Chicago Events
Join us at Ox-Bow’s Chicago office for the following exhibitions and events.
1709 W. Chicago Ave, Commercial 2B, Chicago, IL 60622
Thursday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.– 6:00 p.m. CT
In Conversation: Winnie Weiyun Szu & Joan Mitchell
November 6, 2026–January 5, 2027
1709 W. Chicago Ave, Commercial 2B, Chicago, IL 60622
Thursday–Saturday, 11:00 a.m.– 6:00 p.m. CT
This exhibition brings together limited edition prints of paintings made by Joan Mitchell during her years at Ox-Bow and work by Ox-Bow Summer 2026 LeBlanc Painting fellow, Winnie Weiyun Szu, bridging two generations of women painters at Ox-Bow with the same landscape as their inspiration.
Please join us for a public opening event on Friday, November 6 from 5:00–8:00 p.m. CT.
Summer Fellows Winnie Szu and Elias Mendel, and Summer Resident, Chris Jehly, discuss Winnie’s in-process painting of Ox-Bow’s Lagoon, 2026. Photo by Mak Harrison.
Joan Mitchell and Dan Sparling at the Ox-Bow School of Art in Michigan, 1944. Photographer unknown. Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives, New York.
About the Artists
Winnie Weiyun Szu (2001–) is a Taiwanese artist and educator based in Chicago. Working across painting, installation, text, printmaking, and moving image, she explores weather, perception, and the experience of moving between cultures and places. Working between image, object, and environment, she lets gravity, light, and architecture shape how her work is encountered. Szu received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) (2026) and her BFA in Fine Art from Taipei National University of the Arts (2023). She is a 2026 Carrie Ellen Tuttle Fellow in Painting and Postgraduate Teaching Fellow at SAIC, and a 2026 Summer Fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency. Her work has been exhibited in Taiwan, London, and Chicago, including at EXPO CHICAGO, Epiphany Center for the Arts, Keelung Museum of Art, Research House for Asian Art, and Hermit Gallery. She has been featured in New American Paintings (MFA Annual Issue No. 177) and Taishin ARTalks, and her work has been reviewed in the Chicago Reader.
Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) is widely recognized as one of the most significant American artists of the post-war era. Her abstract paintings are distinguished by their physicality, daring use of color, and personal interpretation of the natural world.
A native of Chicago, Mitchell studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She attended Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan, during the summers of 1943 and 1944, where she painted outdoors and deepened her commitment to a life as an artist. Upon graduating in 1947, she spent over a year in France before settling in New York in late 1949. There, she became an active participant in the “New York School” of painters and poets, exploring different approaches to composition and gesture as part of the emerging Abstract Expressionist movement.
Over the next four decades, Mitchell dedicated herself to the single-minded pursuit of abstract painting of the highest order, while moving between New York, Paris, and later the French countryside in Vétheuil, where she made her home from 1968 until her death in 1992. Throughout her long and varied career, Mitchell drew on experiences and memories of the world around her—particularly views of cities, fields, rivers, lakes, and trees—as sources for her work. She once said, "I carry my landscapes around with me."