This summer, Ox-Bow welcomes twelve artists to campus as part of the 2026 Summer Fellowship cohort. Arriving from across the country and globe and working across disciplines, each fellow brings a distinct practice into a shared environment shaped by time, proximity, and exchange.
The 2026 Ox-Bow Summer Fellows. Photo by Mak Harrison, Summer Fellow ‘26.
“Every year we watch as a cohort of artists challenge their practice, make new discoveries, and leave transformed.””
Over the course of thirteen weeks, these artists will live and work on Ox-Bow’s historic campus in Saugatuck, Michigan, developing their practices alongside one another while contributing to the rhythms of daily life. As the summer unfolds, their ideas, materials, and processes will shift through conversation, experimentation, and the experience of making within a close-knit artistic community.
Together, the 2026 fellows form a cohort defined not only by individual practices, but by the relationships and dialogue that emerge over time.
The 2026 Summer Fellows
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Long Beach, CA / Chicago, IL | University of Illinois Chicago
Michael Cunningham is an artist, writer, traveler, chef, musician and educator based in Chicago, IL. He earned his MFA degree in May 2026 from the Art Department at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), where he was awarded a University Fellowship. His interdisciplinary work includes sculpture, performance, music, cooking, writing, and book making. Thematically, his works are meditations on rituals of loss and the potential of thresholds. In his sound-based sculptures and performances, Michael invites friends, strangers, artists, and musicians to participate in the activation of his works to explore the possibilities in collaborative making. Along with the award-winning collaborative group forceperunit 2012-2024 he produced large-scale installations where he explores how sites are repositories of memories alongside their material presence.
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Sweden / Maine / New Jersey | Rutgers University
Jules Chimes Gårder is an artist and educator born in Sweden, raised in central Maine, and currently based in New Jersey. They work across sculpture, ceramics, installation, performance, and collaboration. Drawing from mythological and architectural histories, Gårder examines unresolvable relational realities of sexuality and power. Recent sculptural installations focus on grotesques and gargoyles as figures suspended between ornament and infrastructure, engaging systems of flow, blockage, concealment, and release. They are indebted to the patterns of demise and reconstruction prompted by loss and longitudinal grief, and maintain an ongoing posthumous collaboration with their mother, who died during their childhood. Gårder received a BA in Art with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently an MFA candidate in Visual Arts at Rutgers University. They have been an artist in residence at Shandaken: Storm King and have exhibited nationally at venues including Human Resources, Gray Area Festival, Nuisance Gallery, Coaxial, Dream Clinic Project Space, Murmurs, The Range, and The Re Institute.
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The Bahamas / Chicago, IL | School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Yutavia George is an artist and educator from the islands of The Bahamas. She holds a Bachelor of Art in Art Education from the University of The Bahamas, a Master’s of Fine Art in Drawing from Paris College of Art and is currently pursuing a second Master’s of Fine Art in Painting and Drawing at the School of The Arts Institute of Chicago. She has participated in several Bahamian and international art exhibitions, contributed to diverse symposiums and artist-in-residence programs. Yutavia George's work manifests itself through the routes of drawing, painting, installation, and performance. Her work is currently focused on the visibility and invisibility of labor while highlighting various atmospheric charges of physicality. She considers how one's labor can leave gestures on objects, is held spatially in the environment and is inscribed on and through the body.
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Iran / Boston, MA | School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University
Saeed Hosein is a painter based in Boston, originally from Iran. He is currently an MFA student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. He holds a BFA and an MA in painting from universities in Tehran and has several years of experience teaching art.
His practice focuses on figurative painting and explores how the human body can carry collective experiences such as tension, vulnerability, and resilience. His work is often shaped by social and political conditions, translating them into staged compositions that emphasize psychological atmosphere rather than direct representation. Through controlled lighting, spatial construction, and selective abstraction, he creates images that resist being tied to a specific time or place. In recent work, he has explored themes of power, violence, and endurance, as well as movement and dance as a form of resistance.
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Wisconsin | University of Wisconsin–Madison
Amber Mans is an artist from Wisconsin working at the intersection of glass, neon, and print. They received their BFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2026. Amber’s practice reflects on interconnectedness as both a biological reality and an emotional condition, positioning dependence, intimacy, and shared existence as a central and divine element of what it means to live. They use blown glass forms to represent fluidity and the ambiguous boundaries of bodies, alongside neon light and print to explore refraction and distortion through deformed vessels. Amber has exhibited in multiple shows affiliated with the UW Glass Lab and Printmaking area, including Coalescence (2025) and Margins of Failure (2024) at Backspace Gallery, and For the Time Being (2024) at the Overture Center for the Arts. Their most recent work was featured in the two-person exhibition, Extinction Point, with fellow undergraduate artist Parker Harmon. Amber is a recipient of the Sophomore Research Fellowship at UW–Madison, focusing on refractory applications in blow mold fabrication, and is a Windgate-Lamar Fellowship nominee.
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London, UK / Chicago, IL | University of Illinois Chicago
Elias Mendel is a London-born, Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist who creates stop-motion animations, sculptures, drawings, prints, writing and performances. He deploys this multifaceted approach to investigate the intersection between dreams, roots, and the abyss, examining legibility, language, diaspora and belonging. These concerns have emerged from his investigation into a vast family history and archive that grapples with the aftermath of fascism and the Holocaust. Mendel engages with this history through my mark-making, as well as through archival research, cataloguing, and writing. Alongside his artistic practice, he has a workshop teaching practice, in which he leads arts, archival, and educational workshops. Mendel completed his MFA at the University of Illinois Chicago and studied history and politics at the University of Manchester. He has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and was exhibited at the Casablanca Art Biennale. He has also exhibited in London, New York, Berlin, Málaga, and Johannesburg.
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Pittsburgh, PA | Carnegie Mellon University
Noah Moskala is an artist born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania currently pursuing his BFA at Carnegie Mellon University. His work functions as a tool to map out how the queer body inhabits space and maintains physical form. Through painting, performing, and making objects, he integrates himself, his experiences, and his body to explore the boundaries between subject and object. They are drawn to forms that droop, sag, become brittle, or fall apart. Often borrowing cues from cartoon imagery, they are interested in what flatness does both visually and symbolically. Moving through representation and abstraction, he aims to maintain a fantastical view of reality. Most of all, Noah’s practice asserts that playing and having fun can be a radical and necessary act in the times that we find ourselves in. On any given day, you can find Noah studying art history, watching old films, or engrossing himself in conversation with a good friend.
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Indianapolis, IN | Independent Studio Practice / Indy Art Center
Josh Rush is a painter based in Indianapolis, Indiana. His work combines elements of his local landscape and watershed, specifically the Central Canal Towpath in Indianapolis, with figurative elements depicting his experience as a parent. His daily commute by bike between home, school, work and studio runs along the Central Canal Towpath and along the flood wall parallel to the White River. Rush observes the water level in the river rise and fall as the seasons pass, and this sense of connection to his local environment is part of the inspiration for his work.
His painting process is a combination of observation, memory, and improvisation in which he uses preliminary paintings and sketches acquired en plein air as reference material for his canal scenes. Rush is the 2026 recipient of the Skip McKinney Award through the Indy Art Center where he teaches.
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Detroit, MI | Stanford University
Bailey Scieszka is a performance artist from Detroit working across drawing, painting, puppet dramas, and video. Drawing on the queer art of failure, he reimagines American history through a rotating cast of personas animated by folly. He received a BFA from Cooper Union in New York and was awarded the Benjamin Menschel Grant. He has exhibited with Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta), MOCAD (Detroit), White Columns (New York), What Pipeline (Detroit), and Maria Bernheim (Zürich and London). His puppet dramas have been performed at Paris Internationale, EMPAC, and NADA New York. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Vogue, The New York Times, Mousse, Cura, The Whitney Review, and Cultured. Scieszka is an MFA candidate for art practice at Stanford University.
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Honolulu, HI / Davenport, IA | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Makayla Harrison is a multidisciplinary artist born in Honolulu, Hawaii and raised in Davenport, Iowa. Her work explores her lived experience within changing suburban ecologies and environments as a biracial Black and British American. Using ideologies from Girlhood and Extinction studies, she investigates how climate change, camouflaged patterns, and multispecies relationships are constantly shaping one another. Her practice is rooted in photography and includes assemblage, performance, and installation. Harrison is currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Harrison earned her BFA in Fine Art Studio with an emphasis in Photography and a Teaching Artist Minor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited in New York Climate week in Queens with Climate Futures Studio, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Harrison’s work has been featured in Loam Issue 9: “Mutual Aid is The Future” with Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education, University of North Carolina Research Stories Digital Magazine, Teen Life Magazine, and Quad City Times.
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Taipei, Taiwan / Chicago, IL | School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Winnie Weiyun Szu is a Taiwanese artist based in Chicago. She makes paintings about the weather—light shifting, wind drifting, something passing through. Working through abstraction, her practice explores perception, displacement, and the search for orientation, using color and material as anchor points within constantly changing conditions, attempting to find commonality through the phenomenological. Her work often takes the form of layered, atmospheric surfaces made with gauze, distemper, ink, and light, where images emerge and dissolve rather than settle into fixed forms. Moving between painting, moving image, print, and text, she approaches making as a way to locate herself in the present. Her work does not try to resolve ambiguities, but to revel in their vitality. Szu (b. 2001, Taipei) holds a BFA from Taipei National University of the Arts and is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown across Taipei, London, and Chicago, including at EXPO Chicago, Epiphany Center for the Arts, and the Keelung Museum of Art, and has been featured in New American Paintings MFA Annual Issue #177, China Times, and Taishin ARTalks.
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Providence, RI | Cranbrook Academy of Art
Kiana Thayer is an artist and designer whose practice uses an-archiving, the recontextualization of existing images, to build narratives through proximity, sequencing, and repetition. Drawing from a decade as a practicing book designer, their work sits somewhere between infographic and visual essay, treating the book as a site for nonlinear, relational meaning-making. Thayer holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2026) and a BFA in Graphic Design from Maine College of Art & Design (2020). They are the recipient of a Cranbrook Museum of Art Purchase Prize Nomination and an American Graphic Design Award from Graphic Design USA. Their work is held in collections at Cranbrook Academy of Art Library, Cranbrook Center for Collections, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, and Joanne Waxman Rare Books Room. Recent exhibitions include Sojourner Gallery (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, ME), Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME), Hard Return Gallery (Chicago), Talking Dolls (Detroit), and Cranbrook Museum of Art.
About Ox-Bow’s Summer Fellowship Program
The Summer Fellowship Program has been a core part of Ox-Bow’s season for more than three decades. Each June, twelve fellows arrive on campus and become part of the daily life of the community—working in studios, sharing meals, supporting program operations, and contributing to the energy that carries through the summer.
Summer 2025 fellows enjoy a meal together outside the Old Inn. Photo by Nolan Zunk, Summer Fellow ‘25.
Set on the grounds of Ox-Bow’s artist-built campus, the fellowship brings together artists at a pivotal moment in their development. “Ox-Bow's Summer Fellowship is probably the jewel in Ox-Bow's program crown,” says Executive Director Shannon Stratton. “It embeds artists at a pivotal point in their professional emergence in a temporary art community, allowing them to deepen their practice while growing their network.”
Fellows receive 24-hour access to studio space, one-on-one meetings with visiting artists, and opportunities to teach, exhibit, and engage with a wide range of creative practices. The program includes a stipend, room and board, and is grounded in a model of shared responsibility: fellows contribute to the functioning of the campus through work in the kitchen, studios, grounds, archives, administration, and communications.
Fellows have the opportunity to exhibit work on campus and at Ox-Bow House, Ox-Bow’s gallery, retail and education space in downtown Douglas, MI.
Inspired by alternative learning models and sustained, place-based inquiry, the fellowship cultivates a rhythm of rigorous studio practice and collective exchange. What develops over the summer is a period of making and learning shaped as much by the people in it as by the place itself, and one that connects each cohort to Ox-Bow’s more than 100-year history of artists gathering to live and work together.
Learn more about Ox-Bow’s signature Summer Fellowship program, and follow along on our socials as we share glimpses of studio work, conversations, and life on campus with the 2026 summer fellows.