Artist Profile: Gabrielle Constantine

On taking risks and expanding a community-based practice by entering into the practices of others.

Gabrielle Constantine first joined Ox-Bow as a fellow during the summer of 2023 where she was matched with the culinary department. There she spent twenty hours a week in the kitchen alongside the rest of the culinary team. The pairing dovetailed neatly with her practice, which in the past had included supper clubs and other hospitality-based initiatives. These drew experience from Constantine’s years-long work in the restaurant industry. 

While at Ox-Bow, Constantine began to dream of ways she could continue to mix her culinary background into her practice. She schemed about a studio speakeasy and a collaborative mini-fridge gallery. She took special inspiration from her time in John Preus’s course “The World is One. The Human is Two: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Objects” for which she worked as a teaching assistant. During the course, Constantine made new conceptual breakthroughs in her work. “I don't know if that could have been worked out anywhere else besides Ox-Bow. I think it was the dynamic of me working through my tendencies of being a host and being a community person, but also the labor that goes with that, and [considering] how do we transfer those things into objects.” These curiosities ultimately manifested in an upholstered sculpture that explored the purpose of objects and their autonomy. As summer came to a close, Constantine had produced a number of physical sculptures, while many of her community-based projects were still taking up residence in her imagination.

If the summer of 2023 was Constantine’s incubator for socially engaged work, summer 2024 was the catalyst. While at a residency in Skowhegan, Constantine took action on several culinary projects rooted in hospitality. Fellow artist-in-residence Dylan Hausthor gave Constantine the push she needed, encouraging her to lean into spontaneity. As a team, the two artists assembled an impromptu bar in the bed of Hausthor’s decades-old Toyota truck. Constantine reflected, “It was nice to do the truck thing with Dylan, because they work very different than I do. They had a freedom in a space that I have a tendency to overthink because of my restaurant background. Working with Dylan felt really easy.” Via the truck bar, Constantine served up grilled cheese and Hausthor dolled out martinis. Throughout her nine weeks on campus, Constantine facilitated several other initiatives. A pop-up bar in her studio featured home brewed amaro and snacks. On a trip to the beach, Constantine and Hausther shucked oysters for the crowd. In tandem with a screening of Moonstruck, she produced a thematic pairing of homemade bread and olive oil.

Constantine also spent her nine weeks at Skowhegan indulging in her curiosity for others’ practices. “At a certain point, I stopped worrying about making enough… I just wanted to be around the people there.” This emphasis on immersion allowed Constantine to participate in a performance piece, join a filmmaker’s project, participate in photo shoots, and more. She described this decision as a conscious effort to “put herself in other people’s practices.” 

After such a robust and active summer, Constantine has much to process. “I really have to sit with all these things and all these people that I’ve met and learned from. How do I take all of these things and put it into a place that I root in?” Constantine said. She hopes that her fall residency at Bemis will be a place to begin answering these questions. In a similar spirit, she intends to spend her residency making quilts, a fittingly reflective practice. “It feels like it’ll heal me a bit,” Constantine confessed, admitting that the traveling artist lifestyle has left a bit of wear. “It’s so fun, but it’s also really hard, this life. We have a crazy life,” Constantine said. In both her quilts and Constantine’s more ephemeral experiences, a similar spirit is conjured. At the heart of her practice is a commitment to hospitality, conversation, gathering, belonging and care.

Giving fake Tiffany, bought from the trunk of a Cadillac, to Rachel Cohen for her Bat Mitzvah. Microwaving lavash and string cheese for an after-school snack. Tending to a mustache and beard since 5th grade. Going to the AC Tropicana for weekend “getaways”. Watching Cher in Moonstruck every night before bed. Drinking milk from a martini glass. This is Constantine’s DNA. Gabrielle Constantine (1994) was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she received her double BFA in Sculpture and Fibers and Material studies at the Tyler School of Art (2017) and holds an MFA at The University of Texas of Austin (2023). Growing up in an Armenian Community and the restaurant industry has inexplicably informed her material, linguistic, and performative decisions surrounding her sculptures, installations, and gatherings. Alongside her more sculptural practice, Constantine has shared in cooking dinners and hosting gatherings with communities all over the country and internationally. She is consistently innovating new ways of gathering community through art and food.

This article was written by Shanley Poole, Engagement Liaison & Storyteller and was based on interviews conducted in June 2023 and August 2024.

Image List:

“Whether Sauce or Blood,” a sculpture created by Constantine at Ox-Bow.

Hausthor’s truck transformed into a bar.

Constantine and friends serving oysters.

Headshot of Constantine.

All images courtesy of the artist.

Storyteller to Storyteller

Ania Freer, former Artist-in-Residence, opens up about her storytelling practice with Ox-Bow’s own Storyteller, Shanley Poole.

SP: I’m really excited to talk to you about storytelling in particular. As someone who really cares about that, it’s cool to be able to interview someone who shares that same mentality. I wanted to start by going way back and asking what role stories played in your childhood.

AF: Mmmm… My mum has a good friend, Chardi, who’s a storyteller. I was actually just reminded of her the other day because I was talking to mum about this friend because she’s not in great health at the moment. I just remember vividly spending time with her. She’s a professional storyteller and artist. She makes these mandalas and runs these workshops that help people tap into their own personal stories. 

I’m a visual person and I see everything as pictures in my mind. I wasn’t interested in reading as a child. It was just a solitary experience. For me, the biggest joy was listening to stories, hearing stories, and having them be read to me. There was a personal connection in hearing someone else’s voice. The way that they speak informed the pictures that were built in my mind. It wasn’t as exciting to hear my own voice in my head. I’m actually just making that connection now as I’m saying that to you. I hadn’t really related the fact that I hated reading as a kid, but I loved hearing stories. 

I noticed more and more how if I needed to talk about something, or if I’m having a conversation with someone, I see the narrative in pictures. It’s kind of how I make sense of the world. It’s how I communicate. It’s how I comprehend and how information stays. Often I think I don’t have a very good memory, but if I’ve made a story that’s how I recall the interaction.

Ania Freer kneels behind a camera while a woman gathers berries in a basket.

SP: That makes sense too with you so often telling your stories through film. Because if you're seeing these stories in a visual way, then that's the most intimate way you could portray that and share with others.

AF: Absolutely. Because that’s a way of bringing people into an experience, which is ultimately what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to recreate these moments: sitting down on a riverbank and hearing a particular story; staring down at the water and noticing a leaf floating on the surface. Film is a way to sort of recreate that experience and bring someone into that world that’s happening in my mind.

SP: That reminds me of one of your films “Working with Water” where there’s a man’s voice and you don’t see his face. You just see the river. 

AF: Exactly. It’s also the meditative moments like when you’re listening to someone, but you’re looking off at the environment and letting your mind wander. It’s almost like watching clouds or watching shapes in nature. Things change and shift, and you’re kind of filling in the gaps.

SP: Yeah, those associative jumps.

AF: Yeah, so there’s the reeds, which are moving and flowing, and they’re just underneath the water surface. He’s talking about these spirits that live in the water, and at moments the reeds are sucked down and pop back up again. It just felt like a presence. My mind is taking from what’s around and creating these types of pictures and images.

Jamaica’s Roaring River.

SP: I liked what you said earlier too about your mom’s friend who is a storyteller. That idea of reminding people of their own stories.

AF: Mmm that’s an interesting one. Often when I say to someone, “I want to record some stories with you,” people might be like, “Well, I don’t really have any stories.” 

SP: (laughs) The number of times I’ve heard that!

AF: Even if I’ve already identified “Okay, this is a really incredible story.” They’ll still say, “I don’t have any stories!” It’s definitely a very empowering experience to be guided to talk and think about your life and your history and start forming a story that you don’t even realize was a story. It’s a sort of accessing, or being guided into accessing, that information.

Ania sets up a camera in front of a storyteller.

SP: When did you start to think of yourself as a storyteller? And from there, when did you start to formulate what type of stories you wanted to be telling and collecting and sharing?

AF: The label of storyteller came to me and at first it made me a little uncomfortable. With my mum’s friend Chardi, she allowed people to access stories, but she also tells a lot of stories. I’m doing more of allowing that access. I work very hard to make my presence feel very invisible, so that it’s their voice. 

The films that I’m making feel very much like you’re in the world of this person. But of course, it’s shot and edited and highly crafted by me. I’m really chiseling away and making it exactly how I see that story coming together. It took a minute to feel comfortable inserting myself and recognizing that part of the craft. I approached it with this need of empowering someone else and allowing them the space to share part of their history. Initially I was trying to give them as much space as possible. Overtime, I’m reflecting that really I’m making big decisions about which parts of the story are being kept and what isn’t. That shaping and editing is the storytelling, the crafting, the molding. 

You know, I come from a background of editing. I was drawn to editing, specifically documentary editing, because that is really where a story takes shape. In the cutting room. More so than in fiction films where you have a script that you’re following, things are happening in the raw footage. The pacing and what you’re choosing to keep in and keep out is really informing the audience’s journey. When I discovered editing I was so excited because it felt very powerful. It was like, “Wow, you can really shift and change and play and create moods and tension.” But again, I resisted taking that title storyteller because I felt like I was representing storytellers. I was giving space to storytellers and was a conduit or providing the platform for the storytellers. And then accepting that by doing the work that I’m doing, I am a storyteller. 

SP: Yeah, there’s multiple storytellers at play.

AF: And that was an interesting shift that happened.

SP: Would you say you now feel comfortable with that term storyteller?

AF: Absolutely. It was probably just a moment in time and in my journey where I was wanting to be quite invisible and having a lot of very incredible experiences and wanting to share those without me. Share them so an audience can experience them themselves. I’m not making it about myself at all. Especially because I’d come into a new culture: my father is British Jamaican, my grandparents immigrated to the UK in the 50s and I didn’t grow up with my father or any of that side of the family. 

I grew up with my mother in Australia, so when I went to Jamaica I had this cultural connection and heritage, but I don’t have any sort of lived experience of that. I felt very self conscious of that. I felt wary about how to negotiate making that personal connection. I felt more comfortable representing the sort of experiences I’m having through recreating the images that felt of the environment that spoke to the experience that I was having. But without it being about me because it was the people, the landscape, the culture, the food, the smells. All of these things was what I wanted to show and represent and allow an audience to experience. 

Cecil “Bingy” Smith weaves a basket.

SP: I feel that sensitivity really shows in your work. I think where that aspect could’ve turned into a sense of distance, in your hands it creates this closeness. We step right into where you were standing and are able to have that same face-to-face interaction.

AF: Good. Thank you! That’s what I want.

SP: When did you start telling the stories of what has become Goat Curry Gallery?

AF: From the moment I arrived in Jamaica. I think it was the 30th of October, 2016. I landed in Jamaica, in Montego Bay, and went straight up to a community called Shrewsbury Logwood, which is right next to Roaring River. I had started a new Instagram account and the first post I made on it was me at a transfer in the Texas airport just before I got on the plane. First I had this intention of documenting stories around food and culture. And then I arrived in Jamaica only to realize its called curried goat. And I was like, “Goat Curry is going to have to stay because that’s a part of my story.” Because in Australia it is called goat curry. It’s the upside-down, other-side-of-the-world experience of a disconnected, diasporic woman who’s trying to connect.

SP: I love that you honored that and didn’t try to cover it up.

AF: Well, yeah, (laughs) I was like “Oh, okay that’s what it’s called.” I also started so quickly. I realized it wasn’t about food. It was about people, and very quickly there were stories. I made my first one, which was the one on the cotton tree, in the first week or two of being there. But then as I started sharing stories and people started following my journey, I couldn’t change the name. Once you have a nickname, people know you and associate you with it.

To begin with, my intention was to spend a month or two [in Jamaica] and I was just going to travel the island and recce characters for this series about food and culture. Instead, I spent two full months in Roaring River. I got there and I didn’t leave. My ticket was coming up and I was like, “No, I can’t go anywhere. I’m here and the work has just begun.” I just canceled my ticket and went to Kingston to apply for my citizenship. And then I didn’t leave. I was there for almost seven years. 

SP: When you went to apply for your citizenship, did you have any idea you were going to stay that long?

AF: Yeah. I decided very quickly that this was where I need to be. 

When I came through New York to get to Jamaica, I also had this very strong sensation that I was going to live in New York. So when I first got to Jamaica, I thought, “I’m going to spend a little here, go back to New York, figure out a way of getting a VISA to be able to live in New York, but when I got to Jamaica I was like, “No, no, no. I’m living here for the rest of my life. This is it.” 

It’s just so interesting, all of these moments. I don’t discredit any kind of strong sensation I get. Even if it changes, I know that it happened for a reason. I knew that being in New York was going to be a part of my journey, I just didn’t know when. I also know that Jamaica is now a huge part of my life and I’m not sure if I’m ever going to live there again full time, but I now live three and a half hours away. I am continuously going back and continuing the work that I’m doing. Maybe there will be another period of time when I’m on the ground and I live there… But I love when that happens, when there’s very strong impulses and knowings.

SP: When you can just feel it in your bones.

AF: When you feel it in your bones and you just know. I love when that happens. I find it very scary when I can’t access that. 

Another view of Roaring River.

SP: When was it that you started to feel the pull to New York again?

AF: It was when I started to feel that I wasn’t able to give as much as I once was. When I started to feel depleted and I always said to myself I’m in such a privileged position to have a choice of where I want to be. I have Australian, British, and Jamaican citizenship. I’m very privileged to be able to move around. Instead of feeling guilty about that, I thought, “Well, there’s a reason.” With the storytelling that I’m doing, I’m in a position to build bridges and allow stories to access the diaspora in a much more powerful way. 

I was also very clear that if I started to feel tired and depleted and frustrated, that I would do what I needed to feed myself, so that when I am in Jamaica, when I am on the ground I am there with good energy. I saw ex-pats who didn’t need to be there and were complaining about bureaucracy and how things weren’t moving how they wanted. They didn’t have to be here and by perpetuating this frustration, you’re generating or contributing to a vibration that isn’t needed. 

The majority of the population don’t have the choice, so it felt like a responsibility. I felt a responsibility to be in a place to have positive conversations, be in a good mental space, and be looking after myself spiritually and emotionally. You know, there is a lot of violence in Jamaica and a lot of crime. You end up having to move and operate in a way where there’s a heightened sense of vigilance. That can be exhausting. I was definitely at a place where I was feeling very depleted and wasn’t in a good mental space. I had arrived in an open place, and I had to learn how to build my own protection. And then you can go too far with that and completely box yourself in. I definitely had long stretches of time when I shut myself off from getting support and community that I needed. 

I had a strong pull in 2019 that something had to change. I had an impulse and thought I needed to go back to Australia. So I packed my stuff, book a ticket, and I go back to Australia. I had just finished a Curatural Art Writing Fellowship at New Local Space (NLS) Kingston and put on an exhibition. Things were really happening in an exciting way, but I just felt I had to go.

The week before I got on the plane, someone reached out with this really exciting job opportunity. They were doing a feasibility report across the Caribbean and they needed help collecting stories from different countries for this funding program through the arts. And as soon as they approached me I was like, “Absolutely! Yes!” So I went to Australia for Christmas and then came straight back again. And then, of course, the pandemic hit and the job didn’t happen. It’s like, you never really know what’s right or wrong. I just had to make a movement, and by making that movement something else came and pulled me back. That something was like, “Okay, good you made a movement. That’s not the right movement. You actually want to be here, but you’re not doing what you think.” 

So I was back in Kingston and I was there for the whole pandemic. It was actually a really generative time. I built an incredible community and it was a really important transformational time for me in Jamaica. I love that not-always-knowing, in terms of the way life works. You just have to get up and do something. The wind pulls you. The universe. God. Whatever it is. The universe redirects you and you are exactly where you need to be.

SP: There’s a poet that I really like that has a line, “be like the fox who makes many tracks, some in the wrong direction.”*

AF: Absolutely. Wrong direction as in, that’s not the direction you end up.

SP: Yeah, wrong is relative.

AF: It’s like a detour. But I really believe you cannot go in the wrong direction. You’re always on the path you need to be on. As long as you are being an active participant. As long as you are getting up and making decisions, and you’re sort of responding to the environment. Being active to what’s coming in and coming out. Then you absolutely cannot make the wrong decision.

The silk cotton tree.

SP: I’m curious about being in New York now, how has that ended up affecting your practice? Has that created space for that rejuvenation and bringing a better energy when you do visit Jamaica?

AF: Absolutely it has. I feel like my energy levels are up. It’s also been good for me to have space to sit with the material that I have. I’m so inspired when I’m in Jamaica, to the point where I could keep on making, making, making. What’s interesting now is because I’m not particularly inspired by making films in New York, but it means I’m now going back through my archives and looking at interviews and films and sitting with them.

There’s an interview that I went back to that I recorded with a woman in the first week or so of arriving in Jamaica. Her patois is so strong. I had no idea of half the things she was saying at the time. It’s so nice now to revisit. There’s layers of the story that are now coming through. It’s a big part of knowing that I needed to take my time. You know, things come to you as they are meant to. And I didn’t want to be extractive in any of the ways that I’m working. So even the fact that with certain stories there’s an opacity or they’re not completely clear until years later, I love that. And I love that what I’m doing right now, how I’m sharing my work, and how I’m being invited to talk about my work. This is work that I made between 2016 and 2022. It’s work that people haven’t really seen and I haven’t shared. It’s old, but it’s not old. 

SP: Yeah, it hasn’t gone stale.

AF: No, that was the moment to be making it, and this is the moment now to be sharing it and contextualizing it. Being in New York now has given me time to do more research in different archives about these water mythologies, and now I’ve started to look more at revivalism, which is an Afro-Jamaican folk religion that has allowed these stories to continue and has provided a space for them to be passed down. So even though I was in such close proximity to a lot of these things that were happening on the ground, I’m also receiving and learning and making it in a way that can only go as fast as I can. 

The way that I conduct research is to be a participant on the ground and to be receiving in a natural way. It’s qualitative research. It’s through conversations. Instead of informing myself by reading a lot of history or researching in different ways, I’m enjoying learning in a day-to-day way as a child would learn as they are living and being somewhere. I think it’s really good for me now to begin contextualizing some of these stories and these histories. That’s really exciting because I’m now looking at ways to expand that research. 

As I go back to Jamaica and record more and unearth and collect and build that archive of stories, I’m informed in ways, but it’s still important to me to operate in a way that feels… I don’t know… I just don’t want to fill my head with too much and come in with certain projections. 

I’m learning on the ground, and I just much prefer that way of learning because I make different types of associations and connections. They’re informed more by people’s own lived experiences.  Both inform each other and both are good. Both are helpful and both are interesting. But I had a moment where I was having a conversation about a cotton tree, and I had read some things about this particular tree. As we were talking, as this man was telling me about the tree, I also joined in. I said a few things I had read about this tree and he shut down very quickly. He was telling me about how the tree looked like a woman selling fruit at the market and was describing it in this very poetic way that was really exciting. When I regurgitated some facts about these trees that I’d read in a book, it just changed the dynamic. It made me very aware of different knowledge systems.

SP: It sounds like the difference between trying to make meaning of something or letting that meaning arrive to you.

AF: Yeah, it’s that patience of letting something arrive. For me there’s no rush. I have so far allowed very long periods of time for these short moments and vignettes to come to life. It’s in those long stretches where I’m not physically making a film, but I’m sitting in rivers or spending time in different parts of the country. I’m learning to move very slowly and operate in different ways and learning the codes of life. That feels like a very important but invisible part of the work. 

Ania perches on a rock to take a photo.

AF: Even coming here to New York, I’m negotiating this resistance to be sucked into the speed of things. There’s so many things going on, but I know that I can only do so much. And it is what it is. I’m just trying to remind myself of my pace because I know what it is now. When I was younger I struggled because I was working in production and I wasn’t owning my pace. I was comparing myself to peers or the industry. I would get so stressed. And the difference is now, I’m working on my own as opposed to other people’s projects. 

It’s so lovely now to know that some of my days don’t really start until 3:00 p.m. Because I’m not ready until about then! It also may involve, you know, I have to go lay in a park for a little bit of time. And that can still be a long big day, they just look different. And obviously, there’s times where it is what it is and you have to get through. But it always has to be a balance. Knowing that, appreciating that, leaning into that and prioritizing is something that this time in Jamaica has informed and has allowed me to really feel comfortable.

SP: It’s hard to carve out those margin spaces. Especially in a place like New York, where culturally that can feel so contrary. I empathize strongly with the walks in the park. When I’m stuck on a piece, I hop in the shower to create that space for generative thoughts. But in the moment, it can feel like the last logical thing to do.

AF: Exactly. Taking breaks and having different conditions… and movement! I’ve just started running in the mornings. It gives me so much energy. And that’s something I really missed when living in Jamaica, especially in Kingston. Where I lived, there’s no pavements. It just ends up feeling vulnerable and it doesn’t feel as easy to do. But actually, during the pandemic there was this mountain that a friend and I would run up. There was this area, I guess it was a golf course, but it was full of mango trees. We would walk it in the morning and pick and eat them as we were walking. It was very special. 

SP: You’re bringing back so many memories for me. I haven’t been back since 2019.

AF: Oh wow, you’re due a visit! Have you ever been to Portland or do you mostly go to Montego Bay?

SP: Mostly Montego Bay. I’ve been up to Knockpatrick and Mandeville in the mountains. It’s totally different than where I spent most of my time. The coolness of the mountains and the mist in the mornings… even just a totally different smell from Montego Bay, which is that mix of ocean and salt and city smell. 

How often do you try to get yourself there?

AF: For most of last year I was waiting on my green card, so I wasn’t able to travel. It came at the start of this year and as soon as it arrived in the post, I booked a ticket. (laughs) Literally within fifteen minutes of opening it. 

This year has been really busy. I had some time now, but I also haven’t seen my family in the UK for seven years. So next week, we’re going to London for two weeks. I needed to do that.

SP: That’s hard when you have your heart and your roots in so many different places.

AF: Yeah. Both of my Jamaican grandparents are in London and they’re both getting older and having different health issues. So I really need to go and spend some time with them. But the dream is to visit Jamaica three times a year. That’s what I’m working towards because it’s only three and a half hours away.

SP: That’s such a quick trip!

AF: Such a quick trip! The dream is to generate the support I need through different avenues here in New York. To be able to go [to Jamaica] and do dedicated recording of stories and making work. Then come back here and edit and stuff. Also the Real Talk series, I plan to turn that into a slightly longer episodic series that focus on different themes and people’s stories in twelve minute pieces instead of one minute pieces. So have two stories per episode, but then this also exists as an episodic series. This national treasure of archives. You know, these current moments and stories of people across the country in different communities, experiences, oral histories. 

SP: I love the scope of that.

AF: I want it to be ongoing. So that’s the plan. I see that happening. And once I see something then it normally happens.

SP: Yeah, that’s kind of the story that I’m getting from this conversation. It’s going to happen. Well, I’m excited to see it continue to evolve and unfold. I’ll also have to tell you when I get that trip on the books. Maybe we’ll overlap.

AF: Yeah, that would be amazing. I can definitely give you some tips on what to do, where to go.

SP: That’d be beautiful. I’d love to see some new places. This has been really lovely. Thanks so much for taking the time to connect. And thanks for being willing to be on the other side of the interview scene too.

AF: Oh absolutely.

SP: I’ll talk to you soon.

AF: Thank you. Have a great rest of your day.

Ania Freer is an Australian-Jamaican artist, filmmaker, cultural researcher, and curator living and working between Jamaica and New York. Through installation, film and curating, Ania uses oral histories to explore identity through themes of class, race, resistance, labor, craft traditions and folklore. Her intimate archive of films work to disrupt imperialist narratives and recenter marginalized voices. Ania is the founder of Goat Curry Gallery, a platform which features artworks from Jamaican craft producers along with her documentary series Real Talk, an intimate collection of oral histories. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Film Theory from the University of Sydney.

Ania’s work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica and her film, Strictly Two Wheel, won Best Documentary Short at Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in 2022. Ania is a Curatorial and Art Writing Fellow at New Local Space Kingston and has attended residences such as Art Omi and AIRIE (Artist in Residence in Everglades). Her practice has been supported by Something Special Studios Black Creative Endeavours Grant, Caribbean Film Academy, American Australian Association and DVCAI.

This interview is a modified transcript of a conversation shared between Ania Freer and Shanley Poole on August 13, 2024. It was published using Ethical Storytelling Practices modeled after the principles created by Voice of Witness.

*Poem excerpt from Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.”

All photos courtesy of Ania Freer.

Artist Profile: Michael Cuadrado

Directionality, semiotics, and deep roots with Alumni Artist-in-Residence, Michael Cuadrado.

Michael Cuadradro’s first encounter with Ox-Bow spanned the entirety of the summer of 2017. As a Summer Fellow, he spent 13 weeks on campus, splitting his time between the studio and a work placement in the kitchen. The season hosted visits to the beach, evenings on the volleyball court, and nights around the campfire. Cuadrado described his summer as a time not only to deepen his practice, but also his sense of self. He had just finished his junior year of undergraduate studies at the Pratt Institute, where he rooted his work in figurative painting, drawing, and collage. Having come out the year before, many of the renderings involved portrayals of nude men, and at Ox-Bow he found a receptive community not only for his art, but also his burgeoning identity. As the youngest of the fellows, the staff and faculty seemed extra intent on nurturing this youthful, energetic artist. 

Ox-Bow’s rural campus stood in stark contrast to Pratt’s New York cityscape, but Cuadrado took to the new environment with ease. By the time he returned to New York for his final year of undergraduate, he found himself daydreaming about Ox-Bow, its quiet meadow and open air studios. In 2019, Cuadrado fulfilled this dream and stepped into a new role in the housekeeping department. As another season came to a close, Cuadrado looked towards returning to Ox-Bow for another bustling year in 2020. Of course, as was the case all across the globe, things took an unexpected turn at Ox-Bow.

Rather than spending that summer hustling to change beds and sweep floors, Cuadradro found himself on an ultra quiet campus. There were no students romping through studios or dancing on the meadow. Only Cuadrado and a few other staff members resided on campus. As the Covid-19 pandemic progressed, Cuadrado once again found campus providing a sort of reprieve from the city. While others took to making sourdough and riding stationary bikes, Cuadrado became an avid reader during the early stages of the pandemic. “This is going to sound heady,” Cuadrado admitted, “but I was reading this book on the beginnings of semiotics.” Having spent so much time in solitude, he (like many others during 2020) began to question just about everything. So he returned to the basics of the visual world, curious what the most rudimentary characters symbolized. He also cracked open Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which explores the idea of directionality within semiotics. “I was lost,” Cuadrado said of those first pandemic months, “so I was like, ‘Let’s just go back to the beginning.’” And in this exploration of semiotics, Cuadrado found new footing. 

Photo courtesy of the artist, Michael Cuadrado.

“That winter I made a lot of work, because what else was I going to do?” Cuadrado said in both jest and earnest. For weeks, he spent his days reading in the morning, pausing for lunch, and then heading to the studio for the afternoon. With semiotics on the mind, arrows began to appear in his work as he explored Ahmed’s proposed interpretations of directionality. These paintings would eventually carry Cuadrado to the portfolio that brought him to Yale for his MFA, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Cuadrado eventually transitioned from housekeeping to Programs Manager. With experiences as a fellow, campus staff, and now administration, Cuadrado emphasized the holistic view of Ox-Bow that he was able to glean. With each position, his understanding of the organization deepened, and it was only through much discretion and consideration that he decided to leave Ox-Bow in the fall of 2022 to pursue a Masters in Fine Arts at Yale. There Cuadrado continued to invest not only in his arts practice, but also the realm of academic and research-based writing. He maintained his pandemic practice of reading copious amounts of literature and became particularly attracted to theory-based courses at Yale.

In 2024, Cuadrado applied for the Summer Residency at Ox-Bow, which returned him to campus for a 3 week stay. “This was my first summer coming to Ox-Bow where I wasn't staff or working alongside staff,” Cuadrado reflected. During this time, Cuadrado stepped back into the ease and slowness of Ox-Bow. “I started the residency thinking I would work on ‘large’ oil paintings… However, I found myself continuously making smaller chalk pastel drawings or thinking about potential installations.” He indulged in both long afternoons in the studio and easy evenings around the campfire. “The most generative experiences outside the studio were conversations with other people,” Cuadrado said. It was these very conversations, as so often is the case at Ox-Bow, that made their way into the studio and onto the paper.

Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez (b. 1995) is an artist born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He received a BFA in Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2018 and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in 2024. Cuadrado has attended residencies at Wassaic Project, BOLT at the Chicago Artists Coalition, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists' Residency, and the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. He has exhibited nationally including solo exhibitions at Harkawik and Coco Hunday.

This article was written by Shanley Poole, Engagement Liaison & Storyteller and was based on an interview and email correspondence conducted from April to September of 2024.

Photos by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

Artist Profile: Steven Smith

Leather artisan, Steven Smith, shares about his journey to finding his craft and identity in the arts.

In the fall of 2017, Steven Smith started designing his first leather journal. He worked in secret, hiding the hobby from his family in the locker room of the soccer stadium where he coached. That Christmas he gifted me, his daughter, with that journal. It was a surprise that harkened back to the weekly trips we used to take to Barnes & Noble where I would stare longingly at the shelves of journals with dimpled leather and yellowed pages. We journeyed there every Wednesday during my middle school years on the evenings my mom had graduate school classes.

The same year my dad began crafting in secret, he announced he would retire from coaching at the season’s end. What had served as a decades-long career would soon sit in the past. Thinking he might be due for a new hobby, I picked up a book (from our Barnes & Noble, of course) on leather crafting to give to him at Christmas.

The exchange of gifts seems serendipitous in retrospect. Six years later, Steven Smith is the artist behind Holland Leather Works. From his workshop, he has produced passport holders, portable bar kits, wine quivers, portfolios, and more. Through leather crafting, he has found not just a second career, but another passion. When he creates new designs, especially custom works, he often finds himself thinking, “This is something this person should have for generations.” In one of our many conversations about his craft, he expressed that he had always loved art, but at a young age wrote himself off from being an artist. In sixth grade, he stopped drawing, certain he could never measure up to Ronny, his older brother. “I saw my brother's art and I thought now he's an artist and I'm not,” Smith confided. My uncle went on to pursue an MFA and career in neon glassblowing and metals, while my father tried to leave art behind and became a professor and collegiate soccer coach.

Despite my father’s belief that he’d never be an artist, my memories throughout childhood serve contrary evidence. I remember him rendering a sketch of his dream house with makeshift drafting tools and using woodworking skills to craft furniture, including the live-edge oak console table that now sits in my living room. Even while he was in graduate school, he found himself learning a new craft, which would eventually serve his leather work well: sewing. At the time, my mother was working at an interior design company who asked her to make pillows after hours for extra cash. During times when orders were high, he’d help cut fabric, sew, and even develop new patterns. He described it as “a skill of necessity” because it helped pay the bills through school. 

While it has taken several decades, the leather artisan has finally accepted his identity as an artist. Smith shared that his creative process usually begins in the night owl’s hours. “Ideas will pop into my mind and then I have trouble falling asleep,” he said. The day after, he’ll usually wake naturally around 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. With a new concept in mind, it’s easy to hop out of bed and head to the workshop, where he’ll turn on an English Premier League game, an audiobook, or classic rock. “Yeah, you might even find me dancing while I'm working,” he said, his confession managing to shock the author of this article. On those early studio mornings, the hours fly by as Smith troubleshoots new concepts and builds prototypes. Those are the days that reignite the creative spirit of the craft, the days that get him through the monotony of others spent on repetitious matters like producing several dozen wallets or passport holders.

After six years and the production of several products, Smith still favors making journals. “There’s something about those that makes me so happy,” he said, admitting part of that is the nostalgia of our days spent at Barnes & Noble. “This would not be happening in my life if it wasn’t for those Wednesday nights… Every time that I went there with you, I would think I could do that,” he said and years later he has proven his thoughts true.

Find Steven Smith’s artisan made journals, backpacks, wallets, and more at Ox-Bow House in Downtown Douglas.

Steven Smith is a leather artisan from Holland, Michigan. He began his craft in response to his daughter’s love of writing in her journals. In response Steven started hand crafting journals for her which turned into many requests for more from friends who saw the work. The expansion into the art continued to grow as time passed to include many forms of leather artisan products including bags, purses, wallets, and many other specialty items. Steven is a retired professor emeritus at Hope College.

This article was written by Shanley Poole, Engagement Liaison & Storyteller. The article was originally published in our Experience Ox-Bow 2024 Catalog.

All images provided courtesy of the artist.

Artist Profile: Sarah Ann Banks

Sarah Ann Banks talks digital art, surfing eBay, and telling the story of a baby mammoth.

Like many artists, Banks shares time between her studio practice and contracted gigs. In her case, such gigs include design work for esteemed brands such as Harper's Bazaar, Urban Outfitters, and Coach. Banks channeled her ever present spark while discussing these opportunities, but there was no comparison for the enthusiasm that emerged when she started discussing her studio practice. Here she allows her imagination and current obsessions to carry her to the furthest reaches. Inspirations include deep dives into Ebay where she enjoys hunting for vintage toys made in the USSR. “They have an amazing talent for [making] the most haunted squeak toys,” she explained with a laugh. During my studio visit in July, Banks was working with an antiques seller to secure a vintage Edward Mobley elephant-shaped toy box. Banks follows these obsessions and threadlines with dogged dedication. This focus has proved a major asset to the narrative component of her work. “I get fixated on something I see and then I try to develop a backstory,” Banks explains.

WolfDog by Sarah Banks. Image courtesy of the artist.

This dedication and attention results in rich characters at the forefront of her designs and complex landscapes composing the backdrop. Also present is the whimsical inspirations sourced from Banks’s childhood. Those familiar with Littlest Pet Shop and My Little Pony will see the resemblance in the luxurious eyelashes and bobble-sized heads of Banks’s creations. Don’t let this whimsy be mistaken for simplicity. Fueling her worlds are inspirations from science-minded podcasts. In her hydra series she explores anti-aging properties and the eternal nature of these mysterious (and very real) species of the Cnidaria phylum. And as one might expect from someone hunting Ebay for USSR-era children’s toys, some of Banks’s characters house a distinctly haunted look inside their sweet, doe eyes.

Most recently, the character that has been knocking on the door of Banks’s imagination is a mammoth. Specifically, a baby mammoth, once frozen in the ice, who has unfrozen in a heat wave. The narrative takes inspiration from biotech company Colossal BioScience, which is working to bring extinct species (such as the mammoth) back to life through genetic engineering. She is particularly fascinated by the paradox of such an ancient creature in infant form. “I'm interested in making some sort of body of work that's all about one story,” Banks says, which contrasts her more recent works that focus on small, unrelated stories. Her hunch is that this baby mammoth might be the perfect lead. This isn’t the only shift Banks is contemplating, she’s also interested in converting her digital renderings to paintings and drawings.

Mammoth Caterpillar by Sarah Ann Banks. Image Courtesy of the artist.

When Banks first came to Ox-Bow during the summer of 2018, she wasn’t strictly a digital artist. At the time she was an undergraduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While pursuing her degree, she shared her focus between ceramics and digital art. Since graduating, Banks stepped away from ceramics and focused on deepening her digital practice. But now she’s itching to expand that practice through different forms. All this coincides with Banks's return to Ox-Bow. Six years after her first visit, Banks was invited to campus for a three week stay as one of two 2024 Alumni Artists-in-Residence. In preparation for her time at Ox-Bow, where she believed the environment would be most conducive to manifesting these more physical works, she took a class from an artist who specializes in turning 3d artwork to oil paintings.

Mammoth Risograph by Sarah Ann Banks. Image courtesy of the artist.

Once on campus, Banks wasted no time unearthing the mammoth from her subconscious. After setting up her computer, she began rendering the baby mammoth. Through various iterations, Banks established the dynamic range of this ancient, infant creature. In one depiction, two mammoths frolic through a field of flowers in a carefree yet deeply feverish dream. Another showcases the mammoth’s capacity for loneliness as tears well in their eyes. In yet another, the creature, abstracted to only its head, calls to mind a talisman or deity. Banks translated two of these portraits into oil paintings, using the methods of the tutorial she took before arriving at Ox-Bow. The translation from digital to physical, felt poetically reminiscent of the mammoth's own journey from DNA to physical. While the oil paintings can’t capture the same literalism of digital work, the layers of paint and depth of color created their own sort of realness.

Mammoth Spiral by Sarah Ann Banks. Image courtesy of the artist.

Continuing with more physical translations, Banks also utilized Ox-Bow’s print studio during her residency. In particular, she experimented with the Risograph. “In 3D [work] you can be endlessly tweaking,” Banks explained, but many of these details fade amidst the granular nature of Risos. In the instance of the flowery fever dream, the faded quality works in favor of the piece. It’s as if we're viewing the young mammoth through a coming-of-age camcorder shot. Through experimentation of form, Banks is able to capture soulful portraits with oil painting, nostalgia with Riso prints, and the hyperreal with digital. Over the course of three weeks, Banks lived into the quintessential Artist Residency experience. She dug deep into her practice, experimented with new forms, and invested in the resources on campus. At the intersection of Bank’s passion and Ox-Bow’s offerings, she brought plans and visions to life and the story she produced was one so characteristic of her work: wholly whimsical and deeply soulful. 

Sarah Ann Banks is a digital artist based in Brooklyn, New York, working primarily with 3D animation software. She uses the virtual space to build an expansive world full of fantastical objects and creatures. These creations are born from vintage objects, nature, and her own personal narratives. Banks develops stories and personalities that overlap between her works, updating with her own interests and daily life. These artworks often act as a diary, tracking her daily interests and fixations. The content ranges from distressed carnival prizes to moody gargoyles. Banks received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. Some of her recent clients include Instagram, Urban Decay, Coach, and Harper’s Bazaar.

This article was written by Shanley Poole, Engagement Liaison & Storyteller and was based on interviews conducted in April and July of 2024.

In Line

Exploring abundant joy in linework with Mark Thomas Gibson

“There's a certain type of drawer who's constantly looking for lines, who wants to see lines, who loves drawing,” Mark Thomas Gibson said, adding that that’s what initially attracted him to comics. He was in elementary school when he fell in love with his first comic, an issue of Wolverine by John Buscema.

Gibson still finds himself drawn to lines, but as he’s spent more time with comics his care for the genre has grown in its diversity. Beyond the linework and style, he believes comics are an essential way in which we can connect to others stories and offer our own. He sees voices, intention, and individual perspectives shining through his students’ work.

Mark Thomas Gibson delivers a lecture under the tent on the meadow. Photo by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

Despite Gibson’s current adoration for comics, which started in his youth, he set them aside for a number of years. He described himself as a product of the 1950’s war on comics. Born in 1980, Gibson explained that war lasted well beyond the 50’s. Even in undergrad he resisted taking a drawing class “because drawing was the devil,” according to his upbringing. When he finally took the course, he fell in love fast, describing the experience as meeting an evil mistress.

When the dean of his department in graduate school visited Gibson’s studio, it was a drawing that the dean purchased. Gibson remembers questioning his decision, wishing he’d instead been more attracted to one of his paintings. The dean left the young artist with these parting words, “All this other shit doesn’t matter. These drawings, that’s it!” A tough pill to swallow, it took Gibson another two years before he accepted those words. Eventually he came around. Not only did his drawings attract viewers, Gibson also realized he found more joy in producing drawings.

This realization left a profound impact on Gibson and has transformed his relationship with both his creative practice and teaching. Gibson values the moments in the studio when he catches a student lighting up about their own idea. In those moments he asks them, “don’t you want more of that?” Over and over, he finds that when students are resistant to pursuing that spark, it’s because someone along the way told them “this isn’t right.” In Gibson’s space, he strives to get students back in touch with their own voice and grant them trust and access to the limitless joy that comes from using that voice.

Gibson insists that working from that place of enthusiasm is key to giving back to other artists. You can only give to others when you are feeling satisfied in your own practice. He admires the comic community for its commitment to this philosophy. Early in his career he sat down with a prolific comic writer at their house and the writer looked over his work. “He didn’t ask for anything in return, he just gave,” Gibson marveled. Evident in Gibson’s own life is this same generosity. Contrary to some other creatives, he doesn’t seem fatigued from teaching or mentorship. Instead, he delights in the opportunity to nurture their potential. He makes it clear that it’s not all encouragement, “I’ll question you, I’ll challenge you, but I always make it clear I’m on your side.”

This is the first year that Gibson’s course, “Considering Comics: Graphic Narratives in Ink,” will be offered at Ox-Bow. Students enrolled can expect to be guided by Gibson’s welcoming spirit, fervor for comics, and vast technique. His goal in every course is to equip students with a well stocked toolkit that will serve them well beyond their weeks on campus.

Headshot of Mark Thomas Gibson. Image courtesy of the artist.

Mark Thomas Gibson's (b. 1980, Miami, Florida) personal lens on American culture stems from his viewpoint as an artist, a professor, and an American history buff. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his exploration of contemporary culture through the language of painting and drawing, revealing a vision of America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within the story. Gibson has released two books: Some Monsters Loom Large, 2016, with funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; and Early Retirement, 2017, with Edition Patrick Frey in Zurich. Gibson has been awarded: residencies at Yaddo; the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency; a fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia; a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University; a Guggenheim Fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York; and was named a 2022 Grantee by The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York. In 2023 Gibson had solo exhibitions at Sikkema & Jenkins Co. in New York and MOCAD in Detroit, and was included in the exhibition Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Gibson is represented by M+B, (Los Angeles) and Loyal, (Stockholm, Sweden). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and lives and works in Philadelphia.

This article was written by Shanley Poole, Engagement Liaison & Storyteller. The article was originally published in our Experience Ox-Bow 2024 Catalog.

Banner: Mark Thomas Gibson, The Boys, 2023, ink on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

Carousel photos of students working in the studio by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

Artist Profile: Paul Peng

Written by Natia Ser (Summer Fellow, 2023), this article dives into the contagious curiosity of Artist-in-Residence Paul Peng.

Before I recognized Paul Peng as one of Ox-Bow's Artist-in-Residence, I thought the face that had been showing up at every single campus event, always flashing a smile, belonged to a student who had a genuine and intense curiosity for other people's practice. He would show up to Faculty and Visiting Artist lectures, gripping his sketchbook and scribbling notes down as the presentation unfolded, before eagerly raising his hand to direct thoughtful inquiries to the speaker. It was on another night, while passing by him glued to his laptop in the Old Inn, where he engaged me in conversation filled with fervor despite the hour (math and art at 12 a.m.!), that I knew he was as avid of a speaker as he was a listener. This summer marks Paul's return to Ox-Bow since he first took a class here six years ago—which he fondly recalls as the time he wore a smile "all week long." With the same radiant beam, he sets foot on these grounds again, exerting an energy that illuminates through his countenance to warm everyone he meets. When I called it a night, he waved at me enthusiastically with a peace sign. Classic Paul. 

Paul points at his favorite work made during the residency.

The same energy permeates Paul’s art practice. In his Ox-Bow studio, his drawings overflow the walls and his sketchbooks—which he divides between "freak" sketchbooks and "actual" sketchbooks. "But the conditions of these books are the same in terms that there is no pressure in making them," he says as he flips through pages of old and new appearances of his rendition of Dipper from Gravity Falls. Weaving through his illustrations in the space are Risograph prints, collages, and ceramics—it seems that Paul has ventured beyond pencil sketches on paper during his time here.

Paul's favorite work he made during his residency—Dipper reimagined as a Chinese dragon over a magazine cut-out.

Paul has also been dabbling with a new way of mark-making. Covering one of his studio walls are dark, uniformed blobs and strokes that fill up sheets of paper. Bolstered by an interest in religion his whole life and inspired by the tranquil scenery of Ox-Bow that he has been waking up to recently, his latest endeavors involve using Sumi ink to make repetitive marks as a means to study Zen Buddhism. In describing the influences of this meditative practice, Paul recalls one of his favorite Pittsburgh-based artists whose work is informed by the same beliefs, as well as his sister who once commented on how Paul's intuitive, improvisatory approach to his works converges with the Zen Buddhist notion of a beginner's mind. "[Zen Buddhism] really specifically solidified and put language for me and gave me a really wonderful framework for how I wanted to approach my time at Oxbow, which is to just really listen to the surroundings and figure out what I can actually do here. And just reading through the Zen practices, the almost natural conclusion of that line of thought is this practice that's dedicated entirely to not making any discoveries. You're just trying to exist in the most basic sense of that, and the most purest sense of that, and the most expansive sense of that."

After his residency at Ox-Bow, Paul looks forward to returning to Pittsburgh where he will be moving to a new home and, hopefully, turning one of the rooms into a studio.

Influenced by Zen Buddhism, Paul has been experimenting with new ways of mark-making using Sumi ink.

With access to Ox-Bow’s Ceramics Studio, Paul ventured out of his comfort zone to explore other mediums like clay.

Paul attends a faculty lecture at Ox-Bow.

Paul Peng (b. 1994, Allentown, PA; pronounced “Pung”) is a contemporary artist who makes non-representational and cartoon drawings based on what it feels like to be a real person. This feeling comes from his adolescent experience witnessing and participating in an internet-based folk art tradition of sad closeted teens drawing pictures of themselves as anthropomorphic fantasy creatures, anime monster boys, and other cartoons of things that they are not. Paul is currently interested in how his art practice directly extends this tradition: how his work, born from queer teen anguish, exists under conditions where that anguish used to exist but no longer does. Paul graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2017 with a BCSA in Computer Science and Art, and has also studied classical drawing at Barnstone Studios in Coplay, PA (2013) and experimental drawing right here at Ox-Bow (2017). Alongside his art practice, Paul is a roller coaster enthusiast, a programming language design hobbyist, and an aspiring long-distance runner and competitive DanceDanceRevolution player. He currently lives and works from Pittsburgh, PA.

Photos by Natia Ser (Summer Fellow, 2023).

All Fired Up

Henry J.H. Crissman and Virginia Torrence share about the importance of kindling community and their passion for wood-fired ceramics.

At the start of my call with artists Virginia Torrence and Henry Crissman, they introduced me to the coffee mugs from which they sipped. Torrence favored a brightly freckled mug that couldn’t have held more than eight ounces. Crissman showcased a more sizable and earth-toned mug with a rock sticking out of its handle. As they shared about each vessel and bantered together, I quickly came to understand the personal connection they share with such objects as well as each other. Given their background, such familiarity shouldn’t come as a surprise…

The artists sit on a potters wheel. Each holds a dog in their lap. Photo courtesy of the artists.

The Early Years of the Artists

Virginia Torrence and Henry Crismass share an extensive history with both pottery and each other. In their early teenage years, Crissman and Torrence attended artist markets together around Michigan. Crissman would bring along his potter's wheel and perform live throwings (often in exchange for their booth fee to be waived) while Torrence managed the sales. Eventually they set up their first studio in Crissman’s family barn. They shared the space with a pony who was particularly winded in one direction and namesaked the studio Farting Pony Pottery in honor of their studio mate. This would only serve as the beginning of their endeavors in pottery.

Both artists attended the College for Creative Studies in undergrad, which led them to fellowships at Ox-Bow in 2010 and 2012. Ox-Bow was celebrating 100 years during Crissman’s summer. In one story he recounted the timely return of the bell, which had been allegedly stolen years before from campus and serendipitously returned for its centennial anniversary. Crissman also admitted to rocking a mullet all summer long. Torrence cited her summer in 2012 as “the best summer of [her] life.” Her work placement stationed her in maintenance alongside John Rossi, whom she showered with no shortage of praise. “I made such incredible friends that I still have today and it was so formative for me,” Torrence said. Crissman also reveled in the impact of his summer surrounded by artists such as Theaster Gates (Visiting Artist) and Sterling Ruby (Faculty), citing that “Ox-Bow gave [him] the tools to imagine how [his] practice could be.”

Woodfire & Community

Woodfired ceramics entered Torrence and Crissman’s lives in a less than typical fashion. In college they were assigned to build a kiln for woodfiring, a ceramics process they had never before tried. The assignment proved influential, inspiring Crissman to ask the department for the scrap parts of the retired kilns. After building his own kiln, Crissman fixed it to a trailer and toured the country in a community initiative seeking to bring access to pottery. Ceramics' potential for creating community was something Torrence and Crissman both prized. When they left Eastern Michigan to go to graduate school at Alfred University, they knew they’d eventually return to the Detroit area. “Our community was here already,” Torrence explained, adding, “We’re thankful to be here. We have such an incredible group of people that orbit around [Detroit].”

The project Torrence and Crissman returned to their home state to start is now the Ceramics School in Hamtramck. Part community arts school, part artist residency program, the school grew from what others had modeled to Crissman and Torrence in undergrad. “The artists that we admired when we were in undergrad were people that were making these broader community practices,” Crissman said.

Crissman and Torrence give an Artist Lecture in the tent on the meadow. Photo by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

Returning to Ox-Bow

At Ox-Bow they saw a similar spirit at work. After each of their seasons there, they started dreaming of ways to return. During two of the summers following Crissman’s fellowship, he visited briefly to assist with a woodfire course taught by Israel Davis. But in 2023, their dream was realized more concretely. Crissman and Torrence officially returned to teach their first course at Ox-Bow during one of the seven summer sessions. The communal nature of the woodfiring course they led captured the attention of their students and those around campus. It wasn’t long before someone proposed the couple return for a community-based workshop that fall. “Something that feels really important and special to me is how little it's changed,,” Torrence said, adding that in particular she’s grateful for the communities that are nurtured on campus.

Their fall workshop in particular embraced and fostered the tight-knit community that so many Ox-Bow attendees experience. For ten days, participating artists shared hours upon hours in the studio together. The loading of the kiln has become a particularly important experience in their course and workshop. “We load the kiln and then we sing it songs… fire themed songs,” Crissman explained. “And transformation themed,” Torrence chimed in. The two have dubbed this night-long tradition Kiln-aoke. Between their festive traditions and enthusiasm for introducing newcomers to the art of woodfiring, it’s no wonder why participants have raved about their experiences with Torrence and Crissman. Those interested in learning about the art of woodfiring can sign up for their upcoming workshop, which will run October 22–November 2, 2024.

Self-portrait pots by Crissman and Torrence. Photo courtesy of the artists.

Virginia Rose Torrence (She/her) co-owns, operates and teaches at Ceramics School, a community ceramics studio and Artist Residency in Hamtramck, Michigan. Virginia’s art practice is sometimes making pottery, and sometimes making sculptures. She received her BFA in Craft/Ceramics from the College for Creative Studies (Detroit, Michigan) in 2013 and her MFA in Ceramics from Alfred University (Alfred, New York) in 2016. Virginia lives and makes art in Hamtramck, MI with her partner and co-teacher Henry Crissman, two dogs, two cats and a parakeet.

Henry James Haver Crissman earned a BFA in Craft from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI in 2012, and a MFA in Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, New York in 2015. He now lives and works in Hamtramck, Michigan where he and his wife and fellow artist, Virginia Rose Torrence, founded and co-direct Ceramics School, a community ceramics studio and artist residency. He regards teaching as an integral aspect of his creative practice, and in addition to teaching at Ceramics School, he is currently an adjunct professor in the Studio Art and Craft Department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan.

This article was written by Shanley Poole, Engagement Liaison & Storyteller. The article was originally published in our Experience Ox-Bow 2024 Catalog.

Carosel photos courtesy of the artists.

Visionary Awardee: John Rossi

John Rossi’s 30-Year Legacy of Luminosity at Ox-Bow

Looking back, my first memory of John Rossi is a fitting one. I initially met him during April of 2021 when I came to campus for a final round interview for what would become my first job at Ox-Bow. My encounter was brief. He stood atop a ladder in the old inn fixing an antique chandelier in place. He gave me a friendly hello, I returned it, and that was that. My first Rossi sighting.

Two years later, I’m walking around campus with John. It’s a cool sunny day in May. The sky shines blue, but only through a filtered haze of clouds. John wears, as he does most days, a plaid flannel. His hat, like most of his hats, is sun faded. I own the same one he does, a forest green in baseball style, but his has paled several shades from mine.

John Rossi, wearing a sun-faded baseball cap, tends to the canoe stand on campus alongside Nate Skiffington, Assistant Facilities Manager. Photo by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

John has several titles here at Ox-Bow, from his official role as Facilities Manager to the cheeky title of Pricker Daddy. Today I’m here to learn why he’s earned one of his most infamous titles: The Light Wizard.

From the moment one walks onto campus there are lights to guide your way. If you arrive after dusk or before dawn, you’ll be greeted first by strings of pixie lights. In every room, you’ll find lamps intentionally selected and slightly altered to meet the aesthetics of our unique building environments. And of course, the tent under which Friday night dance parties take place has been adorned with the perfect mood lighting to fit the revolving party themes. 

John Rossi stands behind a work bench in The Rob (the campus’s maintenance building). Photo by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

John isn’t alone in his adoration of lighting on campus. He notes that what originally drew impressionist painters was the natural light of the area. “It reminded them of France,” he said. For this reason, he’s partial to using warm lighting in the cabins and on exterior buildings. Daylight bulbs he finds too disruptive in how it attempts to imitate the sun. “For most of history, artificial light was warm,” he said, noting how its hue mimicked hearths and candles. Using these warmer bulbs rather than cool lighting helps John’s work imitate what it might’ve once been like to spend time on campus during the days when things were illuminated by gaslights and lanterns.

Of course, some of John’s work is much more bold, not so rooted in imitating nature. When he invites me into his studio space, many of the works in progress are lamps and lights. Just yesterday he spent the evening at the metals studio to work with the plasma cutter. Over the course of the night, he transformed various tin cans into lamp shades. This morning, one of the pieces hangs afresh over the entrance of the studio. The tin can lantern is complemented by a carnival chandelier, purple and orange, equal parts normcore and fabulous. Above that sits a string of blue and purple Christmas lights. Fitting, as that’s where John’s love of lights started.

John Rossi stands outside his studio and looks down at a pencil. Photo by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

When I ask him about this passion’s origin story, John doesn’t hesitate: “Probably around age four or five,” aka the age that memory begins. For all we know, John’s love of lights could’ve been at first sight. He recalled playing with lights as a kid. He’d sneak into the closet where his parents stored the Christmas lights, stage them, then hide the lights away before his parents could find out. Eventually he took on the role of hanging the Christmas lights at both his parents’ and grandmother’s houses. Little did young John know, eventually he’d find a place where this passion would be prized and celebrated.

(left) A chandelier selected by John Rossi for the Talmadge cabin. Photo by Clare Britt. (right) Fairy lights in the trees. Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis.

John takes me to the tent on the meadow, underneath which he’s set up a variety of paper lanterns shaped as stars. He altered them himself to accommodate bigger sockets. While under the tent, John gives me a briefing on the physics of lights, explaining why LEDS produce a stronger spectrum than incandescents, which often fail to produce bright purples and blues. As he throws around jargon like diodes, prisms, and cones it becomes clear to me just how deep John’s knowledge of light goes. 

Across campus, other cleverly engineered solutions abound, all the work of Rossi. Some of these include collaborations with other studios: a hand blown glass vase that ensconces its light bulb and a full string of plasma-cut tin cans hanging behind The Rob (facilities headquarters). It can be said without exaggeration that in every building and even along pathways, John’s expertise and artistic touch literally light the way.

John Rossi stands in front of the floral, teal doors of his studio. Photo by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

This article was written by Shanley Poole and was based on interviews conducted with John Rossi in 2023. Banner photo by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

Visionary Awardee: Larry Gammons

A Lifelong Legacy of Community Impact in Saugatuck-Douglas

Born and raised in Big Rapids, Michigan, Larry Gammons spent many summers vacationing on Lake Michigan’s shoreline. He and his partner Carl Jennings especially enjoyed Saugatuck-Douglas and would take multiple trips with their boat to the quaint town during the sixties. In conversation, Gammons fondly recalled his visits to the Blue Tempo, a popular (and perhaps West Michigan’s first) gay bar, where his eventual partner worked as a bartender in the sixties. In 1976, the venue was destroyed by a fire. For several years after, its absence was felt by community members like Gammons and Jennings. Rather than sit idly by, the couple began scheming. The dream settled into an epic vision for a gay resort, which would feature lodging, a bar, restaurant, pool, and lots of parties.

Manifesting this ambitious dream proved no easy task. Though real estate options weren’t lacking in Saugatuck, local government support for a gay resort certainly was. Multiple times the city of Saugatuck denied the couple’s request to secure a liquor license. “​​They just kept turning us down and turning us down because they found out it was going to be gay,” Gammons confided. After yet another city meeting in which the majority voted against the resort, Gammons and Jennings went for a drive through Douglas to take their mind off the latest rejection. It was on that ride that the couple spotted the shuttered Amity Motel. The instant they set eyes on it they thought, “that could be a great resort!” From there, things finally began to fall into place. After Gammons and Jennings made an offer on the property, the Douglas council members approved its use at the next town meeting. In 1981, their resort finally opened.

Larry sits on a bench in the Pride Celebration Garden. Photo by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

For nearly two decades, Gammons and Jennings oversaw what is still known as The Dunes Resort. Their vision was brought to life, including the restaurant at which Jennings served as the head chef. After buying the resort the couple became full-time residents in Saugatuck-Douglas. While the dream may have finally been realized, Gammons expressed that those first years held a number of challenges. In an article with the Holland Sentinel in 2019, Gammons told reporters, “We had bomb threats and Ku Klux Klan threats… just all kinds of things.” In striking contrast, the community today has come to embrace its reputation as one of Michigan’s queerest cities. 

Gammons hypothesizes that many young folks in the area might have trouble comprehending what the atmosphere was like forty years ago. It was for this reason that Gammons created the Pride Celebration Garden in downtown Douglas following Jennings’s passing in 2019. He wanted to build a memorial to commemorate community members as well as his partner. He also hopes the garden will serve as a reminder that the culture of Saugatuck-Douglas is not one to take for granted, nor has it always existed.

In 1999, Gammons and Jennings made the difficult decision to sell the Dunes Resort. “When you create something it’s hard to give it up,” Gammons explained, but he and Jennings knew it was the right time to pass it on. While the restaurant has since closed under new ownership, the Dunes still hosts a bar, pool, and an abundance of parties. After selling the Dunes, Gammons found new ways to engage with the Saugatuck-Douglas community. He and Jennings co-founded the organization West Shore Aware, which provides financial support to non-profits and awards scholarships to LGBTQ+ individuals and allies. Over two decades, the organization has given away over $1.4 million in scholarships and awards, all of which have gone to the benefit of the West Michigan community.

Larry amidst the flowers in the Pride Celebration Garden. Photo by Dominique Muñoz (Summer Fellow, 2024).

It was Arthur Frederick, former owner of the Button Gallery, that eventually invited Gammons to an Ox-Bow fundraiser. “That was 43 years ago… we had our heart in Ox-Bow from day one,” said Gammons. From the start, he and Jennings recognized the instrumental role that Ox-Bow played in the history of the area. Eventually, Gammons even served as a local board member.

At this year’s Field of Vision: Summer of Love benefit, Ox-Bow recognizes Larry Gamons with the Community Honoree Visionary Award. Gammon’s impact and legacy in Saugatuck-Douglas—from the Dunes Resort to the Pride Celebration Garden, from West Shore Aware to his service at Ox-Bow—spans decades and will surely continue to do so. We look forward to honoring Gammons at the event. Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased through June 24, 2024.

Lead support for Field of Vision: Summer of Love is provided by the Holly Palmer Foundation.

Summer Fellow: Christen Baker

Exploring the path less traveled with Christen Baker (Summer Fellow, 2023).

During Christen Baker’s sophomore year of college, she enrolled in her first and only studio glass course of her undergraduate years. That semester would ultimately go on to shape the path Baker pursues today. After graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute with a BFA in Ceramics, she enrolled in an MFA program at Tyler School of Art & Architecture to study glass. With almost no hotshop experience, she was a unique candidate. “Most people don’t want to try to learn new, crazy skills when they’re entering grad school because you’re already doing a lot,” Baker said. But she was invigorated by the prospect of pursuing a new specialty.

Baker describes her transition to glasswork as “largely trial and error.” But don’t let her humble words fool you into overlooking her alluring and thoughtful work. While glass often serves as a focal point, she doesn’t let her new degree define her. Instead, she identifies as a multidisciplinary artist in which “[glass] grounds the work.” Alongside glass, she has brought photography and printmaking into her practice. During her time at Ox-Bow, Baker spent her spare hours in the Works on Paper Studio, where she learned how to use the risograph.

Christen Baker at work in the studio. Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis.

Baker also leaned into research after discovering the ongoing environmental challenges facing Saugatuck. During the summer of 2023, numerous articles, demonstrations, and yard signs were erected in opposition to a marina that would be built on the Lake Michigan shoreline. In a city that prides itself on its unmarred lakeshore, many Saugatuck citizens were determined to raise hell. Their efforts garnered the attention of Baker, and her interest inevitably began to influence her work. 

At the group exhibition “The Hole” in Ox-Bow’s Betsy Gallery, Baker contributed three distinct pieces to the exhibition. The first of the pieces, a stack of risographs, revealed two-tone images of the dunes. Next to the pile was a note to viewers: “Take one image to transform this landscape.” Elevated less than two feet off the ground was a trail of glass vessels, filled with sand, and embedded with stake flags that a surveyor might use to map a property. The last piece featured an anchor tethered to a rope. Far from subtle and paying tactful homage to the Saugatuck community’s voices, Baker’s works portrayed the imminent danger the environment faced. In February 2024, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy denied a permit to the developers seeking to build a marina. To the relief of many Saugatuck citizens, this decision has ensured the protection of the lakeshore

Another of the most fruitfall aspects of Baker’s time on campus was the friendship that blossomed between Baker and Glass Studio Assistant, Pricilla Lo. “We both just hit it off immediately,” Baker said, adding that the common threads between their work allowed them to learn a great deal from each other.

As summer drew to a close, Baker was open about her hopes to return to campus. True to her ambitious tendencies, she wasted no time in making that dream a reality. Alongside friend and fellow glass artist, Pricilla Lo, Baker will return to Ox-Bow to teach Glass Multiples. Baker’s multidisciplinary approach will be well utilized as one of the course’s instructors. With much of the course centered in mold making, Baker will tap into her ceramic experiences that often centered around mold making. Prospective students can read more about this course in our 2024 Summer Course Catalog.

In the meantime, Baker—in collaboration with Ox-Bow Alumni Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez—is finishing a residency with She Bends and the Museum of Craft and Design. The residency will culminate with the exhibition Neon as Soulcraft at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco.

Christen Baker and Pricilla Kar Yee Lo at work together in the studio. Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis.

Christen Baker is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the complex relationship between attention, desire, and economies that emerge from it. Baker earned a BFA in Ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where she continues to explore the geographies of public spaces and objects, real and imagined.

This article was written by Shanley Poole and was based on interviews conducted with Christen Baker in August 2023 and May 2024.

Carousel images of The Hole Exhibition by Natia Ser (Summer Fellow, 2023).

Fashion as Intuition

Hansell shares about their gift for reading the style palm of others and tuning the gender dial.

Gurtie Hansell’s love for fashion and connection to altered clothing stems far into their past. At a young age their grandmother taught them to sew and from there it seemed, in Hansell’s words, “I always made clothes or augmented clothes to fit my weirdo personality.” However, Hansell started to make a more communal and consistent practice of it in 2015. For the retirement party of Chicago’s Chances Dances, Hansell was approached about facilitating a fashion show. The project materialized into something substantial. Hansell reminisced on the crowd’s positive reactions. “And I had a lot of fun and the models really liked it,” they added. That Hansell would receive such positive reviews from all around didn’t surprise me. It’s in their nature to honor and connect with others, something I’ve experienced first hand in all my encounters with them. 

After the fashion show, Mary Eleanor invited Hansell to display in the window of the boutique and gallery space Tusk. From there Hansell thought, “Okay, I guess this is what I do now.” They credit the encouragement from their community as the spark to transition to an entrepreneurial artist. At the time they’d been working for six years doing corporate level branding and graphic design for Whole Foods. “I lived in front of a computer,” Hansell said, “And I’m a very tactile person,” making their transition to the material world of fashion and alterations a natural one. Though that’s not to say their practice is without challenge. Mostly recently, they’ve been struggling to decipher how to maintain the political heart that fuels their work without capitalizing off of tragedy. Much of their altered fashion consists of upcycling t-shirts by screen printing on them. They do not shy away from imbuing political statements with humor, referring to such t-shirts as “an analog meme.” With hefty doses of intention and goofiness, Hansell’s work hits with a heartfelt relevance and their humor buoys grave subjects with a zany spirit of hope.

Ox-Bow, its traditions and culture, have largely influenced Hansell’s practice. They first visited in 2020 to volunteer at a Halloween event, which has since become one of their annual reasons to come to campus. “Halloween has become [a] part of my practice because of those visits,” Hansell said. These experiences have encouraged Hansell to more deeply explore drag, which they say is “directly linked to the freedom [they have] experienced at Ox-Bow” during Halloween each year. This sense of liberation is one they hope to facilitate in their workshops and one they’ve clearly achieved in years past. In particular, Hansell loves to twist what they refer to as the gender dial. “If I wear a dress, and I love to wear dresses,” Hansell explained they’ll tune in the dial by “then [throwing] on a ballcap” to add a dash of masc to the fem look of a dress.

Hansell rocking the dress and ballcap combo.

Interpretations of gender and willingness to play with them comes naturally to Hansell. They even enjoy twisting this dial when they stylize for others. When I asked Hansell how they go about creating looks for another person, they said, “I think it’s always been a facet of who I am.” They described it as a form of listening to others. When one lends their ear to how others present themselves, it becomes easy enough (for Hansell at least) to offer that individual a look that honors them. Hansell refers to this act as “reading the style palm” of others.

One of Hansell’s favorite parts of Art on the Meadow Workshops is watching folks settle into the space. At the start of the class, participants learn to shed their fears and grow comfortable with the sense of whimsy and spontaneity in Hansell’s workshop. Hansell describes that the four day workshop has a kindred feeling to getting ready for a party as they sift through clothes and help each other find and modify objects to achieve a desired look. The intergenerational aspect, hosting students from 16 to 60+ has also fueled Hansell’s time on campus. “It’s always such a wild mix,” Hansell said. The exchange of creativity between all ages in the workshop and the friendships that form over just four days is truly remarkable.

Those looking to revamp their wardrobe and encounter the enthusiasm and inspiration that Gurtie Hansell always provides, should consider enrolling in their upcoming workshop Renewed Ready-to-Wear.

Gurtie Hansell is a multimedia artist, teacher, and entrepreneur working out of their home studio and backyard in Chicago. They draw on fashion, printmaking (and print-breaking), as well as graphic design to outfit their community for pageantry, protest, and pleasure. Their wearables are deeply inspired by decades in queer nightlife, camp craft, and generally being loud in public. Gurtie owns a gender-expansive streetwear brand called Kangmankey which they've run since 2015, and they also co-operate a production and costume design company called MotherTwin. This is their fourth year teaching "Renewed Ready to Wear" at Ox-Bow.

All images are courtesy of the artist.

Research and interviews were conducted by the article’s author, Shanley Poole, Engagement Liaison & Storyteller. The article was originally published in Experience Ox-Bow 2024.

Partner Profile: zakti tea

Janeil Engelstad and Pamela Miller share their passion for tea and all its varieties, communities, and rituals.

In 2004 Janeil Engelstad and Pamela Miller took a trip to Kuala Lampur, Malaysia. Little did they know how much the trip would transform their future. By the close of their experience, they were dreaming of an entirely new business venture that intersected with the couple’s newfound passion: tea. This passion would eventually grow into the formation of zakti, a speciality, loose-leaf tea company. Engelstad had incorporated tea into her life decades prior, though her partner Miller never held much interest. While in Kuala Lampur, Miller ordered a cup of Shu Puer tea that changed everything.

“I smelled it and it just took me right away to my grandparents' farm in Germany. It was so earthy and musky,” as Miller described the memory, I could see her crawling back into the comfort of that moment. “It’s still my go to drink.” Throughout the rest of the trip, Engelstad and Miller enjoyed a variety of quality loose leaf teas. “The experience there led us to really think about starting a business, a tea company,” shared Engelstad.

In time, Miller’s newfound passion for tea took an academic twist. “ I spent a few years studying and learning all I could and buying tea from all over Asia,” she shared. Enrolling at the Speciality Tea Institute and the American Tea Association, Miller began to pursue more formal training. This desire to learn has also progressed in a desire to share that knowledge with others. “Education for me and talking about tea… that's my happy place,” Miller said. It’s clear she thrives in these educational contexts. She compares the complexities of teas to that which people often associate with wine. “All wine comes from grapes, right? And all tea comes from camellia sinensis,” explained Miller. “Those varieties excited me.”

As the two tea connoisseurs shared about the history of zakti, Engelstad painted a crisp picture of what drives them, “The three P’s are central to our business: people, planet, and profit.” The latter being rather self explanatory, Engelstad expounded on the philosophy of sustainability that drives their company’s relationships and environmental investments. “It’s everything from packaging to the people we work with.” A quick glance at the zakti website showcases paper packaging and partnerships with small, family-owned farms, but their commitment extends far beyond these choices. Zakti returns a portion of its profits to the communities with which it partners. Engelstad, an artist herself, emphasized the importance of supporting the arts in communities from which they source their tea. In 2023 this meant supporting a play in South Africa—where zakti’s rooibos is sourced—directed by renowned theatre artist Selloane (Lalu) Mokuku.

Of course, Engelstad and Miller also believe the tea itself has something to offer. It has the power to connect individuals to themselves and others. As a coach for executives, Miller often starts meetings with clients by offering them tea. Similarly in her role as a professor, Engelstad enjoys bringing tea into the classroom to share with students. “I try to encourage people to build rituals that are infused in their daily life,” Miller said. She lauds these rituals not just because of the benefits of polyphenols, alkaloids, and other compounds found within tea, but because these rituals can encourage individuals to slow down and reflect. If you can create a ritual, then it becomes part of your life,” explained Miller.

In April, zakti will bring their knowledge, passion, and of course, tea to Ox-Bow’s campus. As one of the partners for the upcoming Tea & Trails event, they will conduct a tea ceremony as the Tallamdge Woods celebrates its induction into the Old Growth Forest Network. Learn more at ox-bow.org/tea-trails.

Miller and Engelstad have traveled throughout the tea growing regions of Asia, learning about and tasting teas along the way. Participating in the culture of tea around the world has led to continual research and study, learning how people around the world grow, process, prepare and enjoy tea, which are as diverse as the types of tea. From Chinese Kung Fu, to the Japanese Tea Ceremony (also called The Way of Tea), to Moroccan Mint tea, and more. With joy and enthusiasm, Pamela and Janeil create opportunities to share tea and their learning and passion connected to “The Culture of Tea®,” with clients, friends and family. Learn more at zakti.com.

This article was written by Shanley Poole, Engagement Liaison & Storyteller, and was based off of an interview conducted by the author in April 2024.

LeRoy Neiman Fellow: Jack Holly

Jack Holly (Summer Fellow, 2023) discusses their path to photography and the portrait series they developed during their summer at Ox-Bow.

At age 18, Jack Holly bought their first camera and has ever since been entranced by what appears in the view lens. Through photography, Holly has captured everything from the landscapes of rural America to intimate glimpses of BDSM culture, at times even intertwining the two as seen in How to Steal a Plane. Their ongoing portrait series sits in thoughtful juxtaposition to their past career as a model. Ultimately, they were unsatisfied with their experiences in front of the camera. “It made me feel like a hat rack for other people,” Holly shared. This perspective deeply informs how they aim to render images of others. Their untitled project, which documents genderqueer and gender-nonconforming individuals through portraiture, prizes the autonomy and power of individuals. Through interviews with the subject and collaboration during the shoots, Holly hopes to capture their subjects in a way that honors and elevates.

(left) A portrait of EXYL.

(right) A portrait of John Rossi. Photos by Jack Holly.

During the summer of 2023, after completing their BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute, Holly started their portrait series on campus where they spent 13 weeks as a Summer Fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency. In each photo, an individual identifying as queer or gender nonconforming faces away from the camera and holds an object of meaning to them. “It's one of those projects that I kind of consider a sketchbook practice because it's not really a main tenet of my practice, but it's a way for me to continue photographing and getting to know people and understanding the weird part of people's lives,” explained Holly. During each portrait session, Holly incorporates an interview to better understand the individual. Oftentimes, the stories they reveal are deeply personal. “It's an honor that people feel so open,” Holly said.

Throughout their 13 weeks on campus, they continued taking photos and also ventured into another new project, a performance piece that would eventually become the short film “Big Yellow Horse.” The film’s inspiration took root in Holly’s long standing fascination with Dante’s “Inferno” and Holly describes their work as a “surrealist adaptation” of the text. Having first read the work at age 14, Holly said, “it was a pretty formative text growing up and… [I] always had it checked out at the public library.” Perhaps it is partially this childlike fondness that charges Dante’s themes with new relevance. “The dead have collected and keep my memories now. The world will go on without them,” serves as the film’s opening words. These two lines baptize viewers with the sense of existential modesty that guides them through the rest of the film.  

Still from Jack Holly’s short film “Big Yellow Horse.” Image courtesy of the artist.

Big Yellow Horse builds its own language and logic, creating a world for its audience. Though the piece only runs for six minutes and twenty-some seconds, Holly creates a universe that tugs at the threads of death and memory, weaving them into a visual oasis. The word inferno doesn’t easily come to mind amidst the shots in which Cole Bespalko floats on an air mattress on Lake Michigan's water, but Holly isn’t aiming for simple, as is evident through the psychedelic editing style and sound design that wavers between transcendent and terrifying, like the film’s many symbolic coin flips and flickering lights. While others may have been tempted to manifest inferno with more depictions of brimstones and damnation, in Holly’s hands “Big Yellow Horse” presents downfalls as an opportunity for inferno to function as rebirth, akin to a phoenix gifted with the liberty of a tabula rasa. 

In creating the film, Holly was eager to involve other artists on Ox-Bow’s campus. A number of other summer fellows joined the film as actors. Artist and LeRoy Neiman Fellow EXYL consulted on sound design and staff member Michael Stone wrote the poem that opens the film. The process of filming held its own adventures including late night shoots and on one occasion, Holly fell into the lagoon while trying to capture the perfect shot. At each moment, Holly emphasized the warmth the community offered, whether that included volunteering to help during the witching hours of campus or laughing alongside them when they took their unintended dip. The film’s private debut was also communal; it first aired on the meadow during a 10 p.m. screening in which staff, students, faculty, and other artists gathered together. After its private showing at Ox-Bow, “Big Yellow Horse” made its public debut at the Glenwood Arts Theatre in Kansas City.

(left) A Portrait of Aidan Mudge.

(right) A Portrait of Cole Bespalko. Photos by Jack Holly.

Since the conclusion of Holly’s fellowship, they have settled into their post-graduate life in Kansas City. While working full time at a frame shop and gallery alongside keeping up a studio practice has not been without challenges, they still manage to get into the studio most days and have continued the portrait series they started at Ox-Bow. Nowadays, Holly photographs people in their own homes. “It can be intimidating because I'm a tiny person, and you never know what someone's gonna do when you meet them on the internet,” Holly acknowledged. “It's a really weird exchange of trust and intimacy,” they added, an exchange that has cultivated a captivating series of images.

For the foreseeable future, Holly hopes to continue developing short films, rendering photographs, and spending time with their family and new niece.

This article was written by Shanley Poole based off interviews conducted with Jack Holly in August 2023 and February 2024.

Partner Profile: John Brown

John Brown shares the spirit that fuels all his work behind the bar: hospitality.

The driving force behind John Brown’s career is a philosophy of hospitality. One encounters this spirit almost immediately upon meeting Brown, who lends winning smiles, gentle jokes, and a spark of curiosity to even the briefest of conversations. As bartender and mixologist, Brown explains it's his job to “throw a party for everyone,” and this is not a role he takes lightly. His primary goal of extending hospitality and putting guests at ease is extended through the one-on-one interactions he shares with those ordering drinks as well as the general atmosphere that his drinks build throughout the night. Drinks are often rituals, Brown acknowledges, and like any good ritual, it should be done with intention. Brown insists that drinks should be consumed carefully and created thoughtfully.

John Brown serves Ashley Freeby (Communications Director) a cocktail during the 2022 Field of Vision Benefit. Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis.

When designing a menu, Brown considers the driving forces of aesthetic, taste, and homage. At a club, he focuses less on complex flavor profiles and instead utilizes mixers, such as tonics, that will set drinks glowing under black lights. While dolling out drinks at a wedding, he plays on themes of nostalgia by catering to the couple’s preferences. In the case of Ox-Bow’s recent Winter Break, the menu flirted with the evening’s theme—“Fall in Love with Ox-Bow”— with lavender-hued liquors and a hot buttered rum playfully titled the “Warm Welcome.”

Regardless of the cocktail Brown is making, they follow the same premise as other culinary endeavors. A balanced drink requires sugar, fat, acid, and heat. So long as these complexities are held in balance, there’s much room for play. While Brown’s creations now span wide in their variety, the exploration began with an Old Fashioned. “And being stubborn,” he added. Rather than playing by the recipe book, he wanted to branch out. He started swapping the main components of the classic drink—whiskey, simple syrup, and bitters—with offbeat equivalents. Simple syrup was exchanged for honey, maple syrup, or molasses. From here he started asking more questions and curiosity led to creativity. If syrup was just sugary liquid, then couldn’t he use teas, coffee, or juice as a substitute? The same became true of bitters, which Brown explained are simply flavors extracted from dried fruits and herbs with 100 proof ethanol. These explorations he described as a “colorful playground of flavor profiles.”

John Brown behind the bar at Winter Break 2023. Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis.

Within this playground, Brown has a burgeoning interest in spirit-free cocktails. “My intention is to expose people to a standard. So when they walk into another place, they feel empowered to expect more from their bartender than just lemonade in a cup,” Brown says in regard to non-alcoholic beverages. The same complex flavor profiles in Brown’s spirited drinks are found in his mocktails. Rather than seeing the Gen-Z driven movement of Dry Januarys and soft sobriety as a trend, he hopes it’s here to stay. Brown credits his fluid transition to embracing the sober movement to his passion for hospitality. “It’s easy for me to see the forest for the trees,” he explained, circling back to the idea of ritual. If a spirit free drink helps someone unwind or feel more at ease in a space, Brown wants to equip them with that asset.

While Brown applauds those pursuing the sober movement, he himself is still fond of his spirits. When asked if he had any go-to’s, he said he prefers whatever the “chef” recommends. “You wouldn’t go to Gordon Ramsay and ask him for sushi,” he explained, adding that “at a sports bar,” he’s not above “a cheap glass of rosé.”

This article was written by Shanley Poole based off an interview conducted with John Brown in February 2024.

For the Love of Landscapes

For the Love of Landscapes: An Interview with David Baker

“There’s a magical place when painting the surface of the water,” David Baker says, “where [the surface] switches from mirror to window.” This magic trick was something he spent hours trying to capture during his early years at Ox-Bow. He’d venture out with a canoe on the lagoon, Baker donning a wide brimmed hat to shield himself from the sun and toting a set of paints. While the process might sound romantic, Baker emphasized it was pretty grueling work. 

Baker first came to Ox-Bow in the 90’s and reminisced that in those days you could get a cold beer from the campus vending machine. At the time, he mostly rendered abstract oil paintings, the kinds of work that might draw Rothko to mind. All that began to change at Ox-Bow. As if inspired by the school’s founders, he suddenly found himself driven to landscapes, a style he’d previously written off as a “tired genre.”

Rivulet, David Baker, 2020, charcoal, 11 x 14 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

In the years beyond his first summer at Ox-Bow, Baker continued to expand his practice. He ventured into watercolor, motivated by a class he was to teach at South West Michigan College. Baker eventually brought his professorial skills to campus. He taught his first core course Watercolor in 2000 and continued to do so through 2008. In 2010, he switched gears and crafted his first Art on the Meadow Workshop. Since then, he’s taught community members everything from watercolor to charcoal.  

This year, Baker looks forward to introducing students to some of his favorite subject material: the landscape of Ox-Bow, of course. Those taking Ox-Bow in Black and White can anticipate field studies of dunes and lagoons, while those in Painting with Oil Pastel can look forward to studying the arboreal ghosts and muses of Ox-Bow in the form of felled and still standing trees across campus. And all can count on spending time with an instructor who not only knows all the prime views, but will also teach you to capture them on canvas. 

David Baker holds a painting under a tent in an Art on the Meadow workshop. Two students sit at a folding table behind him. Photo by Ian Solomon (Summer Fellow, 2023).

David Baker (he/him) is a visual artist who specializes in poetic landscape painting, much of it done en plein air. Baker is a lifelong artist and teacher who has taught at Ox-Bow School of Art since 2000. He is represented by Rising Phoenix Gallery in Michigan City. 

This article was written by Shanley Poole and was initially published in the 2022 Experience Ox-Bow Catalog.

Then & Now: Intergenerational Art-Making Through the Years

Ox-Bow has played host to a variety of imaginations, the most receptive of them? Kids. Over the years, the children of professors, staff, guests, and neighbors of Ox-Bow have delighted in the wonders of the meadow, lagoon, studios, and trails. More than anyone else, these kids understand the magic of Ox.

Then:

Family Camp began as a place where artists and their families could gather together at Ox-Bow and make art. Created by Patricia Pelletier and Phil Hanson (the Academic Director at the time), the tradition lasted for over 10 years from the late 80’s to the early 2000’s. The one week class usually took place at the start or end of the summer season. In the morning, adults would attend class, while James Brandess led a session for the kiddos. Afternoons were reserved for family time: hiking, canoeing, or trips to the beach. Each day ended with an evening of intergenerational artmaking. Often hosted in the paint studio, group work usually focused on the creation of masks and costumes. Culminating annually into a Friday performance and parade, everyone would don their work on the meadow at the week’s end. 

Artists and families included Karl and Lori Wirsum, Bobbi and Steve Meier, Richard and Cathy Pearlman, Rodney and Renee Carswell, Paul Solomon, Nancy and Tom Melvin, E.W. Ross, Gretchen Brown and Peter Kuttner, Carol Neiger, Ginny Sykes, George Liebert, and Blair Thomas. A variety of disciplines were represented amongst the artists present including muralists, performance artists, photographers, ceramicists, painters, and filmmakers. President of Ox-Bow’s Board and former Family Camp attendee, Steve Meier reflected, “Many of our children ended up in creative fields, I would credit [this] somewhat to this experience – seeing artists work with their children among such a diverse group of creative people was a truly unique experience.”

Two participants, a child and adult, don homemade masks at Family Camp. Photo courtesy of Board President Steve Meier.

Now: 

For many Michiganders, summertime means beach days or trips Up North, but for artist and educator Kim Meyers Baas it means the annual Ox-Bow getaway. Baas first came to Ox-Bow as a graduate student from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her Masters of Art in Art Education. After graduating, she returned to Ox-Bow several times to take more courses. In the mid 2000’s the student became the teacher with a proposal to bring youth workshops to Ox-Bow.

A child and adult work on paintings at the edge of the woods on campus. Photo courtesy of Kim Meyers Baas.

Baas didn’t view the idea as revolutionary; in fact, it seemed all too natural. Kim noted, “There’s always been kids [at Ox-Bow]... it’s a kid’s dream!” The concept for youth workshops took inspiration from her mentor, the late E.W. Ross, a loyal member of the legendary Family Camps.

Over the years, Baas has created spaces for young artists throughout West Michigan, most recently creating a canvas quilt portrait of Patrick Lyoya in collaboration with students of East Kentwood High School. Lyoya was a Congolese refugee who was killed by a police officer in 2022; his death deeply grieved the community, especially impacting a number of Baas’s students who, like Lyoya, are also Congolese. Baas, alongside a number of students and a few other teachers, painted “Through the Veil,” which was then featured at the 2022 Art Prize Festival. “I feel like I’m part artist, part community organizer,” Baas said when reflecting on her work. “Amplifying voices is my true practice.”

A child sits in a tire swing with pencil and paper. Photo courtesy of Kim Meyers Baas.

After taking a pandemic-pause from Art on the Meadow workshops, Baas returned to Ox-Bow with a new plan of action in 2022: family workshops. The intergenerational aspect of Family Camp had long enticed Baas. In this new format, Baas facilitates various “ah-ha” moments with kids, while simultaneously encouraging parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles to work collaboratively with their young artists.

Over the course of the four workshops, participants explore ceramics, cyanotypes, and watercolor. Each workshop coincides with a natural theme: earth, sun, and water. The workshops’ environmental lens is very much intentional. Baas describes nature as a key part of “the Ox-Bow factor.” 
In 2023, Baas looks forward to bringing back family workshops. She plans to continue exploring art and the elements and is eager to introduce more families to the meadow. Returners might also notice a new addition to this year’s family series, entitled Seek, which Baas hinted will include a campus-wide treasure hunt. By popular demand, the Water workshop will be held twice this summer.

Headshot of Kim Meyers Baas, courtesy of the artist.

Kim Meyers Baas (she/her) is an arts educator who has worked in public and private settings in Michigan, Chicago, and on the Mexican/Texas border cultivating youth artists and community workers since 1992. Her teaching and art making practice focuses on exploring family identity, inequality, migration, cultural recognition, art and technology literacy, and media representation in marginalized communities.

Research and interviews were conducted by the article’s author, Shanley Poole, Engagement Liaison & Storyteller. The article was originally published in Experience Ox-Bow 2023.

Artist Profile: Chidinma Nnoli

Chidinma Nnoli creates a place to belong in her holy, haunting paintings.

Artist and Ox-Bow Alumni Chidinma Nnoli resists those that put her in boxes, and I understand why. She describes herself as a homebody who rarely leaves her home studio in Lagos, Nigeria, but in 2023 she spent two months in London, three weeks in Florida, and another three at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency. It all began with a desire to explore new places and create without the pressure of deadlines. “I needed to pause… and put out work that I was curious about,” Nnoli specified. To spur this shift, she decided to get out of her home studio, and the country while she was at it. “I wanted to go out and see new things,” Nnoli said. And so she did.

Nnoli didn’t find herself navigating any major shifts in her work while she was abroad. Instead, she spent time resolving paintings and, particularly at Ox-Bow, enjoying quiet time for contemplation. “I needed time to be in a space that was different,” Nnoli said. She used those three weeks to follow intuition and pick up whatever materials she felt inclined towards. Instead of exploring new territory, she dove further into the subjects and narratives that she has paid diligent tribute to over the years. 

The pains of growing, 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas, 62 x 54 inches

This habit of diving deeper is not new to Nnoli. When engaging with her practice, it’s clear she has sunk her teeth into something substantial. Her past three bodies of work share a kindred core, but each investigates new subtleties and depths. “When I think about my work, I think about it like a journey, like interconnected phases,” Nnoli explained. She has ventured through this journey at paradoxical speeds. On the one hand, she works through expansive and cohesive bodies of work simultaneously; on the other, each painting reveals the dedication and attunement of an artist that gives each piece the time it is due, never rushing to complete the next. 

Like the artist behind the paintings, Nnoli’s work defies neat boxes and definitions. She skirts away from words that might assign theories and abstractions. “I’m talking about belonging and the search for belonging” she says of her latest body of work. And as she shares more about her practice it becomes clear that she’d much rather engage in conversation about matters of the heart than words that might threaten to academize her paintings. 

“I feel grief, you know, and I hope that's something that is visible within the work,” Nnoli says. This grief she refers to is rooted in her empathy for women, an empathy which serves as her primary lens for the world. When she heard the news about Morocco’s earthquake, the first thought that passed her mind was, “What are the women going through? What is it like for them?”

None of these clocks work, 2020, oil on canvas, 40 x 48 inches

These questions and Nnoli’s deep well of empathy are often sources that exhaust her. To replenish her hope and wellbeing she credits three things: detoxing from the internet, spending time with friends, and listening to music. “I have amazing people around me,” Nnoli glowed as she mentioned them and reflected on the power of having a community with shared values. Similarly, she fills her studio with the music of powerful and heartfelt voices such as Florence & the Machine, Lorde, and Lana Del Rey.

Nnoli did not shy from the label feminist being attributed to herself, saying she identified as such “even before [she] knew what the word meant,” but she insists that her work is more than feminist. “I’m talking about things from a very personal point of view,” she elaborates, “it’s very feminist, but at the same time, I think the art world has this way of running with labels.” She fears that such labels will constrain and limit her work as well as misguide the emotions of viewers. Her ultimate desire is not that viewers will see a painting as feminist, but rather as soft, sad, and haunting. She hopes others will walk away with feelings rather than categorizations. 

Untitled, 2021, oil on arc shaped panel, 34 x 50 inches

Evident also in Nnoli’s practice is an insistent muse who rises from an unexpected source. “Religion is very much evident in my work,” Nnoli shared, “That’s something I've been trying to escape somehow, but it just keeps coming back,” as is seen in her depictions of arches, halos, and rosaries. Nnoli described her experience growing up in Lagos as one shaped by patriarchy and conservative Catholicism. Though Nnoli’s works contain an ethereal quality, I would describe the religious elements in them as haunting rather than heavenly. They hint towards familiar corruptions present in reality. However, they do manage small comforts with an implicit proposal of a differing potential, a holiness rooted in open meadows, an overgrowth of flowers, and women whose faces bleed wisdom and sorrow.

As she reflected on the cultural context’s effect on her work, she realized “that's probably why I create these dreamlike spaces that do not exist… because I don't currently know where I am or am headed. I just know I'm just finding that.” In her paintings she can carve out this space for herself, and others.

While Nnoli humbly protests that her works won’t change lives, I beg to differ. I see images and narratives that have already touched viewers at Ox-Bow and beyond. Arts writer Daniel Mackenzie sums it up well when he writes, “The wider effect of spending time with Chidinma's work is one of comfort, that the suppressed among us are being watched over; that the lonely can find comfort in universal forces that, though not always easy to detect, are always there.” Nnoli’s modest hope and belief is that her works “might be able to start a conversation.” And I would argue that such conversations are the seeds and eventual roots of life changing actions.

Banner Image: Various storms and saints, 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 62 inches

Headshot of Chidinma Nnoli courtesy of the artist.

Chidinma Nnoli (b. 1998 Enugu, Nigeria) is an artist working primarily with painting. Her practice contemplates the importance of a single subject ’s embodied experience(s), overlaying the past unto the present while insisting on the emotional link between body and space often in conflict with self and a background mostly saturated with religion and gendered obligations. Nnoli earned her BFA from the University of Benin and has gone on to participate in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Her works are a part of several notable collections and have been featured in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Colossal, and Vogue. She currently lives and works in Lagos.

Ox-Bow’s Summer Residency Program offers 12 artists the time, space, and community to encourage growth and experimentation in their practice for three weeks on campus. The Summer Residencies are held while our core classes and community programs are in session. During this time, a small group of residents have access to Ox-Bow’s artist community of students, faculty, and visiting artists.

Our Summer Residencies are open to artists at any level. Currently enrolled students, MFA candidates, arts faculty, emerging, or established artists are encouraged to apply.

To learn more about the Summer Residency Program visit www.ox-bow.org/be-a-resident

This article was written by Engagement Liaison & Storyteller, Shanley Poole.

Artist Profile: Emilio Rojas

Former Ox-Bow Artist-in-Residence, Emilio Rojas (2017), responds to the last 15 years of his work. Even while looking back, he never stops the pursuits of forward and next. While on tour with his exhibition tracing a wound through my body, he has executed new performances at various museums and galleries. At his last stop at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts, he takes the time to reflect on the process.

The exhibition tracing a wound through my body was first conceptualized in 2020. As Rojas began to look back on his work he realized it stretched back 15 years. Multidisciplinary in scope, the work investigates colonialism through film, print, and photographic capturings of various performance pieces.

“I’m making work that is not always easy to digest,” Rojas says, nor does it appear easy to execute. His performance pieces often require undergoing intense physical duress. “I’m interested in these sorts of intense experiences, or catharsis, rather,” Rojas elaborated. This is obvious in the capturing of a performance piece in which the artists’ arms are wrapped around a cactus. He spent hours hugging it in heat of over 100º F, conditions so extreme that it solicited hallucinations. In another video, Rojas sits under a tree for six hours, drinking a slow drip of sap from the tapped tree. The performance ends when he has consumed liquid equal to the amount of water in the human body.

Visitors of the exhibit inevitably might wonder about the why behind it all, and those that search for an answer discover Rojas’s work never lacks intent or poetics. “Performance, for me, it’s a way to process,” says Rojas. In “Instructions for Becoming (Waterfall)” the artist participated in what he described as a sort of rebirth. The photo was taken the day after Rojas moved to a new city and took a new job after a divorce. “It looks like I’m drowning,” he says of the photo, “but it actually felt like a purification.” This is not the only piece for which Rojas’s initial audience was mother-nature. In his similarly titled portrait photo “Instructions for Becoming,” Rojas disappears into the root system of a tree. He sought it out during a trip back to Mexico amidst frustrations and anxiety while awaiting his green card. “I tried to find a tree with the thickest roots to connect back to my roots,” he explained.

While reflecting on more political work, he shared the advice he once received from his mentor Tania Bruguera “Political art, it’s site specific, but it’s also time specific… you have to do it when it’s urgent.” Though he initially attached this lens to political art, the same can be said for the work that leans more heavily on what Rojas describes as “poetics.”

Far from completely abandoning the political nature of his work, Rojas has instead attempted to strike a balance between poetics and politics. Since 2021, he has created site specific performance pieces that engage with the history of the exhibition spaces. In the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts, he conducted a choreographed performance piece that centered around cleaning the Center’s Hanes House, whilst wearing Hanes clothing. His work is highly influenced by poets such as Gloria E. Anzaldua, Ocean Vuong, Nikki Giovanni, Clauda Rankine, Audre Lorde, and Pamela Sneed. Rojas views performance as “poetic movement… with your body you’re creating poetry.”

In his ongoing performance piece “A Manual to Be (to Kill) or To Forgive My Own Father,” Rojas literally dissects his father’s book Pequeño Hombre and reorients the words on self healing cutting matts. As if the materials themselves aren’t poetic enough, the poems he creates through the words elevate it all the more, as does the communal foundation of the process. Rojas refers to the process as “mining” for poems and invites others that have complex relationships with their fathers to participate in the process with him. During one-on-one sessions with Rojas, participants are encouraged to engage in conversation with him and construct a poem of their own on one of the self-healing matts.

Rojas started this exercise eight years ago in 2015. “My healing of that relationship has taken that long,” he expressed. Even as he continues to mine into this multi-year investigation, he keeps looking forward. The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art marks the last stop of the three-year exhibition tour of tracing a wound through my body. Next, Rojas heads to Georgia to participate in a residency where he looks forward to digging through footage of the various performance installations he’s created over the past two years.

More information on Emilio Rojas and his work is available at emiliorojas.studio.

Alumni Artist-in-Residence 2023: Paul Peng

Hell in the Summer, graphite on paper, 28 in. by 20 in.

Peng discusses breaking free from artistic blocks, moving beyond the studio, and finding freedom in the 9-5.

When I sit down to call Paul Peng, he first appears on screen beaming a smile. Peng confesses he’s just finished another virtual meeting; “If I seem a bit tired at the start of this call, it’s because I am.” I’m charmed by this candor, his willingness to disclose what’s going on in his world. This same earnestness carries us through the rest of the call, a two and a half hour conversation, which spans in focus from his studio practice to DDR competitions. It’s 1:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, the most notorious slog hour of the work week and I too am a bit tired, however, the energy soon takes off. It’s not long until the general spark of the conversation has us both alight.

It’s been six years since Peng last attended Ox-Bow. In that time his relationship with his studio space, artistic practice, and career have changed significantly. A longstanding element of Peng’s practice is cartoon work, but his associations and explorations of this work have proved adaptive over the years. From 2017 to 2022, Peng rooted his work in exploring similarities between cartoon and mark making. By exploring their shared nature, Peng produced a number of works. This investigation he pinpoints as a significant shift in his practice. He noted laughingly that others might not be able to notice the shift, but he viewed it as a driving force that propelled him forward. However, in 2022 that curiosity found its end. Peng initially tried to continue the exploration, but realized the effort was forced. The question had gone stale.

Ground, graphite on paper, 38 in. by 50 in.

Peng next began to focus on object oriented ontology, most typically associated with sculpture, and applied it to his drawing practice. The goal was to create drawings that were actual objects and not representations. Peng produced a number of works based on this investigation. He laughs as he recalls, “I made some very strange drawings,” and ultimately realized “cartoons are representational, no matter how much I don’t want them to be… they are.” In retrospect, he recognizes it as a strategy to break free of his block. While it successfully did that, it more importantly made Peng realize that this was just another fashion in which he was “radically changing how [he] made art to match how [he] thought about art.” Now “instead of trying to change my art to match the way I think,” Peng recognizes, “I need to change the way I think to match my art.” This is the philosophy that Peng leans into today, an attitude that produces work indisputably authentic to the artist.

In similar spirit, Peng enjoys investigating how space affects his practice. Some of his favorite drawings of late have been produced in coffee shops. Though he still keeps a studio space, he finds freedom in pursuing his work beyond those walls. To only produce work in the studio, he finds, limits the scope of what he can produce. Just as thoughts can restrict artistic expression, so too can spatial influences.

Like many artists, Peng has juggled a number of jobs to pay the bills. After graduating from his MFA program, he navigated a variety of part time teaching contracts. He resisted committing to a nine-to-five for fear of the toll it would take on his artistic practice, but Peng found the financial pressure of these part time contracts to be a burden that still siphoned energy from his creative goals. He came to the conclusion, “I can't continue living life in fear… under this assumption that having a full time day job would like completely drain… because I'm already experiencing that through this weird part time gig.” So in 2018 he picked up a job in coding.

In undergrad Peng had studied computer science alongside studio art. “And no I didn’t do it as a safety net,” he chided. He insisted that for the sake of his soul, he needed to study computer science. He truly loved the world of math and programming. When he returned to it in 2018, he experienced an incredible relief as a he realized, “my life is big enough for more than one passion.” 

Over the past few years Peng has been creating more and more space for his variety of interests. He first felt this sense of permission at Ox-Bow as a student. “Ox-Bow was the first time where I experienced this environment where art didn't feel like it was in a zero sum game with the rest of my life,” Peng said. As it turns out, Peng lives a life filled with an abundance of pursuits, two of the more recent ones being DDR competitions and trips to amusement parks. He disclosed, only half joking, he might organize a trip to the local coaster park in Michigan this summer. As he anticipates his return to Ox-Bow, Peng hopes for equal parts work and play. Just as much as time in the studio, Peng looks forward to time to “frolic on the meadow” and venture out on the lagoon with canoes, to let art and life sit in an unencumbered exchange with one another, and to delight in whatever arrives. 

Birthday, graphite on paper, 38 in. by 50 in.

Photo of Paul Peng. Image courtesy of the artist.

Paul Peng (b. 1994, Allentown, PA; pronounced “Pung”) is a contemporary artist who makes non-representational and cartoon drawings based on what it feels like to be a real person. This feeling comes from his adolescent experience witnessing and participating in an internet-based folk art tradition of sad closeted teens drawing pictures of themselves as anthropomorphic fantasy creatures, anime monster boys, and other cartoons of things that they are not. Paul is currently interested in how his art practice directly extends this tradition: how his work, born from queer teen anguish, exists under conditions where that anguish used to exist but no longer does.

Paul graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2017 with a BCSA in Computer Science and Art, and has also studied classical drawing at Barnstone Studios in Coplay, PA (2013) and experimental drawing right here at Ox-Bow (2017). Alongside his art practice, Paul is a roller coaster enthusiast, a programming language design hobbyist, and an aspiring long-distance runner and competitive DanceDanceRevolution player. He currently lives and works from Pittsburgh, PA.

If you have news or stories you’d like to share about your time at Ox-Bow or beyond, you can contact Engagement Liaison & Storyteller, Shanley Poole, at spoole@ox-bow.org.