Lithography: Stone & Photolithography

with Danny Miller & Kristina Paabus
PRINT 637 001 | 3 credits | $200 Lab Fee
May 26 - June 8, 2024

This fast-paced course is designed for both beginners and advanced artists, and will be offered in a two-week sequence. Week one focuses on traditional methods with stone lithography, and week two introduces students to photomechanical lithography using both hand-drawn and digital processes.  Students are encouraged to investigate personal directions in their work as they explore lithographic possibilities through editions and unique variants.  Emphasis will be placed on both conceptual and technical development, and additional demonstrations will be added based on the specific interests and needs of the participants.  Class consists of demonstrations, presentations, work time, discussions, and critiques.  Historical and contemporary lithographic examples will be presented in order to clarify the relationships between idea, context, material, and process.

Danny Miller is an artist and musician working in Chicago, Ilinois. Utilizing woodblock, lithography, etching, painting and drawing, he conjures works inspired by science fiction pulp covers, film noir, vintage advertisements, comics and music. Miller has taught at Ohio State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of the Art Institute, and OxBow School of Art, and retired from the SAIC Printmedia department after 32 years. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has worked in professional print shops including Landfall Press, Normal Editions Workshop and Four Brothers Press, in addition to playing and teaching traditional fiddle and banjo music at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago for 11 years.

Kristina Paabus (USA/EE) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and printmaker. Her work examines systems of power and control, with a focus on Soviet and Post-Soviet histories. Paabus earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited throughout the US, Europe, and China; and her work can be found in numerous private and public collections. Recent solo exhibitions including Meanwhile at Hobusepea Galerii (Estonia) and Something to Believe In at the McDonough Museum of Art (Ohio). Paabus has participated in numerous international and domestic artist residencies, and was a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for Installation Art in Estonia, the Grant Wood Fellowship in Printmaking at The University of Iowa, and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Paabus lives and works in Ohio where she is an Associate Professor of Reproducible Media and Chair of the Studio Art Department at Oberlin College.

Wandering Spirits

with Joseph & Sarah Belknap
PHOTO | 615 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
June 9 - 22, 2024

What does it mean to make an image? In this course we will make images and photographs using the Earth’s Sun in collaboration with photographic techniques that emerged in the 1800s and continue to be used in contemporary art. We will play with digital photography, anthotypes, cyanotypes, chlorophyll prints, and other alternative photographic techniques. We will utilize photography, drawing, painting, and collage to make images with depth, vibrancy, and wildness. Our images will be experienced through virtual worlds and platforms as well as physical spaces of the home, communities and other locations through posting, installing, inserting, publishing and other possible ways where images can be transmitted. The acceleration of image production has transformed our understanding of ourselves by folding the horizon in on itself. We will look into phenomenological studies of being while making images that examine our contemporary conditions of the power within our lives that these images can serve, deconstruct and reinvent. From social justice, deep fakes, intimacy, ecology - the political impact of images shape our existence. While we look at contemporary and historical image making we will look at ways of seeing. Artists will include Anna Atkins, Kiki Smith, Candice Lin, Zadie Xa, and Dario Robleto. Readings and screenings for this course will include Rebecca Solnit, Susan Sontag, Jean Painlevé, Sara Ahmed, and Hito Steyerl. Assignments will invite students to respond to the reading and viewing of Hito Steryerl’s work How Not to be Seen and create a series of images using the Cyanotype process. We will also consider the perspective points of the viewer and the processes of concealment that make this object or subject hidden in plain sight.

Sarah Belknap and Jo Belknap are Chicago-based interdisciplinary artists and educators. Working as a team since 2008, their art has been exhibited in artist-run exhibition spaces in Springfield, Brooklyn, Detroit, Minneapolis, Kansas City and St. Louis. In addition, they have presented performances at institutions throughout Chicago, including the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Links Hall, and the MCA. Their work has been shown in group exhibitions at SFAI Galleries (San Francisco, California) the Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, Ohio), The Arts Club of Chicago, the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, Western Exhibitions, and solo shows at The Arts Club of Chicago and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Their work was recently included in the book, ‘Weather as Medium’ by Janine Randerson, in the Leonardo Series through MIT Press.

Black in the Woods

with Krista Franklin & Ayanah Moor
FIBER & PRINT 652 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
June 23 - July 6, 2024

This interdisciplinary seminar and studio course examines notions of blackness and the woods. We will discuss art works and readings related to concepts of the gothic, identity, race, cultural studies and the landscape. In addition to more traditional processes including papermaking, sun printing, monoprinting and creative writing exercises, faculty will support and cultivate diverse approaches to media, such as performance, site-specific installation, and field recording. In this course, students will view and discuss works by artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Ana Mendieta, and David Hammons. They will be required to read a number of works such as selected poems and essays from the anthology Black Nature, edited by Camille T. Dungy, and will screen short films and an episode from the FX television show Atlanta. Student assignments are varied and will range from creative writing and text generating exercises both in and out of class to hand papermaking, drawing, collage strategies, and conceptual prompts informed by student driven research.

Krista Franklin is a writer, performer, and visual artist, the author of Solo(s) (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Too Much Midnight (Haymarket Books, 2020), the artist book Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018), and the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012). She is a recipient of the Helen and Tim Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her visual art has been exhibited at DePaul Art Museum, Poetry Foundation, Konsthall C, Rootwork Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Studio Museum in Harlem, Chicago Cultural Center, National Museum of Mexican Art, and the set of 20th Century Fox’s Empire. She is published in Poetry, Black Camera, The Offing, Vinyl, and a number of anthologies and artist books.

The poetics of Blackness and queerness are centered in Ayanah Moor’s approach to painting, print, drawing, and performance. She earned a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Her exhibition venues include Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, (Davis, California); Museum of Contemporary Art; DePaul Art Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, (Chicago); The Studio Museum Harlem, New York; Andy Warhol Museum, (Pittsburgh); ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives—University of Southern California Libraries; Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, (New Zealand); Proyecto ‘ace, (Buenos Aires); daadgalerie, (Berlin), among others. Moor’s publications include, Incite: Journal of Experimental Media, SPORTS (2017) edited by Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere, Nicole Fleetwood’s, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011), and What is Contemporary Art? (2009) by Terry E. Smith.

RISO-relations & Bookish Behaviors

with Madeleine Aguilar & bex ya yolk
PRINT 668 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
June 23 - July 6, 2024

This course is an introduction to the RISOgraph as a tool for high volume printing, editioned objects, and bookmaking to produce publications in printed bookish form. Students will experiment with a range of binding, printing, and sculptural tools to create publications while learning a variety of book structures and binding techniques. Equipment and praxis include but are not limited to: the RISOgraph printer, screen printing, xerox copier, comb binder, Epson scanner, laminator, spiral bound machine, and hand bookbinding tools. Daily in-class technical demonstrations in tandem with lectures on independent presses, zine makers, works by artists and publishers that utilize the RISO as both an economic and artistic tool, and prominent book artists will all be explored. The class will culminate in the production of a publication for the Ox-Bow Artists’ book and Zine Library (est. 2023). Each student will donate at least one book from their edition(s) to the collection. This gesture in fostering community by means of leaving ephemera and art objects for future artists to engage with, is the very core of what arts publishing can be.

Madeleine Aguilar tells stories, builds archives, maps spaces, constructs furniture, records histories, organizes data, catalogs objects, prints publications, creates frameworks, collects imagery, acquires trades, ties knots, re-purposes materials, imitates structures, utilizes chance, plays instruments, follows intuition, prompts participation, guides observation, leaves evidence, develops routines, takes walks, breaks habits, and makes lists. Using the archive as form, she acknowledges the passing of time by cataloging lived spaces, collected objects, familial histories, personal relationships, natural phenomena, mundane routines, and ephemeral moments. She runs bench press, a collaborative Risograph press based in Chicago, and is currently Print & New Media Studio Manager at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency.

bex ya yolk (they/them) is a transdisciplinary visual artist, book maker, scholar, and professor. yolk runs an independent artists’ book bindery, THUNGRY founded in Atlanta, GA now residing in Chicago, IL. With a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a full merit scholar—yolk has received grant endowment and recognition from the Atlanta Contemporary, the College Book Art Association, CODEX International Biennial Artists' Book Fair and Symposium, and the Judith Alexander Foundation. To date, THUNGRY operates as a publishing initiative focused on disrupting what we’ve come to understand qualifies a Book, complicating traditional ways of book building + semantics, through experimentation and queering praxis. yolk also maintains an extensive, generative, multi-year research study into the 'maternal complex', made up of subgenres like mothernism, the maternal identity, care work, reproductive design, rematriation, reproductive justice, container technics, matrescence, and the gestational state especially in queer folx exploring the intersectionalities between the Book + this kind of body.

Considering Comics: Graphic Narratives in Ink

with Mark Thomas Gibson
PRINT 670 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
July 28 - August 10, 2024

From their inception, comics have been complicated. They are often brash, have political use, and a special ability to record the civic passions of their time. In this course, we will consider this history and use it as inspiration to tell the stories of our own personal and meaningful experience. We will engage with techniques including starting a narrative, storyboarding, sketching, inking, lettering, coloring, and do-it-yourself publishing techniques including the risograph. We will consider the work of cartoonists and screenwriters including Eleanor Davis, Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Rodney Barnes, discuss Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and Will Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, and screen Stan Lee’s How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. In addition to a call and response activity where paired students explore their communication skills by completing an eight panel comic together, this class will culminate in a presentation of original artwork and self-published graphic novels to the Ox-Bow community.

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.

DRAW, PAINT, PRINT

with Michelle Grabner, Fox Hysen, Brad Killam, & Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
PAINTING / PRINT 677 001 | 3 credits | $150 Lab Fee
August 11 - 24, 2024

This class champions the interrelationship and the experimental nature of drawing, printmaking, and painting and will invite artists to move fluidly between Ox-Bow’s painting studio and the print studio, providing students with the opportunities to actively combine printmaking, drawing, painting, and collage techniques and materials. Methods demonstrated will include monoprinting, etching, screen printing, frottage, collage, grattage, decalcomania, and fumage. In the painting studio, students can work in watercolor, gouache, acrylic, and/or oils. This course is meant to challenge traditional drawing, painting, and printmaking techniques and focus directly on the spirit of the process and its relationship to contemporary contexts. Chance operations and collaboration will be encouraged. We will review the work of many artists who experiment successfully with a multidisciplinary approach including Dottie Attie, Squeak Carnwath, Judy Pfaff, Miriam Schapiro, Joan Synder, Mickalene Thomas, William Weege, Jeffrey Gibson, and Louisa Chase and discussions will be supplemented by The Slip, 2023 by Prudence Peiffer and “Alex Jovanovich on Peter McGough”, Artforum 2023. Assignments will develop and expand mark-making and compositional vocabularies in relationship to the concepts of expression, attention, histories, form, and social arrangements. Students will be split into 2-groups, one group will have a home-base in the painting studio and the other in the print studio. As the group progresses through content, they will switch studios and focus on assignments specific to those facilities. On the weekend, both groups will come together with all faculty to have group critiques and discussions. The class will culminate in a final presentation of works installed at Ox-Bow.

Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, Oshkosh, USA) holds an MA in Art History and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. Grabner is the 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and a National Academician in the National Academy of Design. She joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996, and currently is the Crown Family Professor of Art and Chair of Painting and Drawing department. She is also a senior critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Modern Painters, Frieze, Art Press, and Art-Agenda. Grabner also runs The
Suburban and The Poor Farm with her husband, artist Brad Killam. She co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and served as the inaugural artistic director of FRONT International, a triennial exhibition in and around Cleveland, OH in 2018. She co-curated the 5th edition of Sculpture Milwaukee titled there is We in 2021. Grabner currently lives and works in Milwaukee, USA.

Fox Hysen works between the flat schematics of a horizontal picture plane such as floor-plans or writing and illusion of space such as a landscape. This formal tension between the illusion of depth and the diagrammatic is a way of teasing out other kinds of tension: personal versus cultural meaning, experiences versus ideas, subject versus object, feeling versus thought, past versus present, etc. Hysen has a need for a connection between things. Hysen works from observation and from memory. They look at the room or whatever is out their window or remember the space of a walk. They recycle ideas from old paintings. They have worked in many different ways so there is a lot to rediscover. A painting is like a double mirror, it reflects itself (and you simultaneously). Hysen currently teaches full-time at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA in Baltimore and lives and works in Norfolk. Awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022 and the Tournesol Award at the Headland’s Center for the Arts in 2016.

Brad Killam's work has been featured in over 30 solo and two-person exhibitions (collaborations with artist Michelle Grabner) and more than 60 group exhibitions since receiving an MFA from University of Illinois Chicago in 1993. In 1999 he co-founded (with Michelle Grabner) and currently co-directs The Suburban, an artist’s run space in Milwaukee, WI. In 2008 he co-founded (with Michelle Grabner) and co- directs, Poor Farm Exhibitions and Press, an artist run space in Wisconsin.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter and writer from Olympia, Washington. She was a riot grrrl and worked in used bookstores and bars until her thirties, when she attended the School of the Art Institute for graduate school, and now she is working in Norfolk, Connecticut. She is opening her attention to composting, depth psychology, differance, climate change, doppelgängers, permaculture, New England furniture, rural transfer stations, daily rhythm, the effects of soul lag on humans, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the color of sunlight through smoke from fires 3,000 miles away, and the emotional landscapes of the people around her. She has shown all over, including at The Blaffer Museum in Houston, TX, The MCA in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She is a frequent lecturer at schools across the country, including, Hunter College at CUNY, UCLA, The University of Ohio, Cranbrook, University of Alabama, the SAIC Low Residency Program, and Cornell College. Zuckerman-Hartung is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago.