Soft Meaning: Weaving, Knitting, and Felting

with Abbey Muza
FIBER 632 001
3 credits | $175 lab fee

In this course, students will make fiber-based work while developing an understanding of how the materials we use create and hold meaning. Focusing on the sustainable material; wool, students will explore a variety of treatments to create yarn, felt, cloth, and sculpture. We will build D.I.Y. handheld looms for our spun yarn, design flat works, explore dyeing, felting, and simple knitting techniques in the service of making soft works, as designed by the students. We will look at how the specific materials and techniques we use influence how we think about and create meaning in our work in relation to histories, cultures, and ecologies. Course readings and lectures will deeply consider how we can think about materials from various perspectives, and will include artists such as Ektor Garcia, Hana Miletić, and Cecilia Vicuña, and texts by authors including T’ai Smith and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Assignments will guide students through processing a locally sourced sheep’s fleece and learning the rudimentary techniques of spinning, weaving, knitting, and felting, using this fleece and other fiber materials, including sourced and foraged materials from Ox-Bow’s campus. After learning a variety of techniques and conducting initial material experiments, students will make final works (which may take any form) that engage thoughtful and personal consideration of materials and their meanings.

Winter Session runs from January 4 - 17, 2026. Classes are held every day during the session (including weekends) from 9:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m. EST

Abbey Muza (they/them) uses weaving and other forms of image-making to explore narration, queer identity, image-making, and abstraction. They are interested in the specificities inherent in textile objects - how image and content can be imbued into a textile, or the uniqueness of a textile object’s relationship to ways of seeing and being in the world. They have been an artist in residence at ACRE and Alternative Worksite, and have been a Fulbright France Harriet-Hale Wooley Awardee, a Summer Fellow at the Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency, and a visiting artist at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. They have shown their work at spaces including Tusk, Slow Dance, and the Fondation des États Unis. They have a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. They currently work as a Visiting Artist at Penn State Berks.

Chaos Temple 

with Elijah Burgher
PAINTING & DRAWING 606 001
3 credits | $175 lab fee

What happens when we pick up a stick of charcoal or a brush dipped in ink? This course takes as its starting point William S. Burroughs’s dictum that “all art is magical in origin. . . . Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen.” Magic offers artists a set of imaginative tools with which to think otherwise about the work they do. Following an examination of concepts and imagery from witchcraft, hermeticism, alchemy, and the occult, students will explore the materials, processes, and psychic investments of the studio through the lens of spellcraft. Drawing will be emphasized as a research methodology and unique medium of expression. As part of a larger inquiry into symbols, we will study various examples of “unknown languages,” such as the myth of Odin’s discovery of the runes, Austin Osman Spare’s sigil magic, the Martian scripts of the 19th-century spiritual medium Hélène Smith, asemic writing, and the automatic techniques of the surrealists, through slide lectures and guided drawing exercises. James George Frazer’s principles of sympathetic magic will be used to think differently about both figurative representation and the specificity and history of materials and tools in drawing, collage, and painting. Additional themes will include ritual, sacrifice, divination, chance, and hauntology. We will look at the work of artists including Jesse Bransford, Atis Rezistans / Ghetto Biennale, Judith Noble, Marjorie Cameron, Wifredo Lam, and František Kupka. Readings will include “Reclaiming Animism” by Isabelle Stengers and excerpts from “Splinter Test” by Genesis P-Orridge; screenings will include films by Maya Deren and Harry Smith. Using James George Frazer’s “Law of Similarity” to think about figurative representation and wish fulfillment, students will make “cave drawings” with tools created from found materials in the landscape and inks we make together in class. The course will culminate in an indoor or outdoor installation of finished pieces.

Winter Session runs from January 4 - 17, 2026. Classes are held every day during the session (including weekends) from 9:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m. EST

Using painting, drawing, and printmaking, Elijah Burgher works at the crossroads of representation and language, figuration and abstraction, and the real and imagined. Drawing from mythology, ancient history, the occult, and ritual magick, Burgher cultivates a highly intimate code of symbolism to investigate the personal and cultural dynamics of desire, love, subcultural formation, and the history of abstraction. His work has been featured in museums and gallaries around the world including the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He is the co-author of Sperm Cult with Richard Hawkins. Burgher received a MFA from the School of the Art Institute and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. He is represented by PPOW in New York, Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Ivan Gallery in Bucharest.

Clay as Canvas 

with Rachel Niffenegger

CERAMICS [TK] 001
3 credits | $250 lab fee

In this class, students will explore the two-dimensional and pictorial possibilities in clay by working on slabs. Students will learn effective slab rolling techniques, drying strategies, and explore a variety of mark-marking processes including carving, printing, underglazing and other painterly and graphic applications to solve traditional painting considerations including figure, ground, composition, color, and mark making in clay. To glean inspiration, we will review the work of artists including Betty Woodman, Ruby Neri, Haylie Jimenez, and Manal Kara. Assignments will invite students to consider the interaction between form and surface by combining slab/hand building with painting techniques using underglazes and image transfer.  The course will culminate in a presentation of wall based works.

Winter Session runs from January 4 - 17, 2026. Classes are held every day during the session (including weekends) from 9:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m. EST

Rachel Niffenegger (she/her) utilizes curious and experimental media to conjure uncanny spirits. Pulled from the folds of psychedelic clay and spiraled through mirrored metal work her creations are preoccupied with fecundity and the macabre, at once psychedelic and mysterious. Rachel Niffenegger’s work has been included in museum shows at the Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem, the  Netherlands; the MCA in Chicago; and in gallery shows in New York, Berlin, Chicago, Liverpool,  Denver, and Milwaukee, among others. In 2012 she completed a residency at DE ATELIERS in  Amsterdam. Niffenegger, received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her  MFA from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and  lives and works in Chicago.

The Sun on the Tongue: Painting & Poetry in the Landscape

with Arnold Kemp
PAINTING 680 001
3 credits | $175 lab fee

Inspired by great artists like Etel Adnan and Elizabeth Bishop and the winter landscape of Ox-Bow, this assignment driven studio course will activate writing for painters and painting for writers. Class discussions and readings will be wide-ranging with an emphasis on the creative process, the development of a personal voice, exchange of ideas, and practical topics in fine arts. Individualized critiques and meetings will follow the group discussions. Students will be expected to define a contextual framework and vocabulary for talking about their work as well as resolving form, content and technical issues. Areas of studio practice as well as outside of class assignments will explore expanded definitions of painting and writing that relate to the body and things of the world, The course is designed to prepare students to pursue individual creative projects in a setting that supports critical thinking, risk-taking, and the production of a body of work on paper and other supports. Students in this course will be assigned a semi-private studio space and can work in the media of their choice. We will take inspiration from readings and screenings from artists including; Etel Adnan, a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. named “arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today” by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States,. Elizabeth Bishop, who worked as a painter as well as a poet, and her verse, like visual art, is known for its ability to capture significant scenes, and Renee Gladman, a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. Other readings will include Marie Howe’s The Good Thief, Deborah Digges’ Vesper Sparrows, Josh Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, as edited by Erica Hunt. Assignments will invite students to adapt sensations experienced in the Ox-Bow landscape through words and drawing, inspired by Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, and to trade pieces of writings with confidants to develop works in watercolor or acrylic based on these writings. These exercises will require us to trust in what we can make of a synthesis of the known and unknown. Walking through the landscape, speaking to trees, looking for foxes, and screaming at the frozen lake will inform our final works.

Winter Session runs from January 4 - 17, 2026. Classes are held every day during the session (including weekends) from 9:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m. EST

Arnold J. Kemp (he/him, they/them) is an artist and writer. Currently, he is a professor of ainting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was previously the chair of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Academy of American Poets. His writing has appeared in Callaloo, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, Agni Review, MIRAGE #4 Period(ical), River Styx, Nocturnes, Art Journal, Tripwire, and in From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice. Kemp’s critical writing has appeared recently in Texte zur Kunst, October and Spike Art Magazine. He has presented his writing publicly at The Poetry Foundation in Chicago and Human Resources in Los Angeles. His work is shown nationally and internationally.

Multi-Level Painting: Form, Process, & Meaning

with Magalie Guérin | PAINTING 605 001 | 3 credits
Monday-Saturday, January 8 - 23, 2026, 11:00 a.m.–1:30 p.m. EST

This course for beginning to advanced students will include extensive experimentation with materials and techniques through individual painting problems. Emphasis will be placed on active decision-making to explore formal and material options as part of the painting process in relation to form and meaning. Students will pursue various interests in subject matter. Students may choose to work with oil-based media. Demonstrations, lectures and critiques will be included.

Magalie Guérin’s (she/her) work is shape-based and abstract in nature although it employs strategies of representation (figure/ground relationship), which brings these invented shapes into an unknown yet seemingly familiar frame of reference. The experience of foreignness and discovery is at the core of Guérin’s practice. Guérin holds an MFA in Painting & Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has had solo shows at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, Corbett vs Dempsey, Amanda Wilkinson, Chapter NY, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Schwarz Contemporary, and Anat Egbi. She is the author of NOTES ON, a compilation of studio writings (The Green Lantern Press, 2016/2019). Awards include Pace at FAWC, Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and Chinati Foundation residency. She is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York, Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, and Galerie Nicolas Robert in Montreal/Toronto.

Animal Behavior

with Dr. Dianne Jedlicka
SCIENCE 3523 001 | 3 credits
Monday-Saturday, January 8 - 23, 2026, 2:00–4:30 p.m. EST

This course will incorporate field observations in the natural environment surrounding Saugatuck, Michigan into the study of animal behavior. Students will formulate and test hypotheses through the acquisition of data in the field.  Topics covered include: classical learning and instinct, reproductive behaviors, and interactions between and within species. 

Note: LIBSCI 3521:  Animal Behavior is a separate course and may be taken for credit in addition to this one.  NOTE: SAIC Students must have already taken English 1001 & 1005 in order to enroll in this course.

Dr. Dianne Jedlicka teaches numerous Biology courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including Animal Behavior, Evolutionary Mammalogy, Ecology (Natural History), and Human Anatomy and Physiology. Her primary research has been at the community level of organization, focusing on the feeding strategies and predation of tree and ground squirrels based on their functional morphology. Observational data collected on nocturnal foraging of the eastern cottontail rabbit were published recently. All of these animals are found throughout the Ox-Bow region and offer Dr. Jedlicka’s students