Opening Reception 'Summer School of Painting'
Located at Ox-House - 137 Center Street, Douglas, MI 49406
Opening Reception on June 10, 2022, at 7:30 p.m. EST
Closing September 2, 2022
Enticed by its idyllic light, painters have come to Ox-Bow School of Art for 112 years. To capture the unique and rapidly changing dance of the atmosphere, artists have employed a variety of techniques, both traditional and experimental. Whether made meadow-side with direct reference or abstractly in the studio while gleaning inspiration from the culture and nature, there is a signature spirituality in the paintings informed by the Ox-Bow landscape.
Ox-Bow is pleased to present Summer School of Painting, a survey of paintings made by faculty and visiting artists participating in our Summer 2022 Session. In this exhibition, curated by Ox-Bow’s Interim Director of Academic Programs, Maddie Reyna, we invite you to sway with the rhythms in the work of Magalie Guérin, Richard Hull, and Laurel Sparks; be pushed toward new discoveries through the work of Gina Beavers and James English Leary; and play in the gentle tides rendered by Isa Rodrigues and Claire Ashley. Join us as we celebrate the legacy of painting at Ox-Bow, and welcome 2022’s roster of esteemed artists who are continuing a radical history of image and object making.
About the Artists
Claire Ashley (she/her) uses her work to investigate inflatables as painting, sculpture, installation, and performance costume. These works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums, site-specific installations, performances, festivals, and collaborations. Her work has been featured on blogs such as VICE, Hyperallergic, and Artforum, and in publications such as Sculpture, Art Papers, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago, the Yorkshire Post, and Condé Nast Traveller. Ashley received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, Scotland. Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, Ashley is now Chicago based. She teaches at SAIC in the department of Contemporary Practices and the department of Painting and Drawing.
Gina Beavers, born in Athens, Greece, creates paintings and installations inspired by photos culled from the internet and social media, rendered in high acrylic relief. Her series have included paintings that are based on body painting, social media snapshots of food, makeup tutorials, memes, and bodybuilder selfies. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions around the word and is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. She has had two recent solo museum exhibitions: in 2019 at MoMA PS1 and in 2021 at the Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, Germany. Beavers holds a BA in Studio Art and Anthropology from the University of Virginia, an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MS in Education from Brooklyn College. She lives and works in Orange, New Jersey.
Magalie Guérin, born in Montreal, lives and works in Marfa, Texas. Her work is shape-based and abstract in nature, although it employs strategies of representation, which brings these invented shapes into an unknown yet seemingly familiar frame of reference. The experience of foreignness and discovery is at the core of Guérin’s practice. Guérin holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has had solo shows at Amanda Wilkinson, London; Chapter NY, New York; Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; Schwarz Contemporary, Berlin; and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles. She is the author of NOTES ON, a compilation of studio writings (Green Lantern Press, 2016/2019). Awards include a Stephen Pace Residency at the Fine Arts Work Center (2019), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2018), and a Chinati Foundation residency (2018). She is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago and Galerie Nicolas Robert in Montreal.
Richard Hull’s figural paintings explore abstraction through his iconic gestural movements, creating an animated relationship between imaginary characters and the viewer. While Hull was in graduate school, his work was admired by the iconic Chicago art dealer Phyllis Kind, and he began to exhibit his work in her galleries alongside artists from the Chicago Imagist movement. Hull earned his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has work in the permanent collections of many museums and galleries across the country, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. He is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.
Born in Chicago, James English Leary (he/him/they) is a New York–based painter, writer, filmmaker, and teacher. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union, where he has been an Adjunct Instructor of Drawing since 2014. Leary is a founding member of the Bruce High Quality Foundation, which was the subject of a 2013 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. He is a Tiffany Foundation Award recipient and a former Robert Rauschenberg Foundation resident. Leary’s work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the 2010 Greater New York show at MoMA PS1, the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and the 2014 Liverpool Biennial.
Isa Rodrigues (she/her) is a textile artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York, and Lagos, Portugal. She works mostly with weaving and dyeing, inspired by natural phenomena, textile processes, and materials. She is also interested in art education as a means to create community and preserve material culture. She received an MA in Textile Conservation from the New University of Lisbon, Portugal. In 2010, she joined the founding team of the Textile Arts Center (TAC), where she has worked as Co-Executive Director for the last six years. Rodrigues teaches weaving, natural dyeing, and other surface design techniques at TAC and other venues, and is currently part-time faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design and the Cooper Hewitt, New York, and she has created work for clients such as Altuzarra, Gabriela Hearst, Ace Hotel, and Thompson Street Studio, among others.
Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work embodies geometric symbol systems and the transmitting potential of pattern and materiality. Exhibitions include solo shows at Kate Werble Gallery and Knockdown Center, New York, and group shows at Cheim & Read, New York; the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York; Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and deCordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts. Sparks’s work has been reviewed in publications such as the New Yorker, New York Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, Modern Painters, New American Paintings, Art21 Magazine, Vogue México, and Art in America. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including a MacDowell Fellowship; an Elizabeth Foundation Studio Immersion Project Fellowship at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop; a Fire Island Artist Residency; Residenza del Palmerino, Associazione Culturale Il, Palmerino, Italy; a Berkshire Taconic fellowship; an SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship; and an Elaine de Kooning Fellowship.
Ox-Bow House is located at 137 Center Street, Douglas, MI and is wheelchair accessible. All programming is free and open to the public unless otherwise noted. COVID-19 policy: Masks are encouraged while inside Ox-Bow House, subject to change.