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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.