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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.