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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.