” artists have often built personal collections to develop unique visual languages. Through daily foraging walks, students will gather and document objects from the Ox-Bow landscape, creating a personal archive to inspire their work. We’ll also explore the local ecology, learning about nearby dunes, wetlands, and old-growth forests. As we examine our relationship to the land, we will consider ways to “collect” without taking and explore how artmaking can offer new perspectives for connecting with the environment. We will study artists who use collected materials to create unique painting styles, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Barbara Rossi, Christina Ramberg, and Wangechi Mutu. We’ll explore the collection aesthetics in the assemblages of Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Dion, Louise Nevelson, and Rashid Johnson, as well as experimental photography and collage techniques by Evelyn Statsinger, James Welling, Harold Mendez, and Anna Atkins. Readings like Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk will prompt discussions about our relationship to the land, expanding our view to include plants and animals. Students will focus on developing a unique visual vocabulary through maintaining a rigorous daily sketchbook practice—completing at least 10 sketches a day along with reflective writing—and compiling a detailed archive of paintings, drawings, rubbings, and photographs that explore forms, patterns, and colors observed in nature. Students will then synthesize their collections, methods, and materials to produce a hybrid body of work for presentation at the end of the course. Although the course is rooted in drawing and painting, a multidisciplinary approach is encouraged. Students will use their sketches to explore ideas, study form and color, and experiment with alternative modes of mark-making, image generation, and nontraditional surfaces. While works on paper and canvas are welcome, students will also have the opportunity to work with cast plaster, handmade paper, and photograms, broadening their exploration of materials and techniques.

Kaylee Rae Wyant (she/her) is a Chicago-based painter whose work combines intuitive drawing with forms derived from nature and observation. Her paintings evolve from a back-and-forth rhythm, blending quick, gestural mark-making and slow, thoughtful, composition. Wyant received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008 where she is now an instructor in the Painting and Drawing department. She has exhibited work in galleries and project spaces across the US and in Europe including Real Tinsel Gallery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Soft Times Gallery, San Francisco; Cleave Carney Art Gallery, Glen Ellyn, Illinois; SWDZ, Vienna, Austria; Comfort Station, Roots & Culture, and Julius Ceasar in Chicago, Illinois. From 2011-2023 she was the co-director of the artist-run gallery ADDS DONNA in Chicago.

In collaboration with the fluid processes of photography, Holly Murkerson’s (she/her) work makes visible an emergent space where body and environment bleed into one another. Based in Chicago, Holly Murkerson received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Post-Baccalaureate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and her BFA from Florida Southern College. Past exhibitions include The East Wing at Goldfinch Gallery, 65Grand, Comfort Station, Rainbo Club, Heaven Gallery, Apparatus Projects, Roots & Culture, Julius Caesar, Andrew Rafacz Gallery (all Chicago); Rockford University Art Gallery, Rockford, Illinois; and Neiman Gallery at Columbia University, New York. She has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, The Ragdale Foundation, and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency and has received grants from The Illinois Art Council and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. From 2011 to 2021, she was a Co-Director of the art-run space, Adds Donna.

Mix & Match: Assemblage with Ceramics

with Allison Wade
CERAMICS 666 001 | 3 credits | $250 Lab Fee
July 21–August 2, 2025

In this course, students will create a collection of hand-built ceramic parts to be combined with found and/or constructed elements into hybrid sculptural objects. Inspired by materials at hand and the work of Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Arlene Shechet, and Linda Sormin (among others), we will think through the relationship of the part to the whole, intuition versus planning, time as it relates to material, and construction and conjunction methods. Over the two weeks, we will pinch, coil and slab build fire-able components while concurrently sourcing and fabricating non-clay materials. The final days of the session will be devoted to producing playful groupings for display and discussion. In addition, students will be asked to bring an item of old clothing to be deconstructed and used for our first assignment, a series of small pieces with unfired clay. A screening of Craft in America’s “Inspiration” episode and Art21’s Arlene Shechet interview, as well as short readings such as Joan Key’s “Readymade or Handmade?”, will complement studio time.

Allison Wade (she/her) is a visual artist and educator whose practice is material-based, intuitive, and formally focused. She combines ceramics, textiles, wood, and metal into unexpected arrangements that explore the intersection of flatness and form. Wade’s process, which she likens to syntax, is closely aligned with writing. Deploying an idiosyncratic visual language, she explores the structural and formal contingencies of her materials and sculptures. Wade received an MFA from the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BA in English literature from Stanford University. She has been a visiting artist/lecturer at Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Ceramics Department, Kansas City Art Institute, Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Miami University, among others. Residencies include Ragdale, Loghaven, Watershed, Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency, ACRE, and the Vermont Studio Center, where she was supported by a John Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. Wade’s work has been shown internationally and nationally, notably at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and she is represented by Devening Projects. She currently resides in Chicago, where she is Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University.

Drawn to Print at Ox-Bow

with Oli Watt & Emilia Lichtenwagner
PRINT 672 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
July 21–August 2, 2025

This course will examine the relationship between drawing and print through various techniques for monotypes and monoprints while encouraging a playful approach to both disciplines. Students will develop sketches, drawings, and paintings into workable and reworkable print matrices. Emphasis will be placed on monoprint processes that facilitate iteration, variation, sequencing, and seriality. Techniques taught will include trace monotypes, additive and subtractive monotypes, screen monotypes, and relief monotypes and monoprints. Students will look at, read, and discuss the following as points of reference: Ray and Charles Eames’s film Powers of Ten (thinking about zooming in and out while making work); works by Christina Ramberg and David Weiss (working in sequences, iteration); Tracey Emin’s Monoprint Diary (monoprinting as a mediation between drawing, printing, and painting); Ellsworth Kelly’s 1954 Drawings on a Bus: Sketchbook 23; Nicole Eisenman’s monotypes; Carla Esposito Hayter’s The Monotype: The History of a Pictorial Art; Lynda Barry’s Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (exploring “failure” and “good vs. bad drawings”); and Zarina Hashmi’s relief prints. While students will be encouraged to use all techniques taught to enhance their individual practice, they will also be given daily prompts to develop sketches and drawings. Assignments will include the creation of a monotype based on another student’s sketch using one or all of the following techniques: trace, additive, or subtractive methods. This will yield a cognate, or “ghost print,” which will be passed on to yet another student for further development.

Oli Watt (he/him) is a printmaker and sculptor who lives and works in Chicago. His projects explore and undermine mass-produced but often unscrutinized objects and imagery that occupy a great portion of the shared urban and suburban American landscape. He currently serves as Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches in the Printmedia Department. Oli has shown his work nationally and internationally including exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; the International Center of Graphic Art, Slovenia, Michigan; La Band Art Gallery, Los Angeles; and Rocket Gallery, London. His work has been discussed in numerous publications including Art on Paper, Art US, the New Art Examiner and Village Voice. He runs a free range gallery and project space in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood.

Emilia Lichtenwagner (she/her) utilizes various media as a means to record, dissect, laugh at, refute, demolish, and love the world. Her work consists of small units of attention usually recorded as drawings and prints on paper. Through her work, she subverts relationships between time and space through suggestion, rejection, and reconfiguration of traditional narrative structures. Using sequencing, repetition and iteration, she experiments with motifs that embrace the unremarkable and evoke empathy for the insignificant. She studied Fine Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria) and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Fulbright fellowship.

Glassblowing

with Ché Rhodes
GLASS 681 002 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
July 21–August 2

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.

Ché Rhodes (he/him/they) received his MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He earned his BA from Centre College where he began his career under mentorship of Stephen Rolfe Powell.  Formerly, he was an assistant professor and Head of Glass Art at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Currently he is professor and Head of Glass Art at the University of Louisville, Allen R. Hite Art Institute. He is a former member of the Glass Art Society Board of Directors, and a current member of the Crafting the Future Board of Trustees and the Penland School of Crafts Board of Trustees. Rhodes has demonstrated at the 2006, 2010, and 2015 Glass Art Society Conferences and has taught at the Penland School of Crafts, North Carolina; Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington; The Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, New York; Urban Glass, Brooklyn, New York; and at Scuola del Vetro: Abate Zanetti, in Venice, Italy. He is a recipient of the James Renwick Alliance Distinguished Educator Award and is included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Speed Museum of Art.

Rhyming the Land

with Hai-Wen Lin & Manal Shoukair
SCULPTURE 688 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
July 21–August 2, 2025

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 elements (rhyme, meter, metaphor) as form, material, and method. We will have daily writing and making exercises to develop a relationship between language, land, and our bodies. Techniques demonstrated will include mold making, cyanotype, field recording, movement mapping, kite making, and writing performative scores. This is not necessarily a poetry class, but a class of poetic making. It will entail 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, Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Francis Alÿs, amongst others. Readings may include Audre Lorde, Etel Adnan, Robin Wall Kimmerer. 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  (they/them) is a Taiwanese-American artist based somewhere between the earth and sky. Their work explores constructions of the body and the attunement of one’s self to the environment, often working through metaphor, etymologies, sunlight, wind, and the way time passes perfectly when you are out walking on a beautiful day. Lin is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and earned a MDes in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are one of the American Craft Council’s 2024 Emerging Artists, a 2023 CFDA Fashion Future Graduate, and are a recipient of the Hopper Prize and fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, and the Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency. Lin has exhibited work at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, the walls of their home, their friend’s home, on a plate, on a lake, on their body, in the sky.

Manal Shoukair (she/her) 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 MacDowell Fellowship.

Things Become Things: Sculpture & Site Specific Installation

with Devin T. Mays
SCULPTURE 689 001 | 3 credits | $250 Lab Fee
July 21–August 2, 2025

Students will create objects and temporary environments specifically for the Ox-Bow campus. Ox-Bow's community of art making as well as its unique natural offerings such as the forests, lagoon, and lake will be the source and location for site-specific creations. It is an opportunity to blur the lines between studio production and daily life in this setting and be in conversation with other artists expanding the boundaries of the studio. Students will experiment with various traditional and non-traditional approaches to object making such as casting, construction, knotting, the augmentation of found objects, and dimensional drawing. The resulting sculptural experiments will be placed in spaces in and around Ox-Bow. Presentations on historical and contemporary examples including Beverly Buchanan, Emmer Sewell, and Kenzi Shiokava will help to contextualize these modes of working and readings will include Forms of Poetic Attention by Lucy Alford, Blackness and Nothingness by Fred Moten, A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, and The Endgame by Beckett. We will discuss the meanings of exhibiting work in a variety of spaces: rural/urban, indoor/outdoor/, natural/manicured, gallery space/living space, sacred/profane, actual/virtual and in addition to creating objects and environments for specific locations, we will also reverse this process by letting spaces dictate what the sculptural environment should be. Assignments will invite students to wander, catalog the material world of their surroundings, and produce temporary slight and monumental gestures in the landscape. Regular discussion and critique will culminate in a presentation of works for the Ox-Bow community.

Devin T. Mays (he/him) uses sculpture, installation, performance and pictures to offer observation of what's seen and unseen. The materials being used in his practice do not always present themselves as anything more than what they appear to be. There is not always a physical transformation at the hands of his facilitation. He often refers to his interdisciplinary practice as an exercise in wandering, a practice-in-practice, a place for things to become Things. Mays has exhibited at Sculpture Center, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Driehaus Museum, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Belmacz, London; The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago; DePaul Art Museum; and The Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, among others. Mays holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University and a Master of Fine Arts from The University of Chicago. He is currently a fellow with the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning (CERCL) and the Art Department at Rice University. 

Romanticism & Nature in Painting

with Mari Eastman & Paula Kamps
PAINTING & DRAWING 682 001 | 3 credits | $175 Lab Fee
July 21–August 2, 2025

This class will focus on painting and drawing from nature. After starting the day with meditation and movement, we will make sketches and watercolors of Ox-Bow’s unique surroundings. Alternating between a painterly approach and writing to reflect on thoughts and impressions, we will touch upon European Romanticism and Asian landscape painting. In addition to reading passages from Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, and Buddhist texts, we will view works by artists including Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Emil Nolde, Giorgio Morandi, George Stubbs, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Marlene Dumas, as well as illustrators such as Beatrix Potter and Maria Sibylla Merian. Thinking together about the meaning of the sublime and the importance of what Isaiah Berlin called “longing for the unbounded and the indefinable . . . an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life,” we will stress solitary studio and reading time as much as encouraging students to explore nature on their own. In the first week of the course, we will supplement local florals with foraged natural elements to design ephemeral arrangements via a lesson in ikebana. These living sculptures will serve as still-life subjects. Finding inspiration in Ox-Bow’s dynamic weather and its rich flora and fauna, we will sketch in the field, draw from canoes, hike, paint the constellations at night, and bird-watch. We will study our subjects and utilize the techniques necessary to translate their textures and colors, starting in watercolor en plein air before finishing works in oil and acrylic in the studio. The class will culminate with an installation of final works.

Mari Eastman’s (she/her) work emerges from a pictorial study of images from magazines and the internet which become intertwined with personal narratives, executed in an intentionally loose manner. Eastman holds an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at Bombon Projects, Barcelona; Broadway Gallery, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Orange County Museum of Art, the Berkeley Museum of Art, Cherry and Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; Spruth and Magers, Munich; Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York; and Maureen Paley, London; among other venues. Her work has been included in such publications as Modern Painters, The New York Times, and on the websites Artforum.com and Contemporary Art Daily. Eastman lives and works in Chicago and is on the faculty at The University of Chicago.

Paula Kamps (she/her; German, b. Cologne, Denmark) is a poet and a painter. Her work focuses on recollection, fabulation, and the perception of narrative. Unhinging the artist's expected role as the operator of signification or meaning, her works joyfully dawdle in a space of transposition between what is read and what is seen, between what is felt and what is thought. From washes of pigment and inks across linen, Kamps' builds strange reveries, often uncomfortable, often feeling incomplete. With figures hazy or obscured and a recurring, but arcane symbology, her works elegantly hint on subjects persistent throughout art history—the unreliability of memory, the evasiveness of meaning, and our continual desire to understand one another. In 2016, she graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Recent solo exhibitions include Word of Honor at M.LeBlanc, Chicago (2024); Cold Customs at eastcontemporary, Milan (2022); Shoot The Moon at Mou Projects, Hong Kong (2022) and At The Pawn Shop at Sans titre, Paris (2021). She regularly publishes her poetry in the form of artist's books and advises graduate students in painting at SAIC.

Becoming Imperceptible: Precarious and Ephemeral Practices in Contemporary Performance, Writing, and Installation

with Lin Hixson & Matthew Goulish
PERFORMANCE 609 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 lab fee
August 3–9, 2025

In this performance intensive, students will be asked to consider the seasons of life, with special consideration of how geography (especially the unique landscape of Ox-Bow) impacts these flows. Engaging the disciplines of performance, writing, installation, and practices of collaboration and response, this course will examine the idea of becoming imperceptible and how it relates to the more than human, reduced behavior, the intertwining of kinship, spaces of disappearance, incompleteness, and lightness of action. The class draws from theoretical writings of Akiko Busch on How to Disappear, Erin Manning on Duchamp’s concept of the infra-thin, the poetry of Ed Roberson, the sculptural interventions of artists Devin T. Mays, and case studies from nature such as the killdeer feigning a broken wing to distract a predator from its nest. Students will work from specific directives to generate individual and group performances, and will compose creative and critical responses to the works of others. We will use our bodies to pick up the extraordinary signals from ordinary surroundings, and translate those signals to an audience, at first each other, and at the end of the week, the entire Ox-Bow community.

Lin Hixson (director) (she/her) and Matthew Goulish (dramaturg) (he/him) co-founded Every house has a door in 2008, to convene diverse, intergenerational, project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognized artists. Drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects, Every house creates performance works and performance-related projects in many media. Every house has presented both nationally and internationally including Prague, Helsinki, Glasgow, London, New York, Austin, and Chicago. Their performance works in collaboration with Helsinki-based artist Essi Kauslainen include Scarecrow (2017), and the multi-year Carnival of the Animals project, dedicated to endangered and extinct species. Residencies have included The Bellagio Center, MANCC, and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Their collaboratively written essays have appeared in the anthologies The Creative Critic—Writing as/about Practice and The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader. In 2022, the company co-published Selected Plays of Jay Wright Volumes 1, 2, and 3 with Kenning Editions.

The Ancient Future: Clay & Sound

with Israel Davis & Douglas R. Ewart
CERAMICS 659 001 | 1.5 credits | $125 Lab Fee
August 3–9, 2025

Music and clay, are two of the most malleable, elastic, enduring, widely utilized, and shared materials and experiences known to the Human Family. Many of the oldest musical instruments found at archeological sites are made of clay and, inspired by this ancient relationship, we will study the symbiotic nature of ceramics and sound through instrument making and performance. We will explore music and clay as medicine for meditation, comfort, and peace through the creation of ceramic drums, shakers, whistles, cups, bowls, and as carriers of sound, food, and libation. The works of Raven Halfmoon, Dante K. Hayes, and Ebi Baralaye may guide our creative path and we will review the ceramic instrument works of Nigeria, Pakistan, Morocco, and Turkey. Through daily musical improvisations, guided sessions, group discussions, and demonstrations on ceramic studio processes including hand-building, throwing, and glazing techniques, this course will culminate in pit fire and a final performance. We aim to share in meaningful exchange that reexamines ancient practices as a way to forge new pathways to cultural wellness.

Israel “Izzy” Davis is an artist whose work plays between the boundaries of object and image. He has taught numerous workshops and exhibited nationally and internationally. Izzy’s work ranges in content from personal narratives, observations, particulars, and fun. He is a professor and head of ceramics at Central Michigan University.

Douglas R. Ewart (he/him) Professor Emeritus at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946. His life and his wide-ranging work have always been inextricably associated with Jamaican culture, history, politics, and the land itself. Professor Ewart immigrated to Chicago in 1963, where he studied music theory at VanderCook College of Music, electronic music at Governors State University, and composition at the School of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Professor Ewart’s varied and interdisciplinary work encompasses music composition, painting and kinetic sound sculpture, and multi-instrumental performance on a full range of instruments of his own design and construction for which he is known worldwide. His visual art and kinetic works have been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Ojai Festival, Art Institute of Chicago, Institute for Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

Open Air Furniture Design

with John Preus
SCULP 694 001 | 1.5 credits | $125 Lab Fee
August 3–9, 2025

In this small class, students will design a bespoke modern collection of outdoor seating for use around the Ox-Bow bonfire. Students will come away with the skills to draft future projects and implement, finish, and install functional works. This class will be hosted in the sculpture studio, upgraded with select woodworking tools.We will review the work of artists and designers including Martino Gamper, Jack Craig, Jessica Stockholder, Misha Kahn, Siosi Design, Hella Jongerius, Chris Schanck, James Krenov, Droog, Sam Maloof, Messgewand, Parsons & Charlesworth, Andrea Zittel, Gordon Matta-Clark, Norman Teague, Enzo Mari, Joyce Lin, and others.Assignments will invite students to compose a thematic collection, salvage from the landscape, produce drawings for projects, cannibalize found objects, and host a celebratory event for the unveiling of their collection.

John Preus (he/him) is an artist, furniture-maker, and builder working in a wide range of media and degrees of functionality. He is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, and Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia.

Perfumery and Glass-Cast Vessels

with Emily Endo
GLASS 652 001 | 1.5 credits | $175 Lab Fee
August 3–9, 2025

This class will introduce the process of casting hollow-core glass vessels and the fundamentals of fragrance construction. Part one of the class will introduce the process of creating cast glass vessels using an adaptation of the core-forming process. Techniques covered will include basic hollow-core mold making, wax sculpting, and firing schedule development. The second section of the course will guide students through perfume formulation, structure, material families, extraction processes, and blending. Participants will work with aroma molecules and high quality botanical essences. Each student will leave with their own custom blended alcohol based perfume and cast glass vessel. The histories of perfume and glass have been intertwined since their inception in the ancient world. In addition to technical demonstrations, this workshop will explore the historical and conceptual intersections between glass and perfume. The class will discuss contemporary artists who fuse olfaction, glass, and mixed media within their work such as Sissel Tolaas, Katie Paterson, and Candice Lin. Readings and screenings will include excerpts from Fragrant by Mandy Aftel, Ancient Glass by R.A. Grossmann, and Perfume on the Radio by the Institute of Art and Olfaction. Assignments will include sculpting a vessel using shape, color, and ornamentation to reveal or conceal the vessel’s contents and create a perfume that tells a story through its ingredients.

Emily Endo (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Joshua Tree, California. Their practice pulls from the disparate, yet conjoined, histories of science and mysticism. Using glass, organic media, and aroma molecules their work references the transformative relationships between body, material, and space. Within Endo's work, the visual, cultural, kinesthetic, and chemical qualities of materials are considered so that they compliment and contrast one another in harmonious tension. Endo received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2010 and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2006. Their work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Somerset House, London; Massey Klein, New York; Marta, Los Angeles; Harkawik, Los Angeles; Neutra VDL House, Los Angeles; LVL3, Chicago; Bullseye Projects, Portland; and the Byre, Latheronwheel, United Kingdom. Recent press includes NY Times, Wallpaper, Architectural Digest, Variable West, Dezeen, Frontrunner Magazine, American Craft Magazine, LVL3, and MAAKE.

Field Illustration

with Josh Dihle
PAINTING & DRAWING 678 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 lab fee
August 3–9, 2025

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.

Josh Dihle (he/him) With a hand for detail and an eye on the natural world, Dihle blends painting, carving, and drawing to open visionary portals into the heart. He is the co-founder of experimental art platforms Color Club and Barely Fair and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also created The Sugar Hole, an ice cream shop staffed by puppets. Solo exhibitions include 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 Gaa Gallery, New York; MASSIMODECARLO Vspace,Milan, Italy; University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, Maine; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois; Essex Flowers Gallery, New York; 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 The Art Newspaper, among others. Dihle lives and works in Chicago.

Funny Books

with Jessica Campbell
PAINTING & DRAWING 603 001 | 1.5 credits
$100 lab fee | August 3–9

The comics we first encounter in the world are funny: gag panels, newspaper strips, children's comic books. Humor is so fundamental to the origin of the medium that is incorporated in the name (ie "comics"). Throughout history, humor has remained a tool of the dispossessed due to its malleable ability to disarm; critique; process trauma; incisively observe; destabilize hierarchy; catalyze political action; and foster connection and joy. Because of how comedy functions (by making people laugh) and how comics circulate (as ephemeral mass media), both can be dismissed as more frivolous than serious forms of academic and artistic inquiry. The ease with which jokes and comics are overlooked is also their strength, allowing them to exist in the margins, piercing social conventions otherwise impenetrable. The accessibility of humor and comics can provide space for those shut out from the halls of power. In this class, we will investigate what it means to make funny books through production, critique, and close readings of work by other artists like Lisa Hanawalt, Walter Scott and Lynda Barry. We will explore comics through a variety of approaches designed to strengthen writing, drawing and the myriad ways in which humor can be used. Through at least one project in this course, students will investigate the process of generating ideas, writing and drawing comic strips using pen and ink.

Jessica Campbell (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who works predominantly in textiles, drawing and comics. Drawing on a wide range of influences, including science fiction, art world politics, and her evangelical upbringing, Campbell explores ways to reflect heterogeneity through a combination of disparate media, subjects, and tone. Whether through cartoony depictions or the use of unorthodox material, her work often wields humor as a device for managing trauma.

She is the author of three graphic novels, including the recent Rave (Drawn and Quarterly, 2022), and her comics have been published by MoMA, the New Yorker, Hyperallergic and the Nib, among other publications. She has had solo exhibitions at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; The Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, MI; Western Exhibitions in Chicago; and Field Projects in NYC. She is an Assistant Professor of Expanded Drawing at York University in Toronto.

Hanji Unfolds: Traditional Korean Papermaking

with Su Kaiden Cho
PAPER 608 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 lab fee
August 3–9, 2025

In this hands-on workshop, students will explore the ancient Korean art of hanji, a traditional craft that transforms mulberry bark into beautiful, durable paper. For centuries, hanji has been an integral part of Korean culture, used in applications from calligraphy to interior design and fashion. Through guided instruction, students will learn the process of preparing natural fibers, forming sheets, and drying the paper. This class emphasizes both traditional techniques and modern adaptations, encouraging participants to create custom papers that reflect their personal aesthetic while connecting with the deep historical and cultural significance of hanji. Course content will consider both the historical and contemporary significance of hanji, with special emphasis on its use in art and design. We will explore the work of renowned hanji artist Lee Seung Chul, whose innovative installations and sculptures push the boundaries of this traditional material, and Yang Sang Hoon, an artist known for his intricate geometric hanji creations that blend craftsmanship with modern abstraction. A key reading will be Hanji Unfurled: One Journey into Korean Papermaking, by Aimee Lee, which offers a comprehensive look at Korean papermaking traditions. The class will also include a screening of the 2011 documentary Hanji, by Im Kwon-taek, highlighting the cultural significance of hanji in Korea. Students will create layered hanji artworks inspired by Lee Seung Chul’s installations or geometric compositions influenced by Yang Sang Hoon’s use of hanji in abstraction. For the final project, they will create a collaborative hanji sculpture for Ox-Bow.

Su Kaiden Cho (he/him) is a Korean-American artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation, exploring the intersections of Eastern and Western diaspora. His work is deeply rooted in phenomenology, engaging with the interplay between the visible and invisible, often through material studies and spatial explorations. Recently, his focus has shifted toward post-minimalist approaches, experimenting with monochrome and color-field compositions, with an emphasis on texture and dimensional surfaces. Cho's practice reflects his ongoing investigation into absence, presence, and the uncanny. Cho earned his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and now serves as an educator, holding a teaching fellowship at SAIC. His artistic achievements include prestigious residencies, fellowships, and awards, such as the International Center for the Arts in Umbria, Italy, led by Michelle Grabner, and the Ox-Bow School of Art Residency in Summer 2024. Cho has exhibited in over 20 solo exhibitions and more than 40 group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. In addition to his artistic endeavors, Cho served as a first ambassador for Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists' Residency in 2024.

Clay, Fire & Food

with Edward Cabral & Maxwell Holden
CERAMICS 669 001 | 3 credits | $250 Lab Fee
August 10–23, 2025

Preparing and sharing meals represents one of the most intimate relationships we have with the earth. With plates made from clay, forks pulled from mountains, and ingredients cleaved from nature, this class will uncover how clay feeds us by learning an abridged history of fire, earth, and food. From Jell-O molds to contemporary art, we will explore the role of ceramics in facilitating artwork at the table. Students of all levels are welcome to join this course, which will include demonstrations of techniques for effective hand-building, throwing, firing, and finishing. In addition to time spent in the Ox-Bow kitchen, the course will have a substantial seminar component. Discussions will introduce students to various histories of mealtime ceramic design and collective making and meal planning. In addition to reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and watching Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, we will consider the work of Erica Lord, Roberto Lugo, Clare Twomey, Michael Rakowitz, Mel Chin, Dirt Waffles Collective, Félix González-Torres, Daniel Spoerri, Stephanie Temma Hier, Stephanie Shih, Alison Knowles, Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group, Adrian Saxe, and Eva Zeisel. Together we will plan and cook a final food presentation, supported by wood-fired ceramic wares. In addition to working toward the community meal, assignments will include “Spirit of the Fire,” for which students will construct a totem representing fire.

Edward Cabral (he/him) is a sculptor and chef living in Brooklyn. His research-based practice encompasses traditional art, edible sculpture, performance, and impermanent objects. He received his BA in Visual Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. He has exhibited at Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts; Roots and Culture and Heaven Gallery, Chicago; Alexander Gray Associates, The Drawing Center, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Superhouse, New York. He has been interviewed in Mold Magazine, Architectural Digest, and CakeZine, and has appeared on the History Channel, Disney+, and The Food Network.

Maxwell Holden's (he/him) career has included both time abroad and within industry, encountering highly creative engineers and artists embracing the sciences. The result has amounted to a passionate interest in the absurdity of modern life, and our quest to find meaning in endless abundance and scarcity. Maxwell is particularly interested in food after nearly a decade spent as a farmhand and many more years making a range of dinnerware, including a collaboration with Blue Hill.

Casting the Body & the Everyday

with Soo Shin
SCULPTURE 690 001 | 3 credits | $250 lab fee
August 10–23, 2025

In this introductory course, students will obtain technical skills and a fundamental understanding of mold-making. Using the techniques learned in class, students will experiment with various ways to capture the everyday and the body while examining personal symbolism, rituals, and the border between art and daily life. Students will practice imprint, ready-made object, and body casting through four exercise projects using clay, plaster, slip, alginate, silicone, and resin. The class will look into art movements in history, such as Arte Povera, Neo-Dada, and Fluxus, via lectures to find the lineage of the everyday in visual art. We will discuss the practices of artists such as Ian Breakwell, Sarah Lucas, Gabriel Orozco, David Altmejd, Liz Magor, Cornelia Parker, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and many others, to consider various possibilities of materials, objects, and rituals to trace the everyday. Readings will include Joseph Kosuth’s, “Art After Philosophy and Selected Writings, 1966-1990 (Part II: Theory as Praxis: A Role for an ‘Anthropologized Art’)”, MIT Press. Students will develop their final project using one of the four exercise techniques. Students are encouraged to adopt the natural environment of the Ox-Bow campus as their new everyday and explore it as the source of pattern materials for their molds. Assignments will include inviting students to consider sculpture as a means of recording, creating a new daily routine that involves Ox-Bow's surroundings. Using imprints of materials and traces from it they will cast the imprints into several plaster blocks. Students will also cast a body part in a symbolic gesture. Incorporating found materials, objects, or sites of your choice with your work to create five sculptures or installations as a final project.

Soo Shin (she/her; b. Seoul, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Shin employs a diverse range of materials—ceramic, brass, concrete, wood, and seawater—to evoke themes of connection, spatial displacement, and longing. She is the recipient of the fellowship at Djerassi Artist Residency, Woodside, California; the individual artist grant at the Illinois Arts Council; and the Vilcek Foundation fellowship at MacDowell Artist Residency. Shin’s work has been presented at The Luminary, St. Louis, Missouri; PATRON Gallery, Chicago; Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago; Chicago Manual Style, Chicago; LVL3, Chicago, IL; and Chicago Artist Coalition, among others. She has completed residencies at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Vermont Studio Center; Art Farm, Marquette, Nebraska; and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency, Saugatuck, Michigan. She earned a Master’s in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master’s in Fine Arts, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea.

Earth in Relation: Embodied Earthworks

with Nance Klehm
SCULPTURE | Non-Credit Only | $100 lab fee
August 10–16, 2025

This weeklong somatic sculpture class will call makers into the ethical and personal reimagining of making with Earth amid great ecological and social change within the dynamic landscape of West Michigan. Daily awareness practices, area field explorations, readings and discussions of ecological texts, and an introduction to scientific methods and material investigations will culminate in individual and collective earthworks. We will engage with readings and recordings by Dark Mountain, Hans Jenny, Rae Atakpa, Suzanne Simard, The Fythyr, CAConrad, and others. Screenings will include works by Regina José Galindo, Nancy Holt, and others. Assignments will invite students to record their solo predawn walks in the landscape, conduct listening exercises in the woods, and participate in labs introducing them to soil science.

Nance Klehm (she/they) has been an ecological systems designer, consultant, and agroecological grower for more than three decades. Her approach is centered on instigating change by activating already existent communities, and her work demonstrates her lifelong commitment to redefining the way human populations coexist with plant, animal and fungal systems on this planet. Klehm is internationally respected for her work on land politics and soil heath. Her work has received extensive national and international media coverage and has been mentioned in over 30 books. She is the author of The Soil Keepers: Interviews with practitioners on the ground beneath our feet (2019) and The Ground Rules: a manual to reconnect soil and soul (2016). She currently splits her time between Little Village, a densely packed, diverse urban neighborhood in Chicago, and fifty acres in the Driftless Region, where she runs Chop Wood Carry Water Residency and cultivates and forages medicinal and edible plants, keeps bees and a fruit orchard, raises ducks and native quail, and grows for several indigenous seed banks. 

The Queer Body in the Landscape

with Brendan Fernandes & Fleming Staples
PERFORMANCE, FILM & VIDEO 611 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
August 10–23, 2025

This class will explore what it means for a queer body to define, exist, and perform in a landscape. Combining embodiment, ecology, and moving image, the course will use the camera as a witness to performances that are collaboratively built out of movement workshops. We will learn about some of the ecosystems present on and around Ox-Bow’s campus, and feel how our bodies are in conversation with these environments. We will explore the use of the camera as a choreographic tool to capture movement but also as a means to create movement gestures. Students will learn camera skills and video editing and participate collectively in creating a movement vocabulary. We will view works by Ana Mendieta, Yétúndé Olagbaju, mayfield brooks, Pina Bausch, and Maya Deren and discuss the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Paulina Ruiz Carballido, and Resmaa Menakem. Assignments will include researching local plants and ecosystems and creating mini-performances inspired by them, as well as a “video in a day” exercise, where everyone gets a chance to be behind and in front of the camera in the morning and edit in the afternoon. This two-week course, taught collaboratively by artist and choreographer Brendan Fernandes and artist and cinematographer Claire Fleming Staples, will culminate with a public screening of collaboratively produced videos. Students will have access to cameras and tripods from Ox-Bow but should bring their own laptops. For those without access to Adobe Premiere editing software, a temporary license will be provided.

Brendan Fernandes (he/him; b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Brendan is also the recipient of the Platform Award (2024) and the Artadia Award (2019), among others. His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); and The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); among many others. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York.

Fleming (they/them) is a queer multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of somatics, sound, politics, and new media. Throughout their multi-faceted practice they are exploring embodiment as a tool for collective liberation. In their immersive installations of expanded cinema, haptic components direct physical attention by means of vibrations, allowing the participant to move seamlessly through an expanding portal of digital reality while maintaining body awareness. In their live desktop performances, a guiding topic propels the viewer on a journey through a deep and eclectic media archive, illustrating political, emotional, and spiritual realities in the familiar intimacy of the personal screen, projected into the shared space. Collaboration and pedagogy are two important vectors of their practice, as a long term member of underground creative communities in which they are engaged in care work and organizing. They currently work and reside in Chicago, Illinois, where they are a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Glass-Blown Organics

with Christen Baker
GLASS 691 001 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
August 10–23, 2025

Glass-Blown Organics is an introductory glass course that approaches material investigation and sculpture through a lens of posthumanism. “Posthumanism” refers to a perspective that challenges traditional human-centered views by emphasizing interconnectedness among organisms and complex systems, aiming to disrupt hierarchies and boundaries between humans and other entities. In this course, students will explore three methods of hot glass forming: solid sculpting, glassblowing, and mold blowing with the inclusion of found organic materials. Soil, wood, water, and food are some examples of organic materials that will be used to create glass artworks that speak to the environmental impact of humans in the Anthropocene. Through demonstrations and discussions, students will develop an understanding of sustainable glass practices that can then be applied to their sculptural works. Using these skills and techniques, students will learn to create forms and surfaces that explore glass as a unique material, how glass is deeply significant to place and time, and how to utilize hot glass and organics together to enhance artistic impact. Each component of this course will develop an understanding of material and processes and will facilitate discussions on critical theory, artistic practice, and making with intention. Sculptural works by contemporary glass artists such as Amber Cowan, Sabine Mescher-Leitner, and Kristen Neville Taylor will be important points of consideration. Assignments will explore material inclusions in glass, optics, impressions, and other formal considerations that speak to the environmental impacts of humans in our time. Students will also view selected historical videos from the Rakow Research Library at the Corning Museum of Glass to research the important technological role of glass in our modern world. Students must demonstrate a strong work ethic and a passion for investigating personal artistic strengths and goals throughout this intensive course. Students of all experience levels working with glass are welcome and encouraged.

Christen Baker (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the complex relationships between attention and desire, and the physical and digital economies that emerge from it. Baker earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute and a Master of Fine Arts in Glass from Tyler School of Art and Architecture, where she was awarded the Assistantship for Tyler Information Technology and Digital Services. Baker’s interests have led her to glass, neon, sculpture, photography, and 3D scanning. She has utilized these mediums to create a new visual lexicon that speaks to the ways in which attention and desire shape our perception of material use, physical space, and information hierarchies. Baker has completed residencies and exhibitions at Belger Arts, the International Ceramics Studio in Hungary, UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, and was awarded the Summer Fellowship in Glass at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency. Most recently, she was awarded the Neon as Soulcraft residency in collaboration with SheBends at the Museum of Craft and Design. She currently lives and works in Indianapolis.

DRAW, PAINT, PRINT

with Michelle Grabner, Brad Killam, & Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
PAINTING & DRAWING / PRINT 677 001 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
August 10–23, 2025

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 (she/her) is an artist, writer, and a curator based in Chicago and Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has also held teaching appointments at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts—Bard College, Yale University School of Art, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Grabner is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2018 National Academician in the National Academy of Design, and a 2024 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters Fellow. Major museum exhibitions curated by Grabner include the 2014 Whitney Biennial and the inaugural 2018 FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. In 2021 she co-curated Sculpture Milwaukee with Theaster Gates. In 2024 she curated 50 Paintings, a survey of contemporary international painting at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Grabner, along with artist Brad Killam runs the artist-run project spaces, The Suburban, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (est. 1999) and The Poor Farm, Little Wolf, Wisconsin (est. 2008).

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-run space in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 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 (she/her and they/them) 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, 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.

Soft Compositions

with Chris Edwards & Heather Mawson
FIBER 627 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
August 10–23, 2025

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 (he/him) makes work that focuses on practicing caring about things and being at home. He makes quilts and pottery in the pursuit of making art that depicts objects found in his space alongside pretend elements. 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 Ox-Bow House, Wrong Marfa, Elephant Gallery, Adds Donna, Tusk, LVL3, Oggi Gallery, Dreamboat, Western Exhibitions, and Julius Caesar in Chicago.

Heather Mawson (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator that views process, layering, collage and archiving as the foundation of her practice. She uses time-based media and everyday materials to investigate how U.S. economic and political systems shape personhood. Her current research looks at the history, techniques and semiotics of quilting within the United States to reexamine within her work the materials and images that are saturated in our day-to-day lives. Through the process of collecting, transforming and organizing images and found materials, she questions where the system ends, and the individual begins. Mawson received her BFA in Fine Arts from The University of Texas at El Paso and an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with a focus on artist-run spaces. Mawson lives in Detroit and teaches at Wayne State University.

Bookbinding with Decorative Paper

with Sophia Rauch & Kellie Romany
PRINT 622 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 lab fee
August 24–30, 2025

In this class, students will apply the processes of cyanotype, marbling, and dyeing on paper for use in a bookbinding project of their design. Students are welcome to bring their paper (store-bought or hand-made) for use in this class, and some paper will be provided. Students will learn bookbinding techniques including pamphlet, stab, and case binding. Lectures will invite students to consider the sustainable characteristics possible in paper treatments, including strategies for foraging, natural dyeing, and re-using materials to create one-of-a-kind sheets and book projects. As a group, the class will look at the work of Sol LeWitt, Krista Franklin, Bethany Collins, and Olafur Eliasson and discuss pertinent readings and resources. Students can expect to spend the first two days of class experimenting with decorative paper treatments and then using those materials to learn three bookbinding techniques.

Sophia Rauch (she/her) is a 2D artist focused on abstraction and artistic myth. Her practice is an interdisciplinary romp through a formalist empire rooted in material experimentation. Rauch uses sculpture, drawing and printmaking to explore artistic authorship and originality. Her work celebrates the complexities of beauty with humor and curiosity. Rauch was born in Berkeley, California, in 1984, and is based in Brooklyn, New York. She has shown internationally and published her artist book Scans at Home with FLTFL. Rauch received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2008, and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012.

Kellie Romany (she/her) is an abstract artist interested in bodies and systems. Using a color palette of skin tones, Romany creates objects that act as a catalyst for discussion about human connections, race, and the systems surrounding these themes. She received a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008. Romany has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including museum shows at the High Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and DePaul Art Museum.

Drafting Flattened Space & Pattern

with Ann Toebbe
PAINTING & DRAWING 666 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 Lab Fee
August 24–30, 2025

This weeklong course explores flattened space as a compositional and narrative framework with a focus on pattern, decoration, multi-view perspective, and intuitive "quilted" layouts. We will be looking at Indian miniature, folk, and medieval depictions of space and a range of 20th century American artists like Horace Pippin, Morris Hirschfield, Martin Ramirez, Florine Stettheimer, Grandma Moses, and Nellie Mae Roe moving toward younger contemporary artists like Anne Buckwalter, Larissa Bates, Bryan Rogers, Laura Williams, Robyn O'Neill, and Andrea Joyce Heimer. Working in graphite and colored pencil the class will focus on creating quicker small drawings at the start of the week then slow down to create 1-2 finished works on larger paper. The option to paint or add paint media will be the artist's choice. We will wrap up the week with a class discussion of the best or breakthrough pieces generated during the intensive work sessions. Source material can range from memory to photo images and anything in between, and it is up to the artist to have this material on hand.

Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, Ann Toebbe (she/her) lives in Chicago. The primary focus of her paintings is domestic life. Toebbe’s process is labor intensive, employing freehand painting, flat geometry, geometric abstraction and intricate patterning. Her paintings are often multi-media works with furniture and objects collaged on the surface cut from paper the artist paints in her studio. Drawing on folk art and Indian Miniature paintings her compositions play with flatness and multiple points of views. Each painting can simultaneously have inside and outside views, views from above, and objects and figures portrayed from a straight on view.

Glass Stemware

with Yashodhar Reddy
GLASS 653 001 | 1.5 credits | $175 Lab Fee
August 24–30, 2025

This intermediate glassblowing class is for students who desire to learn advanced techniques for incorporating stems and bases into more complex forms, such as nontraditional glasses, candlesticks, and cake platters. We will cover the fundamentals of traditional glassblowing at the furnace. Starting with gathering, we will explore basic forms and shapes for cups, bowls, and accompanying parts, such as stems and feet. This course will primarily focus on the importance of timing and teamwork, both of which are equally important in glassblowing. Our instruction will reference traditional Muranese methods of glassworking, looking at makers such as Davide Fuin, a glass maestro working today, and the works of historical glass manufacturers such as Venini and Barovier & Toso. Assignments will invite students to draft potential table and stemware designs in charcoal or paint and then fabricate selected designs in glass using the techniques and methods covered. The class will culminate in a presentation and critique of final pieces.

Yashodhar Reddy (he/him) 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. 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 worked at design studios such as Niche Modern and AO Glassworks and 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 & Artist’s Residency as Glass Studio Manager. He is continuing his education, working as an apprentice glassmaker in Venice, Italy for one of the last few living Masters in Murano, Italy.

Drawing Place in Watercolor & Gouache

with Carrie Gundersdorf 
PAINTING & DRAWING 672 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 Lab Fee
August 24–30, 2025

Watercolor is historically associated with observation of 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 will help students build a basic understanding of the materials associated with both transparent watercolor and opaque watercolor (gouache)—paint, brushes, and paper—as well as the techniques: layering washes, working wet into wet, and using the white of the paper to create color. This course celebrates the ease and transportability of working in watercolor and gouache and brings the landscape into the studio. In addition to using the Ox-Bow environment as a source of subject matter, we will look at past and contemporary artists, including John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, Dawn Clements, Amy Sillman, and Josephine Halvorson. Exercises involving color, observation, and mark-making will help familiarize students with the medium. The class will enable students to build a personal approach to working with the idea of place.

Carrie Gundersdorf (she/her) is an artist and educator who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Maine. She has had solo exhibitions at La Loma Projects, Los Angeles; 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, Art on Paper, Chicago Tribune, and Time Out Chicago. 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.

Wet Plate Photography

with Jaclyn Silverman
PHOTO 613 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 Lab Fee
August 24–30, 2025

Using the historic and time-honored wet-plate collodion process, students will move between the studio, the community, and the natural environment to create glass plate images and photographic objects. We will explore the fundamentals of large format view camera photography while using individual mobile darkrooms for plate processing and production. This course considers the technical information, historical use, and advancement of photographic technology in comparison with contemporary conceptual use by late-20th-century and current 21st-century artists such as Helen Maureen Cooper, Joni Sternbach, and Sally Mann. Readings available for reference include Basic Collodion Technique: Ambrotype and Tintype, by Mark Osterman and France Scully Osterman, and Chemical Pictures: The Wet Plate Collodion Book, by Quinn B. Jacobson. Students will work independently, progressing from tintype positives to glass negatives and ambrotype objects. Subjects can include the still life, portraiture, installation for performance, or natural documentation of the environment. Daily evaluations and cross-classroom conversation will address technical and conceptual issues, and question historical and contemporary uses. The final product will include a suite of quarter glass plates in the student’s own style, driven by individual concept or idea.

Jaclyn Silverman (she/her) is an artist from Youngstown, Ohio, currently living and working in Chicago, Illinois. Her work thinks about the significance of place determined by the dynamics of family and community cultural relationships through environmental portraiture and landscape made by means of educational photographic projects. As Founding Artistic Director and piloting artist-in-residence with Chicago artist residency and non-profit organization CPS Lives, Silverman maintained an independent arts program and project on Chicago’s far southeast side with students from George Washington High School and residents of the Hegewisch neighborhood from 2017-2023. Commissioned by Theaster Gates, Silverman’s photographic installations of the Johnson Publishing Company archives were published in part of the exhibition, A Johnson Publishing Story at Stony Island Arts Bank. Collectively reinstating departmental portfolio exchanges, she co-curated the archive based exhibition Within the Portfolios 1968-2016; a History of Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Silverman is a returning faculty with Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency and the Development Manager for the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. She received her BFA from The Ohio State University and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Crochet, Gifts, Friends: The Politics of Softness

with Falaks Vasa
FIBER 630 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 lab fee
August 24–30, 2025

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) is an interdisciplinary artist with a set of practices that move in and out of definition, but always through their body. Their practices span video, performance, fiber art, poetry, photography, 3D animation, stand-up comedy, and more. Falaks graduated with an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University (2023), and with a BFA from SAIC (2018), and currently teaches at RISD as Lecturer and Critic. Falaks’s lived practice currently takes the roles of an artist, writer, and professor. As an artist, Falaks has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and ACRE, and shown their work internationally. As a poet and author of speculative fiction, her work has been published by Sybil Press and collected by the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. As a professor, she enacts her pedagogy as creative practice, and has been awarded the Archambault Award for Teaching Excellence from Brown University. Falaks is from Kolkata, India, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her wife, a cat, and a ball python.