This course will address the use of the potter’s wheel as a vehicle for exploration in form and concept. Students will use both alternative and traditional wheel thrown techniques as a means to fabricate elements that they can then alter or form in relationship to their ideas. Students will also have the opportunity to finish their work using a post reduction firing known as raku and other options of gas, high fire reduction glaze and wood firing.

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This course offers hands-on glassblowing experience to the beginner. Participants learn a variety of techniques for manipulating molten “hot glass” into vessel or sculptural forms. Lectures, videos, demonstrations, and critiques will augment studio instruction.

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In this intensive class, we will focus on the fundamental techniques of moving ferrous material while hot, with the intent of producing mid-scale sculpture. The forge and anvil will be the primary tools of achieving form. Emphasis will be placed on responding to the history of metalwork and the nature of the material itself. We’ll also be covering different finishing techniques, and the introduction of color to surface.

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Students will be introduced to various methods used in making intaglio prints. Demonstrated techniques will include etching, drypoint, and engraving, as well as a variety of experimental approaches to plate making and printing. Discussion and critique of work will be included with equal emphasis on technique and concept.

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Sessions each day will be devoted to a certain topic within the realm of the confessional comic genre, either autobiographical or fictional. Some sample topics: “I Woke Up Screaming”; “And Then the Floor Gave Way”; “My Mother Married a Werewolf and I Was the Best Man/Maid of Honor”; “Oh So This is Hell? I Expected Something Rather More Elaborate.” Morning sessions will explore the art historical context of that day’s topic — through lectures and discussions of graphic novels or comic books that have delved into the subject. Afternoon sessions will be studio classes in which students will create a three-page, black-and-white comic book story on that day’s topic. The last two days will involve creating a finished comic book story in color based upon the student’s most promising previous comic. Please note this class may be taken for either studio or Art History credit.

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This multi-level drawing course will transcend the traditional approach to landscape drawing. Students will be encouraged to mine the possibilities of nature's realm through observation and imagination. While there will not be overall class assignments, the Instructor will help each student's individual exploration through discussion and daily in depth one on one critiques touching on technique, subject matter, and color. Students can explore drawing through a variety of non-toxic media, including pencils, colored pencils, oil pastels, watercolors and gouache.

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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. Stretch your artistic and technical skills to create unusual works of art.

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Using a variety of color media and drawing materials, students will work from observation of the figure in the natural dunes landscape. In addition to addressing formal issues, the course will use the figure and the landscape to develop pictorial metaphors regarding the human and nature.

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In this class we will make sculptures using basic clay manipulating techniques (slabs, coiling, pinching, carving, etc...) as well as a variety of alternative approaches (paper-clay, unfired clay, combustible supports) and proceed to experiment and discover our own alternative approaches. You will be encouraged to consider it in relation to other materials, both through incorporating alternative materials into clay bodies, as well as by challenging (or exploiting) conventional forms, practices, and the perceived boundaries of clay as a material. This class is intended to move beyond traditional technical instruction, and open up the dialogue on how we can use clay to convey and expand new meanings generally expressed with more conventional sculptural tools. This course will be open to beginning as well as advanced ceramic students; it will consist of demonstrations, critiques, slide presentations, and mostly, personal hands-on work. We will look at work from celebrated ceramicists like Cal Funk and Ken Price and artists like Johan Tahon and Salto Alto, to the sculpture of more historic artists like Matisse, Lucio Fontana, Niki de St. Phalle and contemporary makers like Vincent Fecteau, Rachel Harrison, Charles Long, Mark Manders, and Rebecca Warren.

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This course will examine several woodcut, hand printing, typesetting and letterpress techniques. Students in this class will explore the relationship between text, image, and the contemporary usage of traditional printing processes. The study of sample prints, printing history, slideshows and technical demonstrations will aid and encourage the student’s own designs, images, and compositions. Studio projects may include the creation and editioning of broadsides, prints and pamphlets.

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Using traditional and non-traditional techniques, explored through drawings and historical examples, we will focus on achieving specific shapes and consider simple innovations, like playing with opacity, and aesthetic accidents-bubbles or cracks, to transform traditional forms. Students may focus to work on something as simple as a clear tumbler or can take on more complex projects. Finding significance in even the most minute of details, we will find grounds for exploration, experimentation and conceptual thinking, while simultaneously examining the artifacts of our failures.

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This course aims to help students find a personal painting language through the negotiation of external and internal impulses. The title of the course, Outside/Inside, suggests that the origins of one ís personal language draws upon both one's inner mind as well as one's experiences in the world. Outside/Inside also refers to a literal way of working: in the studio and out-of-doors. To this end, students will engage the landscape that envelops Ox-Bow as well as work independently in the painting studio. Through this framework, students will investigate relationships between representation and abstraction. This relationship begins with seeing abstractly to make realistic pictures and extends to making marks that express reality. Studio work will be supplemented by slide lectures and individual and group critiques.

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Drawing from the observational method of scientific study conducted by naturalists like John James Audubon and David Attenborough, students in this multi-level class will generate and workshop new works by examining living things in their natural surroundings. Lectures and discussion will include the nature writing of Emerson and Thoreau, the art of Charles Harper and Michigan-based Richard Sweet (AKA Marushka), and the comics of John Porcellino and Kevin Huizenga. Inspired by these and other examples, fact, fiction, and personal reflection will turn into natural history essays, reflections on solitude, travel and adventure documentation, and wildlife narratives. We will begin by making simple hand-bound books to carry throughout the week. This class is designed for writers and artists who will be enthralled and inspired by the birds, deer, insects, plants, fungi, lake, sand dunes, and the Ox-Bow lagoon. 

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Students of any level are invited to participate in this one-week course exploring story telling. Drawing on both our own rich personal narratives and the rich visual and historical narrative of Ox-Bow, we will spend time working through generative writing and drawing activities and begin to develop our own stories and images into lively compositions. An examination of traditions in stitched narratives, including works from African American, Chilean, and Vietnamese traditions will inform as we proceed into embellishing these stories with embroidery using both traditional and inventive techniques. Appliqué, reverse appliqué, and other fabric manipulation techniques will be included as ways of developing images and text. Collaborative and individual projects will be supplemented by a survey of contemporary work in the genre as well as individual and group critiques.

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This course offers hands-on glassblowing experience to the beginner. Participants learn a variety of techniques for manipulating molten “hot glass” into vessel or sculptural forms. Lectures, videos, demonstrations, and critiques will augment studio instruction.

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This course is for artists of any experience level wishing to better understand their own creative path through an intense and intimate “hands on” exposure to the medium of cast glass. Students will learn about timing, viscosity, gravity, heat, and light during hot studio sessions. Class will also be discussing the technical and aesthetic concerns prior and post process. Open face sand molds will be used as well as other interesting lectures, and demonstrations.

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Superimposed upon our traditional notions of landscape is an invisible topography accessible only by turning on a radio. This radiophonic landscape exhibits features not unlike the physical one, with boundaries, obstacles, hills and valleys, but differs in its ability to distort scale, distance and time, affording an elastic mapping of physical space. This class will explore the notions of landscape and space, whether they be personal, public, or wholly imagined through the use of self-constructed, solar-powered, low-power FM transmitters and free, open-source cartographic software. Students will gain a basic understanding of electronic theory and construction and will use these skills to create site-specific radio installations and print/web-based maps that will suggest alternate ways of moving through and experiencing space.

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In this course, students will acquire technical proficiency in various hand and photographic stencil printing methods. Individual exploration and development in the medium will be encouraged and supported by individual instruction and group critiques. Emphasis will be placed on unique prints created by layering, stencil repositioning, and combining hand mark-making with photographic and found imagery. Collaboration will be encouraged.

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The course will address the particular advantages that ceramic materials and processes offer in exploring the relationships between form and surface on objects, whether functional or sculptural. The goal is to gain new insight about what to make and the processes needed to make them. We will explore handbuilding, particularly slab constructed pottery and press molds, as well as glazing and surface variations. Demos and discussions will lead to a flurry of work based on the individual goals and skills students bring to the class. This is not a specific project class; but more of a think tank where ideas are shared, a community of makers is established, and faculty and students work together to grow as artists.

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This course focuses on the development of technical knowledge and skills in egg tempera painting. Egg Tempera, which is an artist made, water based medium, offers possibilities of translucent layering, loose or fine brushwork, incising, scraping, and beautiful surface quality. The preparation of panels, grounds, pigments, egg binder, and the application of paint, along with the relationship of the particular qualities of egg tempera with imagery development will be emphasized.

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Many contemporary artists choose to contextualize their work in public arenas where social groups are invited to participate in dynamic, object-less projects with open-ended results. In this class we will explore multiple facets of socially engaged art with the towns of Saugatuck and Douglas as our backdrop. Students will be asked to conduct multiple forms of field research in town that engage them with the town`s history, communities, and landscape. Assignments will ask students to use their research and interests to create socially engaged projects with themes that many social artists utilize such as: service, intervention, participation, and dialog among others. An emphasis will be placed on the process rather than product or outcome as many important questions arise from the process of working with other people. We will also discuss the shift of the role from maker to facilitator along with the aesthetics of social practices. Selected readings will be from artist's such as Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, Temporary Services, Ted Purves and critics such as Paul Willis and Randall Szott.

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Defined in part by Krauss’ 1979 text “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” the practice of expanded painting has historical antecedents going back as far as the Merzbau, synthetic cubisim, the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerke and even cave painting. From fully immersive environments, to a simple collage to something as basic as the use of a photographic source, a great deal of painting today can be said to bear some relation to the expanded field. While the practice often involves the ambitious use of materials and a dynamic formalism, it can also allow for the use of conceptually loaded, unorthodox supports, which effectively comment and reflect on the history of painting. While this two-week intensive course will focus on painting on a variety of sculptural supports, it is not limited to sculpture, as other media, such as video, photography, digital technology, performance, can be incorporated into projects. The course will be taught in conjunction with sculptor and fabricator Mark Schubert and it is designed to revolve around the student’s ideas and interests. There will be demonstrations on techniques and short slide lectures on a daily basis. These will involve for example, basic casting, welding, solvent painting in short, techniques that allow for the interplay of media. The rest of the time will be devoted to working one on one with student to assist them in the realization of a series of projects, and in conceptual development.

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This course for advanced BFA and MFA students is a hybridized studio colloquium that focuses on a rigorous examination of the theoretical composition of one's art practice and how it lives within a larger context. Driven by studio practice, the course will examine work within the context of traditional issues and practices in ceramic art, contemporary approaches that challenge and affirm traditions, as well as the underpinnings of one's own work and the ability to site it within contemporary art discourse at large. A compilation of readings will serve as the primary text for the course, and be accompanied by group discussion, assignments geared toward individual research interests, influences, and questions, writing workshops, individual studio visits, group critiques, and the public presentations of one's work. The overarching objective is that a dedicated time for inquiry and individuation will allow for the things that are found, sifted through, and synthesized to contribute to the development of one's work, and the discovery of its unique genetic code.

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This class will explore the blow mold for making glass forms. Students will be exposed to various mold making techniques from plaster molds, steel, wood, and wet clay molds to digging a hole and blowing into it. The class will cover inexpensive rubber molds, wax working techniques, and how to build objects in parts using different adhesives. Students will learn teamwork and the ability glass has to take on almost any form. Students will be required to complete one finished project and participate in a final critique of the projects completed. Students of all levels are welcome. Students should be prepared for many trips to the hardware store for materials to make molds.

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Alexander Rodchenko, the Soviet Constructivist, makes objects his friends but alternately, racializes them. With a guideline like this, how do we sort through messy, weird, dirty relations to objects: how me make them, receive them, destroy them, and conserve them, and additionally how we make people into objects, ourselves and others? Let’s make and unmake objects together, paying attention to how they are distributed and what is left in the wake of their production. Let’s investigate the fetish/counter fetish set up by capitalist/communist systems and perhaps determine another route. Finally, how do we make objects that are conceptually more akin to cannibals, ghosts or aliens than to dumb owned things. You will not only make fraught objects but think up new rules of ownership as part of that process. Part of this objective will include making things that people want to steal and are meant to be stolen, things that fall apart, float and disappear, queer objects whose centrifugal force is resistance to the norm. Our investigation is site specific. After you have made objects how will you determine their distribution within the abutting towns? We will examine the contours of the waterways that flank Ox-Bow (geographical feature as object); the Keewatin passenger ship (leisure as object), the remains of the Big Pavilion (disappeared object) and the birthplace of the first white child (race as object). Viewings will include the work of: Rodchenko, Regina Jose Galindo, William Pope L., Frances Glessner Lee, David Horvitz, Marie Lorenz, Gordon Matta Clark, Trevor Paglen, Mierle Ukeles Laderman, Pyjama Girl, Facial Reconstruction,, C.1938. Readings are not restricted to but will include: Michael Taussig, Jean-Luc Nancy, Chris Kraus, Theodor Adorno, the Cannibal Manifesto; Claude Cahun, Cristina Perris Rossi.

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Using traditional and non-traditional techniques, explored through drawings and historical examples, we will focus on achieving specific shapes and consider simple innovations, like playing with opacity, and aesthetic accidents-bubbles or cracks, to transform traditional forms. Students may focus to work on something as simple as a clear tumbler or can take on more complex projects. Finding significance in even the most minute of details, we will find grounds for exploration, experimentation and conceptual thinking, while simultaneously examining the artifacts of our failures.

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A workshop for those with a story to tell or ideas to illustrate. Using woodcut printmaking for its broad range of expressive possibilities, from abstract, minimal to intricately carved narrative, participants will carve and print blocks to bind into books. Four binding styles will be shown; accordion, Japanese. non adhesive folded and simple sewn. Traditional processes such as hand drawn design and carving are combined with Xerox transfer, stencil and chine colle to expand expressive possibilities. Students are encouraged to explore photo, found and collage imagery. Various approaches to these processes will be shown through slides, books and actual artwork.

Emphasis is on the experimental and the effectiveness of the print as it relates to the idea or story, as well as the impact of the book format on the idea it presents. All processes can be done at home and are non-toxic. No experience necessary.

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This multi level course is designed to expand students command of both craft and content through individually developed painting projects. The course is geared toward developing your painting practice as an artist beyond the classroom environment. Discussion will center on how your choices of format, materials, image and contextual alignment all inform the reading of your work. Painting is actualized through a free or creative relationship to pictorial space and the historical context in which it is produced. The literal space of the canvas support acts as a field in which the issues pertaining to the armature of the medium are played out along side the imagery of the chosen subject. From deep space to the abstract surface of the support itself, space becomes the cue as to how the picture is interpreted. Issues of transport, duration, and plausibility are acted out as a methodology for understanding the position of the painting. The course will include extensive experimentation with techniques and imagery through individual painting problems. All mediums are accepted and experimentation with formal and material options as part of the painting process in relation to form and meaning will be stressed. Students will pursue various interests in subject matter around the issues of space and facture. Lectures and critiques will be included.

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This interdisciplinary and cross-level workshop aims at observing, exploring, and reflecting on the natural settings at Ox-Bow, through conceptual, performative, participatory methods. We will examine the possible roles of the artist in and with nature, the gardener, the botanist, the eco-political activist, the voyager, the tourguide - and more. What does it mean to make a "garden" in the middle of nature, as opposed to city gardening, where nature is brought into the compartments of the city? And how do we acclimate ourselves as artists to the natural environment as a platform for our practice, as opposed to bringing nature into the traditional gallery setting or the urban environment? We will look at what it means to "frame" nature, claim space in nature, take ownership of nature, turn it into an acculturated sanctuary. What is implied in revising nature, imitating nature, recreating, re-envisioning nature?

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Fire and ice, chocolate and bacon, pink and red are just a few things that really should not work together but somehow meld. In this two-week seminar students will be taught various skills that pertain to welding, cutting, rolling, and drilling steel. The first part of the class will be dedicated to skill building labs focusing on Oxy-Acetylene welding and cutting, MIG, and TIG welding. As these skills are attained students will combine the steelwork with other materials that will push the viewer to redefine their thoughts about the materials they are working with. Course will begin with an intense skill lab and cumulate with a series of short assignments that incorporate ideas of site, interactivity, sound, and found objects. Projects will be introduced with lectures showcasing artists working in a similar realm. Each class will involve some combination of looking, making, and studying.

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This course is meant to explore the confines and boundaries, and possibilities in contemporary performance. What, exactly, is a performance, how do these actions relate to objects, both permanent and temporary? How do we capture these actions and what affect do these modalities have on the meaning of performance? We will perform a variety of daily exercises--both solo and collaborative--designed to raise questions about "the creative process," as well as how performances are constructed in terms of materiality and reference. Responding to the existing social and physical environment, the students and teacher will formulate these exercises together in order to shine a self-reflexive light on the steps involved in moving through the idea-execution-documentation-distribution process. We will incorporate frequent readings written by artists such as A. Kaprow, M. Rosler, the Vasulkas, Nam Jun Paik, Rauschenberg, that establish a vocabulary for these sorts of performative works while tracing the genre conventions of critique in the first-person. We will also address issues of resonance, site-specificity, temporality, and information flow, within the immediate milieu of Ox-Bow, as well as the broader spheres of the art world and the internet, looking closely at the cultural history of technology and how it is currently defined.

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This fast paced class will proceed as a dialogue between sculpture and drawing where students will make a small scale sculpture and draw in response then make another sculpture in response to that and so on. For the sculpture’s materials used will include: cast glass, blown glass, papier mache’, wood, Styrofoam, and found objects. Drawing materials will include: graphite, colored pencils, watercolors, acrylic paints inks, and collage. Students will produce a series of small sculptures and a hand bound sketchbook full of ideas. Critiques and slide lectures will be used to stimulate discussion. Artists and topics covered will include: Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Ree Morton, African fetishes, native American, Arman, Ted Halkin, John Newman, Sarah Sze, Jessica Stockholder, Elizabeth Murray, and Dieter Roth.

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Printmaking's greatest quality is it reproducibility. From the simplest of historical beginnings to the vast variety of techniques available to the contemporary printmaker, one thing remains constant - the image can be made over and over. Yet today, with reproduced imagery penetrating every aspect of life, the question arises: what exactly is a print anyway? A work in ink on paper? A physical process of reproduction? A repeated image? Where is the line drawn? This course invites students to experiment with printmaking's potential as an incredibly dynamic drawing tool, and to work creatively with printmaking's greatest quality - potentially endless reproduction. Starting with a technical grounding in Etching and Silkscreen, this class will operate with the assertion that there are no limits to what you can do with a printed image, just endless possibility. The course will get you using print to push out beyond borders, and well beyond the edges of the printing press. Students will be able to take advantage of the Ox-Bow campus as a worksite - and will be encouraged to consider the print as a means to develop ambitious works that break from a square border and become collage, multi-media, temporal, three dimensional, and even performative. The Borderless Print will be about finding the most dynamic, creative possibility in printmaking, and creating work that harnesses that potential to the fullest. This course requires previous printmaking experience in etching and screenprinting.

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This fast paced class will proceed as a dialogue between sculpture and drawing where students will make a small scale sculpture and draw in response then make another sculpture in response to that and so on. For the sculpture’s materials used will include: cast glass, blown glass, papier mache’, wood, Styrofoam, and found objects. Drawing materials will include: graphite, colored pencils, watercolors, acrylic paints inks, and collage. Students will produce a series of small sculptures and a hand bound sketchbook full of ideas. Critiques and slide lectures will be used to stimulate discussion. Artists and topics covered will include: Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Ree Morton, African fetishes, native American, Arman, Ted Halkin, John Newman, Sarah Sze, Jessica Stockholder, Elizabeth Murray, and Dieter Roth.

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Utilizing traditional and non-traditional methods of bookbinding and box structures we will create several artists’ book pieces. We will examine many contemporary works as well as traditional methods that will assist the development of your own skills and concepts to create the pieces. We will explore methods of constructing the plethora of book forms and using those that coincide with the concepts you create.

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The writer’s life tends to be all too insular: writers are cut off from their colleagues, their community and the larger world. This course seeks to act as remedy for the excessive inwardness of the writing process. Each session will begin and end with group discussions addressing issues of craft, artistic models, shared concerns and student work. However, the heart of each session will be devoted to writing en plein air. Students will avail themselves not only of the luxury of time but also of the kind of contact not usually afforded them -- contact with other students, contact with the instructor and contact with the natural world -- to move beyond the critical approach of the typical writing workshop to a truly generative process.

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In this course we will investigate the meaning of found objects when contained and displayed in contemporary jewelry. The course will provide an introduction to traditional fabrication techniques, including soldering, riveting, basic stone setting, and photo etching, to enable the students to transform and explore found objects within the framework of contemporary jewelry. Working with everyday objects, we will explore how these objects can be transformed into precious mementos as well as cultural signifiers. Researching contemporary artists that rely on using found objects in their work such as Robert Ebendorf, Pierre Cavalan, and Dave and Roberta Williamson, we will also examine how these objects contribute to constructing narratives in jewelry pieces. The class is open to all levels.

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Waterbased paint and dry material will be used separately and together to open up possibilities for artists wishing to pursue new ways to expand a familiar medium. Source materials to be chosen by the student. Subject matter is anything that they can see or imagine: abstract or figurative, based on the world of nature, personal photos or images derived from the internet or other resources.

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