Expansions: Skill Building for Advanced High School Artists
Claire Arctander
1 week course || PAINTING 401 001 || 1 credit hour
This pre-college class will entail individual and collective explorations of foundational aspects of artmaking. Participants will establish a community in which they draw from observation, make found object sculptures, and devise site - specific installations to investigate our current surroundings. Students will engage in mark-making and sculptural and performative experiments to learn about ourselves, our values, and our location. Using materials, sites and content found in and around Ox-Bow’s campus, students will begin to develop an understanding of the reasons why art is made. By week’s end, students will decide upon a central question and present a group show of works responding to that theme. Students will gain technical skills in observational drawing, formal skills in organizing objects into coherent artworks, and conceptual skills in developing strong ideas behind their art-making practice. The students’ interests and priorities will help dictate the direction of the course and the resulting exhibition.
FACULTY
Claire Arctander
American Standard
vintage toilet paper and latch hooked yarn
2017
Claire Arctander is an artist in Chicago. Working across multiple mediums, she joyfully articulates conflicted feminist notions of desire and desirability. Arctander’s works refer to and respectfully pervert the aesthetics of women’s creative outputs throughout American history. Via an investment in and respectful treatment of abject, lush materials and low-brow media outlets—such as pop music, home decor, porn, handicrafts, edibles, and consumer ephemera—she posits debasement as a viable position from which to critically operate. She works as a teaching artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and at Weinberg/Newton Gallery. She has been a resident at The Cooper Union, Summer Forum, ACRE, and Ox-Bow. Her work has recently appeared at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, Spektrum in Berlin, Lula Cafe in Chicago, and Eastern Michigan University’s Ford Gallery.