Summer non-credit course

Tucked among wooded dunes beside a quiet lagoon on the Kalamazoo River in Saugatuck, Michigan, Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency  has been a site of creative practice and community for over a century. Each summer, artists at every stage of their careers arrive to live and work together in one of the most distinctive learning environments in the country. The landscape is not backdrop but participant, and where the boundaries between study, studio, and daily life dissolve into something harder to name and easier to feel.

This summer, Ox-Bow invites artists, makers, and practitioners to enroll in its one-to-two week non-credit courses. Designed for those who wish to pursue focused, hands-on learning outside the structure of academic credit, these courses offer something increasingly rare: time and space to follow a material or idea with genuine commitment, in the company of fellow artists equally devoted to the work. Academic credit is also available. Contact oxbow@ox-bow.org for details.

On-campus housing puts participants at Ox-Bow from the first light breaking over the lagoon to the last colors of the evening sky—present for shared meals, nightly artist talks, and the kind of conversation that only happens when a community is living and making together.

This summer's courses
Building a Cedar Strip Canoe Work alongside fellow students to hand-build a cedar strip canoe that will become part of the Ox-Bow campus fleet. Learn traditional woodworking techniques—spokeshaves, steam-bending, fiberglassing—and close the week with a launch onto the lagoon.

Make an Ox-Bow Movie Write, shoot, and edit a short experimental film inspired by the Ox-Bow landscape, using any camera including your phone. Embrace the improvisational, DIY spirit of independent filmmaking through play, collaboration, and creative risk. The session culminates in a screening for the whole Ox-Bow community.

Living Sculpture: Floral Gestures and Techniques Explore flower arranging as a sculptural and painterly practice, working with fresh seasonal blooms each morning and moving into drawing and painting in the afternoon. The week includes a visit to White Barn Flower Farm and culminates in a collective installation that transforms the studio into a living gallery.

Textile Ecologies: Pattern, Printing & Place Using nature as both inspiration and collaborator, this course explores eco-conscious surface design through natural dyeing, cyanotype, and paste resists. Work with sun, water, and wind as active agents in your creative process and develop a personal visual language rooted in the living world.

Sculptural Basketry: Exploring Form, Color & Tactility Discover the expressive potential of 3D weaving and sculptural basketry, building forms and vessels that emphasize tactility, color, and experimentation. From dyeing reed to working freehand or over molds, this hands-on course is an invitation to explore fiber, sculpture, and woven form.

Drawing Place in Watercolor & Gouache Watercolor and gouache are among the most portable and immediate of mediums—perfectly suited to Ox-Bow's landscape of dunes, lagoon, and open sky. This course builds a foundation in both transparent and opaque watercolor while using the natural world as primary subject matter, developing a personal approach to drawing place.

Enroll now. On-campus housing is available and encouraged. For full course details, scheduling, and to enroll, visit here.

As an artist-built and run school and residency, Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency is dedicated to the time and space for arts education, research, practice, and community-building for artists at all stages of their artistic journey. Founded in 1910, Ox-Bow’s egalitarian and intimate environment encourages all artists, regardless of experience, to find and amplify their impulse to create. Faculty, Visiting Artists, Residents, staff, and students live together in community on our campus in Saugatuck, Michigan, where they share meals, social time, and the exchange of ideas. We actively encourage our participants to engage across differences in age, regional location, race, and gender identity, learning what it means to be a community by participating in one. Ox-Bow is a 501c3 not-for-profit organization.