Sharon Louise Barnes Awarded Fellowship by Los Angeles’s Department of Cultural Affairs

Image courtesy of Sharon Louise Barnes. Photo by Bria Goodall.

This year, Alumni Sharon Louise Barnes (2019 Longform Resident) was awarded the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Master Artist Program. During her appointment, Barnes delivered a lecture entitled “Resistance, Resilience, and Radical Beauty” for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. In her lecture she shares about her latest work and the inspiration behind them, including excerpts of poetry from Gwendolyn Brooks. Barnes’s ongoing collection Seeds of Wind is centered in what the Artist calls “poetic materiality,” which she describes as “an evolving practice using discarded materials, abstraction, and poetic visual language.” 

Each year the Fellowship culminates in a collective online exhibition of the artists’ works. The collection is currently live and Barnes’s work is available for viewing. Hear more about Sharon Louise Barnes in COLA’s 2022 Design Visual Artist Feature.

We’re so thrilled to see the work of Sharon Louise Barnes being celebrated and honored in Los Angeles and beyond. Congratulations, Sharon!

If you have news or stories you’d like to share about your time at Ox-Bow or beyond, you can contact Engagement Liaison & Storyteller, Shanley Poole, at spoole@ox-bow.org.

Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency Announces Summer Benefit Concert Line-Up

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (June 27, 2022) Saugatuck, MI — Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency Announces Summer Benefit Concert Line-Up

SAUGATUCK, MICHIGAN (June 17, 2022) – Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency is excited to share their first summer concert line-up featuring Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Joan Shelley, Bitchin Bajas perform ‘Switched on Ra’, Marisa Anderson, Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek, Rosali, Bill Mackay, and a Corbett vs. Dempsey DJ Set, on Saturday, July 9th from 2:00-9:00pm EST.

The event is family friendly, offering food, drink, and a screen-printing experience. VIP tickets are $175 (includes limited food and drink tickets, snacks and NA beverages, and special accessed areas), general admission tickets are $100, and minor tickets are $25. All proceeds go to support Ox-Bow.

The curated line-up by The Storehouse will take place on Ox-Bow’s campus along the shores of the Ox- Bow lagoon. The Storehouse, co-founded by duo Penny Duffy and Michael Slaboch in Galien, Michigan, is a Southwest Michigan-based events company. The organization primarily focuses on orchestrating casual, intimate gatherings.

” By fostering partnerships with other small operations in our region, we can create our own alternate reality that has very little in common with the broader corporate sphere that dominates other parts of the country. It’s very empowering and enlightening to be a part of this communal process,” Michael says.

Tickets are available to the general public for purchase at www.ox-bow.org/benefit-concert.

Founded in 1910, Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency is an arts-based nonprofit with a rich legacy of empowering and investing in artists. Their year around programming welcomes degree-seeking students, professional artists, and those new to the arts. The 115-acre campus – located alongside and protected by the dunes, forests, and waters of Saugatuck – cultivates a space that does not simply host its residents but enhances their practice. Both its facilities and faculty edify their longstanding mission: to serve as a network of creative resources, people, and ideas amidst an energizing natural environment inspired by its rich artistic history and fueled by the potential of a vital future

Photography by Jamie Kelter Davis.

When Fashion and Inflatables Collide

We caught up with Claire Ashley and Vincent Tiley to see where their inspiration and excitement lies in this new course. Inflatables: Paint Skins comes to Ox-Bow this Summer for the first time!

OX: What are you most looking forward to in coming to Ox-Bow to teach next summer? 

Vincent Tiley: I’m very excited about the kind of artistic explorations that can happen at Ox-Bow. I think it’s very different than what is generated in a more typical classroom. At Ox-Bow you can really step outside of your focus and enrich yourself in a more self-directed way.

Claire Ashley: I'm always excited to be at Oxbow in person and bask in the landscape, pace, and camaraderie of the community!! There's nothing quite like it!  And I'm excited about this new class with Vincent as I've oddly enough never taught an inflatables-specific class before! 

OX: What was the inspiration behind joining forces for this new course, especially given that you both taught two popular courses separately? Vincent, will you be bringing any fashion elements to the table from your previous course?
VT: I was Claire’s TA in grad school and had a blast working with her. Claire is also a creative force. Her work is really incredible and fun. I’m very technical. I thought that this class would be possible at Ox-bow because of the success of the fashion class. Clothing and balloons are really similar. They both are essentially skins that are filled with something to give them volume. In the case of balloons that something is air instead of parts of the body.

CA: Vince is an incredibly inventive artist who works with a similar set of concerns as I do, namely inflatables as garments, performance, and the expanded field of painting, so I'm excited that we both will be working together again!! I'm also excited that I get to use the expanded field of painting content from my previous exploding paint class within the context of the inflatable membrane or skin, I'm hoping it will be a model that we can repeat :)

OX: Are there any exciting highlights you would like to share about your course that we can share? What can students look forward to in your course?
VT: I think that the most exciting thing is the possibility for installing outdoors. There’s forest, beach, lake, lagoon, and the campus of Ox-Bow to be explored for installation. The thing about inflatables is something that’s as tall as a house can roll up and fit inside a suitcase or back pack. You can really be playful in just where you install. 

CA: I think there will be an abundant amount of energy, play, and curiosity in this class. Both of us strive to build a supportive environment where everyone can take risks, test, play, cavort, and generally explore a more irreverent relationship to an artistic practice. 

Born in West Virginia, New York based artist Vincent Tiley (he/they) received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Tiley's garment-based durational performances queer clothings’ myriad uses--often combining multiple performers into one sculptural and painted form; the garments no longer function as outward signifiers adorned by an interior self but fully disguise, restrain, and extend their wearers, irreverent of the corporeal boundaries of individual selves. His work has been featured and reviewed in Art in America, the Chicago Tribune, Performa, and the New York Times. The artist has been widely exhibited internationally including the Museum of Art and Design, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, AxeNeo7, CFHILL, and the International Museum of Surgical Science. His works have been collected by the Whitney Library, the Leather Archives and Museum, Yale University Library, and the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Claire Ashley (she/her) uses her work to investigate inflatables as painting, sculpture, installation, and performance costume. These works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums,site-specific installations, performances, festivals, and collaborations. Her work has been featured on blogs such as VICE, Hyperallergic, and Artforum, and in magazines such as Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago, Yorkshire Post, and Condé Nast Traveller. Ashley received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, Scotland. Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, Ashley is now Chicago based. Currently, she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Contemporary Practices, and the Department of Painting and Drawing. 

Interview with Cover Artist Ling Chun

Ling Chun is the cover artists for the 2022 Summer Course Catalog and is teaching the Clay Makerspace during CAMP: our 3-week Intensive.

What are you most looking forward to in coming to Ox-Bow to teach next summer? 
I am most looking forward is the face-to-face connection with students after teaching an online class for more than two years now. 

What was the inspiration behind the piece you have featured for our catalog cover?
Green Jar, 2018— my inspiration for this work is finding the most recognizable language of ceramics ( in this case, the vase ) that connects with the most audience. With the use of hair as the extension of glaze— I intend to break the old structure and shape and walk my audience to look at ceramics from a refreshing perspective — simple way to say: I am giving ceramics a make-over. 

Your course says you are taking inspiration from historical movements, can you elaborate a bit more on which movements you will be highlighting?
The course would emphasize the most recent contemporary movement in the ceramics discourse — how cross-discipline this medium has become. Also, what does it means when dominantly crafts-based ceramics become more used as an art medium. 

What about ceramics do you love and why did you want to lead this makerspace?
Nothing like clay capture movement intuitively— spoil alert: SO MUCH disappointment from the ceramics process makes you appreciate every little moment— that’s what I love about ceramics. It makes you look at the world differently. Part of the reason to lead this maker space is the excitement I have for a student interested in what sort of projects and wild ideas they will bring in. For most, I love giving a demo and showing the possibility you can do with ceramics.

Are there any exciting highlights you would like to share about your course that we can share? What can students look forward to in your course?

Do you like sparkle? I bring lots of sparkle and glitter to the course. I am not joking. I will teach you how to make your work likes it from outer space. 

About the artist…

Ling Chun (she/her) is a multimedia artist from Hong Kong. Her work represents the coexistence of multicultural identities within a single society. Chun’s practice focuses on creating artifacts which speak about history with a contemporary sensibility. In her execution and conceptualization of creative projects, Chun brings together her knowledge of Chinese culture and her contemporary artistic vision. Chun aspires to create public artifacts to bring relevance to historical storytelling in her future artistic pursuits. Chun is the recipient of numerous awards including the ArtBridge Fellowship 2020 sponsored by Chihuly Garden and Glass and The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts emerging artist award in 2020. In 2019, Chun was shortlisted for the Young Master Art Prize in London and recently she has been shortlisted for 2021 Korea International Ceramics Biennale. Chun is currently based in Seattle. She works as a ceramic educator at North Seattle College and also as an educational guide for the Wing Luke Museum.