VVinter Sun: Mythological Cycles in the Studio

with Elijah Burgher and Rebecca Walz
PAINTING 681 001 | 3 credits | $100 Lab Fee
In-Person: January 5–18, 2025
Every day during the session (including weekends) 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m EST

Since prehistory, art has served as a way to make meaning of the difficult and mysterious aspects of human existence, particularly the cycles of birth, death and regeneration that structure life on this planet. For this interdisciplinary class, Michigan’s wintry landscape will serve as a point of departure for thinking about these cycles and their mythic symbols, such as Ishtar’s descent to the underworld and the death and resurrection of Attis. This course focuses on drawing as an archaeological and regenerative practice within the interdisciplinary field of contemporary art. Through studio projects, readings, screenings, lectures and group discussions, students will speculatively apply concepts of birth, death and regeneration to the process of making art, exploring themes of continuity, recurrence, rupture, metamorphosis, critique and appropriation. Topics will include cave painting, Mother Goddess cults, solar and lunar mythologies, alchemy, ritual, surrealism and the occult roots of modernism. Class projects will emphasize drawing as a research methodology. We will take inspiration from artists including Leonora Carrington, Forrest Bess, Ana Mendieta, Geta Brătescu and Paleolithic cave painting, historic tarot decks and alchemical manuscripts. Selected readings will include Metamorphoses by Ovid and Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art by Georges Bataille. Students will engage in performative and ritualistic exercises including “Womb of Chaos,” which invites them to rapidly generate drawings and raw materials for self-directed projects. Mercurial values of intuition, risk, ingenuity, trickery, theft, speed and quantity will be emphasized. Students will also create a self-guided independent project that includes a written proposal, research, sketches, material studies, and final work of art or a series of works. Artists will be encouraged to consider how site or installation, material choices, and historical references shape meaning and context within their work. Suggested themes: origin myth, cave art, time machine, underworld journey, union of opposites, mother goddess, solar/lunar cycle, rebirth.

Using painting, drawing, and printmaking, Elijah Burgher works at the crossroads of representation and language, figuration and abstraction, and the real and imagined. Drawing from mythology, ancient history, the occult, and ritual magick, Burgher cultivates a highly intimate code of symbols to investigate the personal and cultural dynamics of desire, love, subcultural formation, and the history of abstraction. Burgher lives and works in Berlin. His work was featured in Block Party at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania; Scrivere Disegnando: When Language Seeks Its Other at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, 2020; For Opacity at the Drawing Center in New York City, 2018; and the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Elijah Burgher is represented by P.P.O.W in New York City, Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Ivan Gallery in Bucharest.

Rebecca Walz is a visual artist, educator and curator based in Chicago. Currently working mostly in the areas of drawing, mixed media and collage, she has maintained a collaborative practice with her partner, Ryan M. Pfeiffer, for the past decade. Drawing from her research into prehistoric & ancient art, archeo-anthropology, religion and historical erotica, her works synthesize concerns about desire, myth, transformation and formlessness.

     She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including The Carnegie Museum of Art, International Museum of Surgical Science, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Institute of Contemporary Art (Singapore), Breese Little (London), Abbaye Saint–Magloire Galerie (France), LAXART (Los Angeles), among others. Her works are included in the following public collections at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, The Kinsey Institute of Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, and the Microsoft Collection of Art. She was appointed as curatorial board member at Iceberg Projects (2015-2022) and has been professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for many years.

The Sun on the Tongue: Painting & Poetry in the Landscape

with Arnold Kemp
PAINTING 680 001 | 3 credits | $100 lab fee
In-Person: January 5–18, 2025
Every day during the session (including weekends) 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m EST

Inspired by great artists like Etel Adnan and Elizabeth Bishop and the winter landscape of  Ox-Bow, this assignment driven studio course will activate writing for painters and painting for writers. Class discussions and readings will be wide-ranging with an emphasis on the creative process, the development of a personal voice, exchange of ideas, and practical topics in fine arts. Individualized critiques and meetings will follow the group discussions. Students will be expected to define a contextual framework and vocabulary for talking about their work as well as resolving form, content and technical issues. Areas of studio practice as well as outside of class assignments will explore expanded definitions of painting and writing that relate to the body and things of the world, The course is designed to prepare students to pursue individual creative projects in a setting that supports critical thinking, risk-taking, and the production of a body of work on paper and other supports. Students in this course will be assigned a semi-private studio space and can work in the media of their choice. We will take inspiration from readings and screenings from artists including; Etel Adnan, a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States,. Elizabeth Bishop, who worked as a painter as well as a poet, and her verse, like visual art, is known for its ability to capture significant scenes, and Renee Gladman, a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. Other readings will include Marie Howe’s The Good Thief, Deborah Digges’ Vesper Sparrows, Josh Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, as edited by Erica Hunt. Assignments will invite students to adapt sensations experienced in the Ox-Bow landscape through words and drawing, inspired by Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, and to trade pieces of writings with confidants to develop works in watercolor or acrylic based on these writings. These exercises will require us to trust in what we can make of a synthesis of the known and unknown. Walking through the landscape, speaking to trees, looking for foxes, and screaming at the frozen lake will inform our final works.

Arnold J. Kemp is an artist and writer. He is Professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was previously the chair of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; Pollock-Krasner Foundation; Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Academy of American Poets. His writing has appeared in Callaloo, Three Rivers

       Poetry Journal, Agni Review, MIRAGE #4 Period(ical), River Styx, Nocturnes, Art Journal, Tripwire and in From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice. Kemp’s critical writing has appeared recently in Texte zur Kunst, October and Spike Art Magazine. He has presented his writing publicly at The Poetry Foundation, Chicago and Human Resources, Los Angeles. His work is shown internationally including at Biquini Wax, Mexico City, The Drawing Center and Martos Gallery, NY; The Neubauer Collegium at University of Chicago; Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; JOAN, Los Angeles, The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas, and M. Leblanc, Chicago.

Soft Meaning: Weaving, Knitting, and Felting

with Abbey Muza
FIBER 632 001 | 3 credits | $100 lab fee
In-Person: January 5–18, 2025
Every day during the session (including weekends) 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m EST

In this course, students will make fiber-based work while developing an understanding of how the materials we use create and hold meaning. Focusing on the sustainable material; wool, students will explore a variety of treatments to create yarn, felt, cloth, and sculpture. We will build D.I.Y. handheld looms for our spun yarn, design flat works, explore dyeing, felting, and simple knitting techniques in the service of making soft works, as designed by the students. We will look at how the specific materials and techniques we use influence how we think about and create meaning in our work in relation to histories, cultures, and ecologies. Course readings and lectures will deeply consider how we can think about materials from various perspectives, and will include artists such as Ektor Garcia, Hana Miletić, and Cecilia Vicuña, and texts by authors including T’ai Smith and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Assignments will guide students through processing a locally sourced sheep’s fleece and learning the rudimentary techniques of spinning, weaving, knitting, and felting, using this fleece and other fiber materials, including sourced and foraged materials from Ox-Bow’s campus. After learning a variety of techniques and conducting initial material experiments, students will make final works (which may take any form) that engage thoughtful and personal consideration of materials and their meanings.

Abbey Muza uses weaving and other forms of image-making to explore narration, identity, image-making, and abstraction. They are interested in the specificities inherent in textile objects - for example, how image and content can be imbued into a textile, or the uniqueness of a textile object’s relationship to ways of seeing and being in the world. They have been an artist in residence at ACRE and Alternative Worksite, and have been a Fulbright France Harriet-Hale Wooley Awardee, a Leroy Neiman Fellow at the Oxbow School of Art, and a visiting artist at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. They have shown their work in solo and two-person shows at spaces including Tusk, Slow Dance, and the Fondation des États Unis. They have a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. 

Clay Makerspace

with Kylie Lockwood
CERAMICS 657 001 | 3 credits | $200 lab fee
In-Person: January 5–18, 2025
Every day during the session (including weekends) 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m EST

This course provides students of all levels with the opportunity to work on their own projects and to improve their ceramics skills. Students will have access to all materials in the Ceramic Studio, and can choose from a variety of firing options, including the electric kiln, gas kiln, or raku. Demonstrations will include hand building, vessel creation, construction methods, proper firing methods, and encourage intermediate understanding of drying times, methods for building sound pieces, techniques for minimizing loss, and studio safety. Taking inspiration from historical movements and contemporary ceramicists, students may engage in coil and slab building, slip casting, have time on the potter’s wheel, and practice a variety of surface design techniques. Assignments are designed to build understanding of each method, and students will conceive projects that reflect their interests. Instructors will be available to help facilitate individual, collaborative, and interdisciplinary projects.

Kylie Lockwood (b. 1983, Detroit, Michigan) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reconciles the experience of living in a female body with the Western history of sculpture. She received her BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and her MFA from Hunter College in New York. She has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences, Offshore Residency, Caldera and Contemporary Artist Center. Lockwood completed a permanent public sculpture in collaboration with the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oregon Lewis Integrative Science Building. She is represented by Simone DeSousa Gallery, Detroit, MI and her work has been exhibited at PS1 MOMA, Long Island City, NY; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY; Lord Ludd, Philadelphia, PA; Synchrotron Radiation Center, Stoughton, WI; Coop Gallery, Nashville, TN; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Popps Packing, Detroit, MI. Lockwood currently lives and works in Hamtramck, Michigan.

Alternative Printmaking

With Sarita Garcia
PRINT 606 001 | 3 credits | $150 lab fee

Specifically designed for Ox-Bow, this alternative printmaking course is a combination of etching, monotype, and relief.  It is the alternative print medium for painters, printmakers, and all two-dimensional visual artists who are looking for a tremendous range of line quality and color, as well as the opportunity to create multiples.

Sarita Garcia is a Chicago based artist, educator, and cultural worker, born and raised in South Tejas. Garcia holds a Master of Art in Arts Education and a Bachelors in Fine Arts with a focus in Fiber and Materials Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Garcia is a fiber artist and printmaker informed by architectural spaces of her vernacular culture. Using an image archive to talk about consumerism, identity and cultural hubs, these fantasyscapes showcase a vocabulary of iconography  as a means to empower and remix the reality of these spaces.

Garcia has exhibited work in Chicago such as the National Museum of Mexican Art, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Art Department, Chicago Cultural Center, Roots & Culture, Heaven Gallery, ACRE, Mana Contemporary, SITE Galleries, Laband Art Gallery Los Angeles, CA, City Gallery San Diego, CA, and Blue Star Contemporary San Antonio, Texas. Garcia has been featured on the Chicago Tribune, Hyperallergic and Southside Weekly. Garcia currently works as an arts administrator at the Hyde Park Art Center and holds expansive experience working alongside non-profits, cultural institutions, and artist galleries centered on art education programming.