Students of any level are invited to participate in this two-week course exploring a Maximalist Aesthetic with drawing, mark making, embroidery, appliqué, and beading. Taking inspiration from “outsider” artists, as well as contemporary art world models, students spend the first week loosening up and learning a bevy of surface embellishment techniques; improvising to create new methods of accumulative marks. Starting with contemporary drawing exercises combined with traditional embroidery techniques, students quickly develop their own vocabulary of mark making and additive processes. Drawing and sewing machines will take these ideas further, offering vigorous and immediate ways of making continuous lines and textures. The richly layered landscape and altered environment of Ox-Bow serve as both backdrop and jumping off point. Collaborative and individual projects are supplemented by a survey of contemporary art as well as historical examples, Individual and group critique keep things moving quickly.

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With the ever increasing ubiquity and miniaturization of digital devices comes the opportunity to reproach traditional means of animation and programming practices. Untethered from the Internet’s distractions as well as the troglodytian catacombs of computer labs, this class takes studied observation of the natural phenomena in and around Ox-Bow’s grounds as its primary source of inspiration and context. Students are introduced to a variety of animation techniques and practices that will forego over-rendered articulation in favor of gestural motion studies and are encouraged to produce digital interventions in and around campus throughout the course of the class. A laptop PC or Mac will be required; projector encouraged.

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Paper as an art medium is exciting and elusive. Paper pulp can be transformed into sculptural works, drawings with pulp and unusual surface textures. It can allude to skin, metal, rock or something quite totally different. Explore all of these possibilities.

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This course will approach materiality, the physical body, and site from trans-media and time-based perspectives. Initial research will begin by looking at ways in which humans across cultures have recognized or imagined the material world as “spirited,” from animistic religions to garden gnomes. Through observation, writing, building, movement workshops, and lectures participants will propose and respond to ideas of intertwined lives. Participants will also spend time designing, re-building, and repurposing materials and found items into performative objects. This two-week course will culminate in a live, interdisciplinary site-specific performance.

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This course will take place over the Summer Solstice and fittingly, we will draw inspiration from this phenomena in order to dig deeper into photography's most basic juxtaposition of light and dark. All levels of photography are welcome, as we'll be exploring a variety of foundational discoveries related to the camera's invention as well as making several devices of our own. These include: making a two week photographic exposure of the sun at the peak of its yearly arc using home-made cameras; making camera obscuras that can be worn on your head as well as ones that you can sit inside; and making stereoscopic images. Several nighttime projects will also be realized using a sound-triggered flash kit among other techniques. The course will emphasize experimentation with materials at hand and will be augmented with discussion on how these inventions have changed the way we see the world.

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The aim of this class would be to combine the tactile object-making of visual art with a stripped-down, short-hand approach to video production suitable to the Ox-Bow setting and facilities. Students would be challenged to complete their own video short or series,
dividing their two weeks into conceptualizing, prop/costume/set-making , shooting and editing, culminating in an outdoor screening event open to the Ox-Bow community. A Cheap TV Youtube channel would function as an additional archive and forum for
the class.

Course content would include readings, lectures and discussions on moments where the hand-made has met the cinematic in both art and popular culture. Artists discussed would include Georges Melies, Jacques Tati, Harry Smith, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Tony Oursler , Miranda July, Sadie Benning, Olaf Bruening, Forcefield, Paul McCarthy, Shana Moulton, The Kuchar Brothers, Matthew Barney, John Waters, Ryan Trecartin as well as Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Bollywood cinema, Mexican soap operas, Youtube music videos, cable access programming and David Hockney’s theater sets.

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This class explores the history and practice of art’s relationship to the written word. Illustration, calligraphy, language, narrative, and mark-making have had a complex and diverse relationship across cultures. Taught by an art historian and a sculptor, students in this course will create work using texts that will be contextualized through learning about the history of artists from antiquity to the present who were inspired by texts or used them visually in their work. During the two weeks of the course, a diverse set of historical examples and studio exercises will create a call-and-response structure to the course. Assigned essays, speeches, poetry and prose will inform, inspire and guide various assignments. One can take this course for either art history or studio credit.

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This course explores the biology of the most numerous form of life known on the planet: insects. We study insect form and function in relation to ecology in a hands-on manner, learning basic collection and identification techniques that enable the creation of individual insect collections by the end of the course. Biological topics include reproduction, evolution, development, communication, as well as a variety of social behaviors.

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Inspired by both traditional craftspeople and contemporary artists students in this class will use the frame looms as a device to create tactile woven forms. Demonstrations will focus on classic tapestry techniques and basic plain weave structures as well as experimental forms. Students are encouraged to weave with traditional and non‐traditional materials and explore both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional forms. Artist with little or no weaving experience are welcome to take this course.

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The course investigates storytelling from combined verbal and visual perspectives. Students will investigate a variety of fiction, poetry and essays that utilize artwork or graphic strategies to add new layers of meaning to the written word. These examples as well as group discussions of narrative and imagery will complement individual projects. Students will work through a series of flexible generative exercises that will explore the rich possibilities of text combined with images. This course is appropriate for all levels of writers or visual artists.

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