Drawn to Print at Ox-Bow
with Ayanah Moor & Oli Watt
$175 lab fee | July 26–August 8 | Exploratory
This course will examine the relationship between drawing and print through various techniques for monotypes and monoprints while encouraging a playful approach to both disciplines. Students will develop sketches, drawings, and paintings into workable and reworkable print matrices. Emphasis will be placed on monoprint processes that facilitate iteration, variation, sequencing, and seriality. Techniques taught will include trace monotypes, additive and subtractive monotypes, screen monotypes, and relief monotypes and monoprints. Students will look at, read, and discuss the following as points of reference: Ray and Charles Eames’s film Powers of Ten (thinking about zooming in and out while making work); works by Christina Ramberg and David Weiss (working in sequences, iteration); Tracey Emin’s Monoprint Diary (monoprinting as a mediation between drawing, printing, and painting); Ellsworth Kelly’s 1954 Drawings on a Bus: Sketchbook 23; Nicole Eisenman’s monotypes; Carla Esposito Hayter’s The Monotype: The History of a Pictorial Art; Lynda Barry’s Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (exploring “failure” and “good vs. bad drawings”); and Zarina Hashmi’s relief prints. While students will be encouraged to use all techniques taught to enhance their individual practice, they will also be given daily prompts to develop sketches and drawings. Assignments will include the creation of a monotype based on another student’s sketch using one or all of the following techniques: trace, additive, or subtractive methods. This will yield a cognate, or “ghost print,” which will be passed on to yet another student for further development.
SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code PRINT 672 001.
Ayanah Moor (any/all) centers the poetics of Blackness and queerness in her approach to painting, print, drawing, and performance. Her work has featured in exhibitions at venues including the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, DePaul Art Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; ONE Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries, Los Angeles; Te Tuhi, Auckland, New Zealand; Proyecto ’ace, Buenos Aires; and daadgalerie, Berlin. Moor’s publications include INCITE Journal of Experimental Media: Sports (2017), edited by Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere; Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011) by Nicole Fleetwood; and What Is Contemporary Art? (2009) by Terry Smith. She holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art.
Oli Watt (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist who creates prints and multiples to connect fictional props and events (often suggested in cartoons, movies, and music) to the contemporary social landscape. He currently serves as Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches in the Printmedia Department. Watt has shown his work nationally and internationally, including in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; the International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Laband Art Gallery, Los Angeles; and Rocket Gallery, London. His work has been discussed in numerous publications, including Art on Paper, Art US, the New Art Examiner, and the Village Voice. He runs Free Range, a gallery and project space in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood.