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, Grieving the Sugar Maple, 2024, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in.
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.
Holly Murkerson, gash, 2023, gelatin silver print, 19 x 12.75 in.
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.