MEET THE FACULTY

and pottery are nature abstracted. Her work uses movement and patterns to deliver a healing message. She encourages us to take notice of the beauty in the world around us. The unifying undercurrent in Clifford-Bandstra’s work plays with ideas and concepts surrounding nature, healing, and the human connection. In 2014 she started curating pop-up art shows with the mission of helping artists connect with their community. These networking events grew into the Lakeshore Visual Arts Collective, a 501c3.

specialist, and corrective exercise specialist from the National Academy of Sports Medicine and a chronic disease specialist and Active Aging specialist from SCW. She is a member of the American Bodywork and Massage Professionals.

DAVID BAKER (he/him) is a visual artist who specializes in poetic landscape painting, much of it done en plein air. His studio pieces are often reinterpretations of paintings done outdoors. His principal media are watercolor, oil, and charcoal. Baker is a lifelong artist/teacher. He recently retired as art professor Emeritus from Southwestern Michigan College. He earned his MFA degree from Indiana State University. Over the years he has mounted more than four dozen solo exhibits. He has taught at Ox-Bow School of Art since 2000 and at the Krasl Art Center since 2016. He serves on board of the South Haven Center for the Arts. He is represented by Rising Phoenix Gallery in Michigan City.

JAMES BRANDESS (he/ him) is a painter, working primarily in oil. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Brandess’s relationship with Ox-Bow started in 1987 when, as a student at the School of the Art Institute, he answered an ad for a summer job. While at OxBow, he began his practice of painting landscapes and people. He currently works in Saugatuck, Michigan. His studio and gallery has been in operation in downtown Saugatuck since 1994.

ute paragraphs. Generally, her work centers around supporting collaborative making, process-based work, care in administrative practices, and creative sustainability; what are we going to learn from one another? Burke is the Director of People & Culture at Design for America, the Co-Founder of Annas, and a Lead Organizer for the Chicago Arts Census.

ALDEN BURKE (she/they) is a Chicago-based educator, facilitator, and writer. Currently, she is thinking about modes of introduction, radicalizing HR practices, and free-writing in five-min -

MAGGIE CLIFFORDBANDSTRA (she/her) completed her MFA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design. Bandstra has a Masters in Educational Leadership from Michigan State University and a BS in Education from Loyola University of Chicago. She teaches art part-time at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and works at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency as the Manager of Retail Programming. Her paintings

ALETHEA CRANDELL (she/ her), LMT is a licensed massage therapist and certified personal trainer. She is impassioned by art, taking art classes at Ox Bow, The Corcoran School of Art, and Montgomery College. She has been a sports massage therapist for the University of Maryland football team, Georgetown Basketball; a chair massage therapist for DC law firms, Orioles baseball office staff, the National Institute of Health Children’s Inn, for nurses at hospice, teachers and college students; a stretch therapist; has done physical therapy assisting externships at outpatient hospital, nursing home, and home health settings; and worked for a brief period as a personal trainer at a Capitol Hill DC gym. She has 640 hours of professional massage training in modalities from Swedish, Deep, Myofascial, Stretch, Chair, and spa & hydrotherapy. She also is a certified nutritionist, certified behavior change specialist, certified personal trainer, women’ s fitness specialist, senior fitness specialist, performance enhancement

JANE DESMOND (she/her) is a poet, anthropologist, and former choreographer who works broadly across the arts and humanities. Her work has appeared in books, national print journals, on television, in film, and even on a billboard. As a teacher, she brings several decades of experience to teaching interdisciplinary classes both in the U.S. and abroad, including at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where has been featured multiple times on the list of “Teachers ranked as Excellent by their Students.” Her creative and scholarly work has been funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and through residencies at Write On Door County!, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Cummington Community for the Arts.

SHERI DOYEL (she/her) curates, gathers, juxtaposes, and considers the audience. Doyel does this primarily in two spaces: farmer education via colleges and non-profits, and events on her own farm in southern Wisconsin. Yesterday, as in, for the past three decades, she has curated visual art exhibitions, cabaret performances, vegetable, herb, and flower varieties, vendor mix at farmers markets, art classes for kids and adults, and seminars for farmers and landowners. I trained in dance at UCLA where I earned a BFA in World Arts and Cultures, and studied Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago earning her Master’s degree in 1998. She has performed with Redmoon Theater, Mickle Maher, Bread and Puppet Theater, and the Persephone Project. By day, she is the Director of the Center for Agrarian Learning at McHenry County College and the owner/operator of Tiny Tempest Farm.

GURTIE HANSELL (they/she/ he) is an interdisciplinary artist and entrepreneur living and working out of their home studio in Chicago. Their work centers around fashion, printmaking, graphic design and wearables, exploring themes of pageantry, protest and pleasure. They operate a small genderqueer clothing line called Kangmankey as well as co-running a costume and production design company called MotherTwin.

GRACE ESTHER GITTELMAN sounds, conversations, histories, nuances, objects, images, trash, and more to build disjointed narratives. Such narratives, which revolve around navigating phenomenologies of language, displacement, and charged banalities, are realized as paintings, drawings, prints, animations, sculptures, books, and more. Kim received her BFA at The Cooper Union in New York. Past residencies and awards include The LeRoy Neiman Fellowship from Ox-Bow School of Art, The Sarah Cooper Hewitt Fund Prize for Excellence in Art from The Cooper Union, and the Center for Book Arts Scholarship.” dolff’s mission is to nurture each student’s creativity and honor and support however the individual wishes to express themselves.

(they/them) graduated from School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 2020. They are a Chicago based Korean and white Jewish American originally from Raleigh, North Carolina who explores the intersections of their identity through the creation of hybridized traditional Korean ceramics. Gittelman grapples with the weight of their conflicting and coexisting cultures by applying traditional Korean ceramic techniques to non-traditional forms and vice versa. They are a 2021 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Multicultural Fellow and their recent exhibitions include The Clay Art Center’s State of Emergence; a solo show at Jude Gallery in Chicago, Say “Kimchi”!; and Nubes at Heaven Gallery. They attended ACRE Residency, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, and were an Ox-Bow Longform Resident in 2022.

JEANNIE HUA (she/her) is a collage/mixed media artist. She collects images and colors from magazines, newspapers, photos, paper mementos and reconstitutes them into different contexts, giving new light to old visages. She does this by cutting, tearing, and shredding ephemera and re-piecing images for new meanings and/or reclaiming old ones. For her, collaging is solving jigsaw puzzles. She’s fascinated with how ephemera interplays with memory, rituals, and moments of emotional significance. Jeannie recently graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s the recipient of the merit scholarship for OxBow, the Denis Diderot Grant for the artist residency at Chauteau Orquevaux, as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums in New York, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee, Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, and Nevada.

NICHOLAS JIRASEK (he/ him) Jirasek’s career began with a job as a short order cook in a local diner. Tireless learning led to a quick ascent as Director of Food & Beverage for the 94th Floor at the John Hancock. Association to the arts guided him to develop Guerrilla Smiles Food Art: a catering company, which collaborated with artists and arts organizations for over a decade to create offerings from intimate salon dinners to fundraisers for a thousand people. He also acted as personal chef and caterer to artist Tony Fitzpatrick. Jirasek traveled to Panama City where he consulted on and managed Los Del Patio, a bar and restaurant within an art gallery and cultural center. In Chicago, he served as opening chef for Currency Exchange Cafe, Theaster Gates’ first foray into the restaurant industry. Jirasek oversaw the kitchen and managed operations at Gaslight Coffee Roasters. In 2018 he opened Old Habits at Ludlow Liquors where he brought a realness in the foodways of Chicago’s working history. Jirasek also opened Young American to instant viral success of his creation, Goth Bread, garnering attention from the Chicago Reader and Chicago Magazine. Jirasek is now the Culinary Director at Ox-Bow School of Art.

YEJI KIM (she/her) is an artist and graphic designer based in New York, NY. She examines and hoards fragments, stories and tales,

JOANNE LAUDOLFF (she/ her) is a Saugatuck based artist and art instructor. She is a mixed media artist who focuses on Japanese papermaking, book arts and painting with oil and cold wax. Laudolff holds a BA from Columbia College in Chicago and an MA in Studio Arts from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. While attending Columbia College, she took many classes at The Chicago Book and Paper Center. While there, she studied with Marilyn Sward who is one of the founders of the Center. Laudolff has taught workshops for the past 24 years at various art galleries, art leagues, and schools. These venues include: The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois; The Dupage Art League in Wheaton, Illinois; Four Corner’s Artist and Gallery Trio in Lisle, Illinois; The Fine Line in St. Charles, Illinois; The Clearing in Door County, Wisconsin; The College of Dupage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois; and Ox-Bow School of Art, among others. Lau -

ROWAN LEEK (he/they) is a multimedia artist who works in textiles, printmaking, and papermaking. His work is inspired by queer ecology and finding divinity in the mundane. He grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2020 with a BFA in Sculpture and Expanded Media. He has interned at the Morgan Paper Conservatory as well as Penland School of Crafts Paper and Book studios. His work has been exhibited at the Artists Archive of CWRU, Cain Park, Bostwick Design Art initiative, and as part of the Queer Ecology Handkerchief Exhibition at Zygote, Women’s Studio Workshop, and The Future.

CAYLA LOCKWOOD (she/her) is an artist, printmaker, curator and graphic designer based in Philadelphia. She creates fake companies as an art practice to investigate how capitalism is embedded in our lives and creates absurd expectations and behaviors. These experiential works incorporate installation, graphic design, printmaking, video, and performance. From 2017–2021 she was an artist in residence at Flux Factory in New York City, where she worked on a number of collaborative projects in New York, Denmark, Finland and Ukraine. From 2017–2019 she was a curatorial member of Little Berlin in Philadelphia—a collective of artists who curated exhibitions. Lockwood has a BFA in graphic design from Central Michigan University and an MFA in printmaking from Syracuse University. She has participated in book fairs such as the Philly Zine Fest, Yale University Art Book Fair, Boston Art Book Fair, Miami Zine Fair and Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair. Currently she is a graphic designer for the University of Pennsylvania, a member of The Soapbox Community Printshop, and teaches workshops in printmaking and bookbinding. ers since 1992. Her teaching and art making practice focuses on exploring family identity, inequality, migration, cultural recognition, art and technology literacy, and media representation in marginalized communities. She has worked as an artist educator with Kentwood Public Schools, Ox-Bow School of Art, Calvin University, Kendall College of Art & Design, Chicago Public Schools, Valley AIDS Council, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Meyers Baas holds a BA from Loyola University Chicago & MAAE from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. in New England. Currently, they are a lecturer for both UW-Madison and UW-Green Bay in art foundations and metals/jewelry.

ERIC MAY (he/they) is a Chicagoland-based parent, chef, and artist. May cooked for Ox-Bow from 2000 to 2014, serving as head chef for 11 of those years. May is the founder and director of Roots & Culture, a nonprofit contemporary art center in Chicago’s Noble Square neighborhood, which is now home to the original Ox-Bow stove. May also cooks for cool clients in the Chicago art world (and beyond) with the Easy Eats catering crew. They have written about food for Time Out Chicago, the Chicago Reader, and Bon Appetit.

KIM MEYERS BAAS (she/her) is an arts educator who has worked in public and private settings in Michigan, Chicago, and on the Mexican/Texas border cultivating youth artists and community work-

CATE O’CONNELL-RICHARDS (they/them) is a queer artist, jeweler, broomsquire, and educator currently living in Madison, Wisconsin. O’Connell-Richards has exhibited internationally and has shown work at Abel Contemporary in Stoughton, Wisconsin; Hesse Flatow in New York; EatMetal Inc. in Hoboken, New Jersey; the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington; Lillstreet Arts Center in Chicago, and the Gallerie im Körnerpark, Berlin. Their last solo show “SWEPT: This Work I Will Do”, was on view at Hancock Shaker Village and concerned the history of American broom production. They have been awarded several travel grants for craft research, including funding for fieldwork in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to study the copper mining culture of the area, a trip to the Foxfire Museum and Appalachian Heritage Center in Georgia to study broommaking, and a residency at MassMOCA to study and make work about the history of broommaking him) is a socially-engaged artist interested in gathering, performing, cooking, eating, conversing, spectating, recording, and viewing. Fethke draw inspiration from the food we eat, the stories we tell, and the places that embody our most personal memories. Over the past few years of pandemic precarity, his work has taken on new forms that place himself at the center: as a facilitator of dialogue, as a provocateur asking critical questions, as a host creating space for people to cook and eat together. It is his goal to sustain an artistic practice that centers humor, respect, and joy as a web of positive practices in order to make work outside the white walls of the gallery—from ephemeral happenings to site-specific interventions on the street level. Fethke received his BA from Brown University in Media Studies in 2015, and will be receiving his MFA in Integrated Practices from Pratt Institute in 2023. He has exhibited works at the Yale School of Art, Recess Art Space in Brooklyn, and Helena Anrather Gallery in New York. Fethke attended Ox-Bow as a Pratt Fellow in August 2022. throwers in Chicago, and is the Academic Program Director for Ox-Bow School of Art.

LIBBI PONCE (they/she) is an Ecuadorian artist, making sculptures, 360-degree videos, installations, and performances. Ponce explores themes of Latinx-Futurism through a sculptural practice of world-building, incorporating an ambitious range of materials including steel, bronze, resin, polyurethane, mortar, grout, terracotta, and glass. Inspired by the erotic and anthropomorphic motifs from ancient Andean ceramics, Ponce constructs tactile sculptural objects which probe discourse on grief, intimacy, and historic folklore. They have attended the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, OxBow School of Art & Artists’ Residency, Yale Norfolk Undergraduate Residency, and ACRE. Exhibitions include terciopelo at Selenas Mountain, BASE REMOVED at the Museo Antropologico y de Arte Contemporaneo, and Skyway 20/21 at the Tampa Museum of Art. They hold a BFA in Studio Art and BA in Philosophy from the University of South Florida. In 2021, Ponce completed a Fulbright Creative Research Fellowship in Ecuador. Ponce is the founder/director of galeria juniin in Guayaquil, Ecuador and Co-Director of Coco Hunday Gallery in Tampa, Florida.

MADDIE REYNA (she/her) is an American painter who began arranging flowers as a way to have live subjects for her work. That practice has come to stand alone as she applies considerations of color, form, and composition to three-dimensional organic matter. She has a Masters in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studied at The Flower School of New York, designs flower arrangements for brides and other party an artist creating work that brings together performance, writing, and design to facilitate deep engagement and promote community. She trained as an actress at the Piven Theater Workshop, Interlochen, Oberlin, Northwestern University, and was a principal collaborator at Redmoon Theater since its inception. For 25 years they pursued Spectacle + Wonder through adaptations of great novels, pageantry and circus. They built shadow shows, blew fire, learned to stilt, took over streets, paraded in January and July. A strong desire to reach young people accompanied her work at Redmoon and she founded Dramagirls, a longterm creative mentorship for middle school girls on the West Side. Smith has an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute. She creates programming and produces events at Guild Row Chicago, a social club for people who Give a Damn. She is the co-creator of The Persephone Project which uses the Myth of Persephone to create pageants on the land to address climate change. and works at Ox-Bow School of Art as a Housekeeper in West Michigan.

JACK RIDL (he/him), Poet Laureate of Douglas, Michigan (population 1100), is the author of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Wayne State University Press). His Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (WSUPress, 2013) was co-recipient of the National Gold Medal for Best Collection of Poetry by ForeWord Reviews. His collection Broken Symmetry (WSU Press) was co-recipient of The Society of Midland Authors best book of poetry award for 2006. His Losing Season (CavanKerry Press) was named the best sports book of the year for 2009 by The Institute for International Sport. Then Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected his Against Elegies for The Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award. Individual poems have been published in The Georgia Review, Poetry, Colorado Review, Rattle, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Field, and Poetry East. Students at Hope College named him their Outstanding Professor and their Favorite Professor, and in 1996 the Carnegie Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. More than 100 of Ridl’s students are published, several of whom have received national honors. Every Thursday, Ridl hosts and posts on his YouTube, The Sentimentalist.

The Peachbelt Studio - formerly the Peachbelt Schoolhouse, ca 1867. Open weekends seasonally, May - October. Since 1996 she has participated as both student and staff member at Ox-Bow as kitchen staff, a teaching assistant, course instructor, and Art on the Meadow facilitator. Originally from New York, she received her BFA from Swain School of Design in Massachusetts before moving to Michigan in 1992. Her work is widely collected.

DAWN STAFFORD (she/her) is a full-time artist working in the Saugatuck/Fennville area. Her oil paintings of West Michigan’s landscape, rural fauna & flora, and everyday human objects explore subtle color palettes, rhythms, and harmonies that seek to reduce the noise of the outer world. Often using color and scale to effect a sense of intimacy, atmosphere, or presence.

Painter, artist, teacher, mother, and gardener she creates and exhibits her work in a repurposed historic one-room schoolhouse,

CHRISTINA SWEENEY (she/ her) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and collaborator. Sweeney grew up moving around South Florida and carries ideas around wetlands, invasive species, harsh weather conditions, borders, and protection with her. She is interested in the artist’s material processes as a way to critically examine movement, repetition, structure and the lack thereof. She works to support the ways in which objects and our environment relate through installation and video. Although she is a processed based artist, a large part of her practice reflects traditional craft and its history. Sweeney has shown work internationally and received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an emphasis in Sculpture and Visual/Critical Studies. She recently worked for Red Bull Arts NYC, Coalition for Hispanic Family Services, and The Phoenix Community Garden in Brooklyn. Outside of her studio practice she enjoys walking the lakefront headphones in, exploring new places, watching movies with loved ones and cooking dinner for hours. She currently lives interest in the full spectrum of human experience, from primal instincts to highest consciousness led to her studies of Eastern art and healing, becoming a Reiki Master through the Usui Shiki Ryoho System of Natural Healing and Certified Feng Shui Designer at the New York Institute of Art and Design. Trierweiler says, the acceptance of paradox has been one of the most healing lessons of her life. Her process reflects this attitude. It is both fluid and structural, organic and geometric, improv and laborious design. Trierweiler is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received her BFA in Studio Art, she teaches drawing and painting, currently online, and leads workshops on Drawing as Meditation as well as other topics. writing has been published by Yale University Press, Viral Ecologies, and the Journal of Art Practice.

JESSICA THEBUS (she/her) is a theater artist, director, and educator. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and is currently Director of the Northwestern MFA Program in Directing for the Stage. She has directed and adapted plays in Chicago and nationally for twenty years, and has long associations with many Chicago theaters. At the Goodman Theatre she has directed A Christmas Carol, Buzzer by Tracey Scott Wilson, and both The Clean House and the world premiere of Stage Kiss by Sarah Ruhl. At Steppenwolf Theater Company she has directed four large spectacle evenings at Millenium Park, as well as 7 productions. Thebus is also involved in outdoor spectacle projects in Chicago that celebrate community, joy and environmental justice—these include The Persephone Pageant Project and The Art Of Spontaneous Spectacle.

JANET TRIERWEILER (she/ her) enjoys creating gestural abstract paintings. Her focus is on the sensual nature of art and the healing aspect of beauty. Like the meeting point of mind and body, experienced through yoga and the Chakra system, artistic composition can be felt both physically and through conscious response. This

MAGGIE WONG (she/her, b.1988, Oakland, California) is a visual artist attuned to materiality and sculpture’s disciplinary capacity to shape social space. She creates multidisciplinary works that focus on care labor, sentimentality, and collectivity. As a teacher is interested in the interplay between informal and experiential education amidst formal art ecologies. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She is currently the Educator-in-Residence at the Luminary, and lecturer at SAIC. Her work has been shown at Mana Contemporary Chicago, Comfort Station, Annas Projects, take care (Los Angeles), Temple Contemporary, YBCA, and 99cent Plus, and has been written about in ArtForum and Sixty Inches from Center. Her

ANDERS ZANICHKOWSKY (they/he/she) is a queer and transgender artist and writer making art about grief, desire, and our longing for another world. Equally at home in traditional craft and new media, their studio practice includes weaving, printmaking, papermaking, video, and poetry.

Zanichkowsky has been an artist with The Arctic Circle sailing expedition in Svalbard, Røst AiR in Sápmi/ Norway, and the Chicago Park District’s Cultural Asset Mapping Project. Their work has been exhibited across the United States, Europe, and Australia including the Wisconsin Film Festival and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art and they’ve received numerous awards for printmaking, public art, and international research.

Zanichkowsky has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019) and a BA from Hampshire College (2008). They currently work for artists Mel Chin and Latham Zearfoss and are the owner and weaver of Burial Blankets, handwoven shrouds for green burial meant for reflection and enjoyment during life.