DRAW, PAINT, PRINT
with Michelle Grabner, Brad Killam, & Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
$350 lab fee | July 13–25 | Exploratory
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.
SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code PAINTING & DRAWING 677 001.
Michelle Grabner (she/her) is an artist, writer, and curator. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1996. She has also held teaching appointments at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Yale School of Art, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Grabner is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2018 National Academician in the National Academy of Design, and a 2024 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters Fellow. She has curated major museum exhibitions including the 2014 Whitney Biennial and the inaugural FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2018). In 2021, she co-curated Sculpture Milwaukee with Theaster Gates. In 2024, she curated 50 Paintings, a survey of contemporary international painting at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Grabner, along with artist Brad Killam, co-directs the artist-run project spaces The Suburban, Milwaukee, and The Poor Farm, Little Wolf, both in Wisconsin.
Brad Killam (he/him) has had work featured in over 30 solo and two-person exhibitions (in collaboration with artist Michelle Grabner) and more than 60 group exhibitions since receiving his MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago in 1993. He co-founded and co-directs, with Grabner, two artist-run spaces in Wisconsin: The Suburban, in Milwaukee, and The Poor Farm, in Little Wolf.
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung (she/her) is a painter and writer. She was a riot grrrl and worked in used bookstores and bars until her 30s, when she attended graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is opening her attention to composting, depth psychology, difference, 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 Art Museum, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, New York. She is a frequent lecturer at schools across the country, including Hunter College at CUNY; the University of California, Los Angeles; Ohio University; Cranbrook Academy of Art; the University of Alabama; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Cornell College. Zuckerman-Hartung is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago.