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, Goin’ Mobile, 2021, screenprint monoprint, 11 x 15 in.

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, I am many animals, 2024, installation of 70 monotypes on paper, size of the installation: Length: 330 inches, Height: 165 inches

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.