Color
Jo Hormuth
1 week course || PAINTING 655 001 || 1 credit hour

This course investigates a series of color problems to sensitize students to the interaction of color and color phenomena. Considering the problems of color use and color composition, the course emphasizes hue, value, and chroma and the application of such knowledge to the visual arts. A basic course for all disciplines in seeing and using color.

FACULTY

Jo Hormuth is a multidisciplinary artist whose ideas spring from a fascination with perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic contradictions, backed by research into the architecture, history, and material conditions of the situation in which a work will be developed and shown. Her latest public project is Better Grammar–Garden, for the Chicago Botanic Garden. The eight large color compositions form a portrait of the garden—itself an abstraction—from monochrome macro photographs of plants taken over the course of a year. As founder of Chicago Architectural Arts, she focuses on the restoration of significant interiors; most recently, she researched and recreated interior finishes for the Darwin Martin House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s largest Prairie-style complex, and worked on the restoration of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Willow Tea Rooms in Glasgow. Hormuth is represented by Kusseneers Gallery, Brussels.

Multilevel Painting: Form, Process and Meaning 
Nazafarin Lotfi and Erin Washington
2 week course || PAINTING 605 001 || 3 credit hours || Lab Fee: $50

This course for beginning to advanced students will include extensive experimentation with materials and techniques through individual painting problems. Emphasis will be placed on active decision-making to explore formal and material options as part of the painting process in relation to form and meaning. Students will pursue various interests in subject matter. Students may choose to work with oil-based media. Demonstrations, lectures and critiques will be included.

FACULTY

Erin Washington is a Painter, Drawer, and Installation artist currently living and working in Chicago. Using fugitive and symbolic materials (ashes, blackberries, bones, chalk, moss, and spaceblankets), Washington’s works source imagery from the Sciences, Mythology, and Art History that represent ruptures and failures in the search for meaning and truth. Colors fade or pigments are burned: the objects emulate the cycles they describe. The artist’s actions and products are in a constant state of flux, highlighting the disharmony between meaning, beauty, and a fundamentally messy universe. However, the relative temporality of the work’s making counters ambivalence; the immediate process and present-ness the work demands eclipses uncertainty... for the moment. Erin is currently a lecturer in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in 2011. Notable solo exhibitions have been held at such venues as Illinois State University, The Riverside Art Center, Riverside Illinois and Zolla/Lieberman Gallery. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at such spaces as Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Julius Caesar, Chicago; and Columbia University in New York. Washington’s upcoming exhibition at Cleve Carney Art Gallery in Glen Ellyn, IL is scheduled for Fall 2019.

Nazafarin Lotfi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and her BA from the University of Tehran in 2007. Lotfi explores the phenomenology of spatial experience to investigate how self and place relate to and define each other. In the context of collective histories and memories, she examines the subjectivity of the politicized individual. Recent solo exhibitions include: Become Ocean, Soon.tw, Montreal, CA; Negative Capability, Regards, Chicago, IL; Poiesis, Fernwey Gallery, Chicago, IL; White Light, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Love at Last Sight, Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy; Circles, Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago, IL. Recent group shows include: Waving, Unisex Salon, Brooklyn, NY; This here, Regards, Chicago, IL; Elsewhere, Joseph Gross Gallery, Tucson, AZ; Sedentary Fragmentation, Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL; Resonant Objects, Logan Center Exhibitions, Chicago, IL; among others. In 2015-2016, Lotfi was awarded an artist residency at the Department of Arts and Public Life at the University of Chicago.

Beyond Observation: Embodiment and Materiality in the Landscape
Carris Adams
2 week course || PAINTING 656 001 || 3 credit hours || Lab Fee: $50

In Beyond Observation, students are invited to redefine their perceptions and interactions with the landscape through various approaches to observational painting. While gaining proficiency in the techniques and vocabulary of painting, students will develop new ways of representing the landscape outside notions of the “serene” and “pastoral” while considering moments of their body/mind in the space. Artists’ work and writings will be provided as inspiration for assignments such as Andreas Siqueland, Rodney McMillian, Josephine Halvorson, Lari Pittman, Emily Cheng. Students will be challenged to experiment with the material properties of paint, language, principles and elements of design to compose a painting that embodies an exchange between the maker and the surrounding world.

FACULTY

Carris Adams is a visual artist whose practice visually investigates markers  of domesticated space. Her conceptually multi-layered works seek to inform and position viewers to recognize their assumptions, recall an experience and perhaps note how societal markers materialize in the landscape. Adams received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin (2013) and her MFA from the University of Chicago (2015). Adams' work has been exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Logan Center Exhibitions at The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Produce Model Gallery, Chicago, IL; Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery, Chicago,IL; and The Courtyard Gallery at The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.

Dimensional Collage
Annalee Koehn
1 week course || PAINTING 653 001 || 1 credit hour || Lab Fee: $50

This week-long class combines traditional collage concepts and paper construction styles to explore a structural approach to image and form using found imagery and materials. Deliberate or makeshift, there is a body of artist collage referencing the world of 3D objects such as paper toys, games, and packaging. Informed by the tradition of artists’ collage and assemblage work, including Eileen Agar, Romare Bearden, Joseph Cornell, Hannah Hoch, Claes Oldenburg, Pablo Picasso, Betye Saar and Kurt Schwitters, this class will explore and expand the possibilities of 3D structural imagery, function, utility, and content building. Students will employ traditional materials and tools such as bristol board, exacto knife, scissors, tape and glue, and a stockpile of colored papers, found images, other printed materials. Students will come away with a collection of meaningful objects that incorporate their personal vision and an expanded visual vocabulary.

FACULTY

Annalee Koehn is a Chicago-based artist and musician, and teaches at SAIC in the Designed Objects department. Her work is primarily structural, but spans disciplines and materials, sometimes defying categorization. Threads that run throughout are an exploration of physical and metaphorical properties of materials, cause-and-effect, and the interplay of form and function. Koehn’s work has been shown at Galerie POWERHOUSE, Montreal, the Chicago Cultural Center, Frederick Layton Gallery at MIAD, Vanderbilt University, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Illinois State Museum, Randolph Street Gallery and others, and she has multiple grants, awards and 8 US Patents. She earned her MFA from Louisiana State University and BFA from University of Illinois. Other teaching includes Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, West Virginia University, Oakton College, and traditional music and harmony singing at The Augusta Heritage Center.

The Portrait As Starting Point
Dylan Rabe 
1 week course || PAINTING 614 001 || 1 credit hour

This class will focus on issues raised in painting, particularly portraits and self-portraits, translating what is known and seen into the formal vocabulary of paint. Sources will include direct observation of the subject and the imagination. Students will investigate form and content as well as materials and techniques. Students may choose to work with oil-based media with odorless solvents, or water-based media. Slide lectures and critiques will be included.

FACULTY

Dylan Rabe is an artist living and working in Chicago. He predominantly makes hybrid ink and oil paintings, combining traditional techniques with automatic drawing and surrealist compositional strategies to give form to the subconscious, or an emotionally heightened vision of the external world. He received his BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has exhibited paintings, drawings, and animations at Chicago venues including the Beverly Arts Center, Julius Caesar, The Research House for Asian Art, Iceberg Projects, and Rare Visions in Boulder, Colorado.  He is currently a lecturer at SAIC.

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 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.

Material and Environmental Collaborations
Jeremy Bolen and Rachel Niffenegger
2 week course || PAINTING 655 001 || 3 credit hours || Lab Fee: $50

How do artists combine material processes with explorations of their surrounding environments? In this course, students will engage the landscape as a medium alongside cyanotypes, van dyke and chlorophyll printing, making natural dyes and “potions”, submerging, burning/fumage, earth recording, burying, sand casting, building armatures, and site-specific constructions. Through the examination of ritual and magic as art practice, as well as the intentional sequencing of material processes, students will accumulate and experiment with modes of creation that transcend disciplinary boundaries. We will be referencing interdisciplinary visionaries such as Ana Mendieta, Otobong Nkanga, Tibor Hajas, Lazlo Moholoy-Nagy, and Mickalene Thomas who synthesize painting, photography, installation and sculpture. Students will conceive of projects around the idea of making as performative action, and will choreograph their experimental processes into final works, imbued with meaning and resonance. These unique material and environmental collaborations will be displayed in a culminating exhibition and guided walk of the works installed throughout Ox-Bow’s campus.

FACULTY

Jeremy Bolen is a Chicago-based artist, researcher, organizer and educator interested in site-specific, experimental modes of documentation, community engagement, and presentation.  Much of Bolen’s work involves rethinking systems of recording in an attempt to observe invisible presences that remain from various scientific experiments and human interactions with the earth’s surface.  Bolen received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2012 and he currently serves as Assistant Professor of Photography at Georgia State University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also a founding member of the Deep Time Chicago Collective and is represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago.  

Rachel Niffenegger’s work has been included in group shows shows at Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Tracy Williams Ltd in New York, Bourouina Gallery in Berlin, Ceri Hand Gallery in Liverpool, The Suburban in Milwaukee, and in Chicago at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, and the Hyde Park Art Center. In 2012 she completed a 9-month residency at DE ATELIERS in Amsterdam. Chicago Magazine named her “Chicago’s best emerging artist” in 2010 and Newcity named her one of “Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers” in 2010, this after naming her the “Best Painter Under 25” in 2009. Niffenegger, born in Evanston in 1985, received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.

Encaustic and Materiality in Contemporary Painting
Kristy Deetz
1 week course || PAINTING 654 001 || 1 credit hour || Lab Fee $100

This course will contextualize encaustics within contemporary painting and materiality. Students will experiment with warm wax, pigment, and collage on paper as a way to uncover new ideas through process and material. Encaustic painting techniques create a variety of rich surface textures that respond to continual reworking. Encaustic lends itself to images that are buried under or embedded within multiple layers of wax and meaning. Students will apply encaustic to paper surfaces with a variety of collage materials to learn a full range of additive and subtractive techniques including fusing, scraping, layering, scraffito, encaustic and oil painting combinations, stencils, block-outs, and image transfers. This course will cover topics such as the deconstruction of the language of painting, abstraction, political, ecological, science and technological advances, ephemeral/durational, and installation. Students will reference The Art of Encaustic Painting by Joanne Mattera and Encaustic Art by Lissa Rankin along with contemporary artists working in the medium, including Byron Kim, Kiki Smith, and Petah Coyne. In-progress critiques and lectures will uncover relationships between materiality and subject to create new ideas and meaning.

FACULTY

Kristy Deetz is a Professor in the Art Discipline at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Her extensive exhibition record includes national and international venues.  She is co-curator of FABRICation that has traveled to art museums, university art galleries, and art centers since 2013. She frequently serves as a visiting artist and has led numerous painting/drawing workshops at venues including Haystack, Oxbow, Penland, and Arrowmont. UWGB awarded her the Founders Award for Excellence in Scholarship in 2011 and she received SECAC’s 2016 Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her paintings have been featured in Encaustic Art in the Twenty-First Century, Encaustic Art—The Complete Guide to Creating Fine Art with Wax, and Full-Range Color Painting for the Beginner. Recently she served as Erasmus Visiting Lectureship at the University of Kassel, Germany, and completed a residency at The Burren College of Art in Ireland.

Experimental Watercolor
Hannah Barnes and Susan Klein
1 week course || PAINTING 657 001 || 1 credit hour

This class approaches watercolor from an experimental angle, using chance strategies to create new works. Working from traditional sources such as landscape, students will harness the unpredictable qualities of watercolor to create improvisational, process-based images. Students will have the opportunity to work in a range of styles and motifs, including both representational and abstract images. Located squarely between painting and drawing, watercolor possesses unique material characteristics that lend it to explorations of chance, accident, immediacy, and impermanence. As pigment suspended in a transparent, watery vehicle, watercolor engages the physical forces of gravity and fluidity like no other material. The class will create space for students to explore watercolor’s unique capacities for improvisation. A source of study will be John Cage’s chance based watercolors created at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia between 1983 and 1990. We will also explore techniques developed by Dada, Surrealist, and Fluxus artists to generate unplanned imagery, music, and poetry, and consider how they can be applied to the painting process. A series of daily exercises will introduce students to tools, methods, and strategies. Additionally, students will select a theme to explore independently throughout the class.

FACULTY

Hannah Barnes creates work in painting, drawing, and installation that engages structure, impermanence, and the indeterminacy of images through the lens of abstraction. Her projects have been exhibited in such places as the Dhoominal Gallery in New Delhi, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine, and Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn. She recently completed a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Fellowship in India. She was also a recent resident at the Studio Program at MASS MoCA and a Hedda Sterne Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. Ms. Barnes received an MFA from Rutgers University and a BFA in Painting from Maine College of Art. In 2008, she joined the School of Art at Ball State University, where she teaches painting and drawing.  Born in 1980 and raised on the New England coast, Barnes currently resides and works in Indianapolis. 

Susan Klein’s practice moves fluidly from painting to drawing to sculpture. Her work revolves around a symbol system that references artifacts, devotional objects, and popular culture, the objects and images becoming artifacts of the present.  She employs a wide range of media to allow color, form, mark, and material to communicate meaning. Klein has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Sumter County Gallery of Art. She has also shown at The Southern, Charleston, SC, Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Artists Gym, 3433 Gallery, Chicago; PDX Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; University of Ulsan, Korea; Wayne State University, Detroit; as well as other venues. Awards include a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, residency at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency, and a residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (Brooklyn). She recently curated the group exhibition Nighttime for Strangers at NARS Foundation (Brooklyn). Currently, she is Assistant Professor of Art at the College of Charleston. She is represented by The Southern, in Charleston, SC