Muraling at Ox-Bow 

with Alex Bradley Cohen and Chris Johanson
$175 lab fee | May 31–June 13 | Communal

In this class, students will have the opportunity to design, propose, and implement a large outdoor mural that will beautify and celebrate Ox-Bow. Visible from the main entrance road into campus, the mural will greet all visitors and participants. Students will learn strategies for planning, drafting, scaffolding, and collecting supplies for their collaborative mural. The class will draw inspiration from the style and signage of Ox-Bow and consider the work of muralists Diego Rivera, Ben Shahn, Seymour Fogel, Thelma Johnson Streat, Keith Haring, and Bernard Williams, among others. In the first few days of the course, students and faculty will work together to design three proposals, to be reviewed and approved by Ox-Bow's leadership team. The remainder of the course will center on the implementation of the selected design.

SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code PAINTING & DRAWING 605 001. 

Alex Bradley Cohen (he/him) utilizes painting to visualize the push and pull of political life. Working with acrylic paint on canvas, Cohen depicts friends, family members, and himself in scenes that foreground everyday moments. Originating from personal photographs and memories rather than direct observation, each painting serves as an exercise in imaginative world-building. Recent group exhibitions include In Relation to Power: Politically Engaged Works from the Collection, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Triple: Alex Bradley Cohen, Louis Fratino, and Tschabalala Self, University Art Museum, University of Albany, NY. His work has also featured in exhibitions at venues including the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum, IL; and the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow.

Chris Johanson (he/him) is a multimedia artist whose wide-ranging practice spans painting, drawing, and sculpture using wood, metal, fabric, and paper; building a small house; sound installations and music performance; writing music; publishing zines and books of his own work as well as work by others; curating; producing music and performance events such as the Quiet Music Festival in Portland, OR; and creating numerous murals, some with the participation of young people. A college dropout, he has shown his art internationally for many years, including as part of the Whitney Biennial. Recent projects include paintings or installations at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and de Young Museum, all in San Francisco, as well as a gallery exhibit at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland. He has made many monographs, including one with Phaidon, and is the recipient of a SECA Art Award from SFMOMA.

Painting in Dimension: Abstraction, Representation, and Collage 

with Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Jennifer Rochlin
$175 lab fee | June 14–27 | Exploratory

This course investigates painting as a spatial and dimensional practice. Participants will examine the interplay between abstraction and representation while extending painting into relief and three-dimensional form. Collage serves as both source material and conceptual framework—borrowing images and ideas from the world, disrupting dominant narratives, and constructing new meanings through layering and juxtaposition. Through a series of projects, participants will move between surface and structure, exploring how cutting, assembling, and building can transform the painted image into sculptural space. The course emphasizes experimentation, material exploration, and critical dialogue, offering students the opportunity to expand their understanding of what painting can be. We will discuss paintings that have been made in the expanded field, considering color, line, composition, form, beauty, and content beyond traditional painting materials. We will take inspiration from artists who have experimented with unexpected materials, whose pieces have stretched onto the wall, and use three dimensional forms. We will look at the work of Ann Truitt, Michalene Thomas, Cady Noland, Rachel Harrison, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and Cauleen Smith, among others. Likewise, we will glean inspiration from artists who have used collage to rupture methods of looking, including Hannah Wilke, Jess, Frida Orupabo, Wangechi Mutu and the films of Robert Bresson. Assignments will prompt participants to explore where meaning emerges in their work—through materials, imagery, and personal connection. Participants will bring personal items, forage for materials across the Ox-Bow landscape, and build a sculpture or relief using paper-mâché, cardboard, and wire as foundational structures for painting. To quickly generate energy and begin thinking through form, students will create four to six collages during the first few days. Following a mid-session critique, participants will develop a final project consisting of two to three experimental, sculptural paintings that integrate their discoveries in material, process, and meaning.

SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code PAINTING & DRAWING 607 001.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins (she/her) produces sculptural installations, assemblages, paintings, and large-scale ceramics that often transform everyday household objects. She has had solo exhibitions at Columbus College of Art and Design, OH; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; the Hepworth Wakefield, UK; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Significant group exhibitions include Makeshift at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI, where Hutchins first premiered her performance work; the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace; and the Whitney Biennial. Her work has been incorporated into public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Margulies Collection and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Portland Art Museum, OR. Hutchins holds a BA in Art History from Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jennifer Rochlin (she/her) trained as a painter and took up ceramics as a way to expand her painting practice into three dimensions. She uses terra-cotta clay to hand-build vessels in coil and slab methods, creating familiar forms that echo the long history of ceramics. Undulating with dents and bulges, Rochlin’s vessels reject direct homage, however, in favor of suggesting the unpredictable, beautiful variance of human bodies. Her brushy, expressive gestures in underglaze and glaze reside both comfortably alongside and in contrast to the sgraffito drawing method she also employs. Rochlin’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at venues including Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles; Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, CA; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, WI; 356 Mission, Los Angeles; Gamble House, Pasadena, CA; Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA; Deitch, New York; Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York; and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago. The recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Belle Foundation and the Durfee Foundation ARC Grant, she has had solo exhibitions at galleries including Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels; Hauser & Wirth, New York; Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Paris; Shrine, New York; The Pit, Los Angeles; Maki Gallery, Tokyo; and Lefebvre & Fils, Paris. Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. She holds a BA from the University of Colorado Boulder and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she participated in an exchange at the Universität der Künste Berlin.

Textile Ecologies: Pattern, Printing & Place 

with Isa Rodrigues and Ricki Dwyer
$175 lab fee | June 14–27 | Skill-building

In this course, students will explore textile patterning through eco-conscious surface design techniques. Working with nature as inspiration, material source, and collaborator, students will engage processes such as natural dyeing, mordant printing, cyanotype, and paste resists to create patterned textiles. Special attention will be given to observing natural systems and working with the sun, water, and wind as active agents in the creative process. Through field observation, experimentation, and reflection, students will develop a personal visual language rooted in ecological awareness and collaboration with the living world. We will consider how principles of community, regeneration, and ephemerality inform textile practice, studying the work of Ana Mendieta, Yto Barrada, and Maria Elena Pombo. Readings will include selections from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and In Pursuit of Color by Lauren MacDonald, which together frame material practice as both an artistic and ethical inquiry. Assignments will guide students in designing and producing a series of patterned textile samples and one final project that integrates natural processes as both technique and conceptual framework. Technical demonstrations will be paired with discussions on sustainability, care, and responsible practice, supporting each student in building a process that is both materially and environmentally responsive.

SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code PRINT 636 001.

Isa Rodrigues (she/her) is a textile artist and educator. Through research and practice, her work explores how textiles can serve as archives of our experience of the natural world. She is also interested in craft education as a means to create community and preserve material culture. A founding member of New York’s Textile Arts Center, where she worked as Co-Executive Director from 2015 to 2021, she also founded the project Sewing Seeds (2010–15), activating natural dye gardens in empty lots and community gardens in Brooklyn. She is currently a co-lead for the Textile Dye Garden at Pratt Institute and a collaborator of The Mothership, an eco-feminist project by Yto Barrada in Tangier, Morocco. Rodrigues teaches textile techniques and materiality at Pratt Institute, Ox-Bow, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Textile Arts Center, among others.

Ricki Dwyer (he/they) explores how textiles can inform and strengthen our sense of embodiment. A recipient of the Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, the San Francisco Artist Grant, and the San Francisco Queer Cultural Center’s Emerging Scholars Award, Dwyer has had solo exhibitions with Anglim/Trimble, San Francisco; Rupert, Vilnius, Lithuania; and Volume Gallery, Chicago. In 2022, he participated in the Biennale de Lyon in collaboration with Nicki Green. He has been an artist-in-residence at Jupiter Woods, Textile Arts Center, ARTHAUS Havana, the Kohler Co. Pottery and Foundry, and Yto Barrada’s The Mothership. In 2024, Dwyer was a Bronx Museum AIM Fellow. He received his undergraduate degree in Fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design and his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. Dwyer currently teaches with Parsons School of Design.

Field Illustration

with Josh Dihle
$100 lab fee | June 28–July 4 | Skill-building

Inspired by the landscape and wildlife of Ox-Bow, this class invites students to develop an illustrative portfolio in pencil, ink, watercolor, and gouache. Students will build effective and inventive travel easels to explore campus and, working both outside and in the studio, will develop a personal approach to rendering and responding to the plants and animals that call Ox-Bow home. Demonstrations will cover methods for effective color mixing and composing in the field as well as techniques for recreating botanical structure, basic animal anatomy, and biological textures including bark, shell, and feathers. We will review the work of John James Audubon, Walton Ford, Evelyn Statsinger, and Kiki Smith and students will carry a naturalist pocket guide for reference. Onsite and studio drawing assignments will be accompanied by readings and discussions of naturalist poetry by Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, and Sharon Olds. Assignments will challenge students to notice the nuance in nature and will include a bug hunt, with invertebrates sketched in graphite, and a watercolor assignment that gives visual expression to a work of poetry or literature. Students will be encouraged to propose a final project inspired by their observations.

SAIC students: This is a 1.5-credit course; use the course code PAINTING & DRAWING 678 001.

Josh Dihle (he/him) has a hand for detail and an eye on the natural world, blending painting, carving, and drawing to open visionary portals into the heart. He co-founded the experimental art platforms Color Club and Barely Fair and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also created The Sugar Hole, an ice cream shop staffed by puppets. He has had solo exhibitions at venues including M+B, Los Angeles, and Andrew Rafacz, 4th Ward Project Space, McAninch Arts Center, and Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago. Dihle’s work has been exhibited in group shows nationally and internationally, including at Gaa Gallery, New York; MASSIMODECARLO VSpace, Milan; the University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum, IL; Essex Flowers Gallery, New York; Ruschman, Mexico City; and Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy. His work and curatorial projects have been written about in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, Artspace, the Washington Post, and The Art Newspaper, among others.

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.

Go Figure: Representing the Human Form in Painting 

with Richard Hull
$175 lab fee | July 26–August 8 | Exploratory

This class will explore ways of representing the figure in painting. Whether observed or imagined, all figurative painting requires invention. Maintaining the believability of that invention, no matter how “unreal” it might become, will be the focus of the class. We will look at a range of figurative representations, from the ancient to the present. After a series of drawing and painting assignments involving shape, scale, and distortion, we will move on to self-directed figurative paintings that will engage the whole language of painting.

SAIC students: This is a 3-credit course; use the course code PAINTING & DRAWING 647 001.

Richard Hull (he/him) has paintings, drawings, and prints in the collections of many museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago. Hull has presented more than 40 solo exhibitions dating from 1979 to 2023, along with countless group exhibitions, at venues including the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. He is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

Drawing Place in Watercolor & Gouache

with Carrie Gundersdorf
$100 Lab Fee | August 9–15 | Exploratory

Watercolor is historically associated with observation of the natural world, through works such as botanical and wildlife illustrations, J. M. W. Turner’s ethereal landscapes, Charles Burchfield’s transcendental images, and Joseph Yoakum’s reminisced locations. This course will help students build a basic understanding of the materials associated with both transparent watercolor and opaque watercolor (gouache)—paint, brushes, and paper—as well as the techniques: layering washes, working wet into wet, and using the white of the paper to create color. This course celebrates the ease and transportability of working in watercolor and gouache and brings the landscape into the studio. In addition to using the Ox-Bow environment as a source of subject matter, we will look at past and contemporary artists, including John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, Dawn Clements, Amy Sillman, and Josephine Halvorson. Exercises involving color, observation, and mark-making will help familiarize students with the medium. The class will enable students to build a personal approach to working with the idea of place.

This course is available for non-credit only.

Carrie Gundersdorf (she/her) is an artist and educator whose paintings and drawings reference early modernist art and images of natural and astronomical phenomena. The watercolor technique of layering transparent colors is central to both her drawing and painting practices. Gundersdorf has had solo exhibitions at La Loma Projects, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Drew University, Madison, NJ. Her work has been featured in group shows at 106 Green, New York; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; La Box, Bourges, France; and the Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, among others. The recipient of a 2025 Individual Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Gundersdorf has also received the Artadia Award and the Bingham Fellowship to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been reviewed in ArtReview, Artforum, Artnet, Art on Paper, the Chicago Tribune, and Time Out Chicago. She earned her BA from Connecticut College and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.