Skill Level: Beginner To Advanced

Coil-building is a foundational ceramic hand-building process with principles used to make things that encompass pottery, sculpture, and even architecture. The techniques taught will lean heavily on understanding materiality (clay), the sensitivity of touch, and ideas of structure. In this workshop, students will engage all three of these elements; learning how to coil-build an array of forms, volumes, and structures as ceramic sculpture. In this amazing workshop, issues of intention, scale, and exploration of form will be shared.

Ebitenyefa Baralaye is a Detroit-based ceramicist, sculptor, designer, and educator. His work explores cultural, spiritual, and material translations of objects, text, bodies, and symbols interpreted through a diaspora lens and abstracted around the aesthetics of craft and design. He studied at Rhode Island School of Design and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Baralaye has exhibited at David Klein Gallery, Friedman Benda Gallery, and the Korea Ceramic Foundation, among others. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.

Course Fee: $500 + $60 Lab Fee + $40 Non-Refundable Registration Fee

Skill Level: Beginner to Advanced

Discovering Your Creativity is a hands-on workshop in which students dive straight into creating acrylic paintings from initial concepts to a finished piece. Attendees will learn basic painting techniques and will be encouraged to draw upon learned life experiences, new ideas and underlying inspiration. This always dynamic workshop will give the student new insights as to how to take risks, learn from experimentation, and make artistic expression a fulfilling life-long endeavor. The fun is always electric in this very popular workshop at the foot of legendary Thomas Cole Mountain.

Kárin Lowney-Seed is a professional artist and designer whose work demonstrates a bold, confident and colorful painting style. Lowney-Seed’s prolific career has spanned the fine arts and design worlds. Featured as a popular guest artist at The Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts, Kárin takes personal pride in elevating her student’s artistic talents by sharing her deep knowledge of technique, color and space. She holds an MFA and BA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Karin currently makes her home and studio in New Jersey.

Course Fee: $400 + $50 Lab Fee + $40 Non-Refundable Registration Fee

Skill Level: Beginner To Advanced

This workshop will focus on technical skills, cultivating curiosity, and learning from the surprises that arise in a studio practice. We will spend time making pots on and off the wheel, discuss clay’s material poetics, and will prepare together for a salt firing. Technical demonstrations will include wheel throwing, altering, trimming, hand building, slab making, and slip and glaze considerations. We will fire the soda/salt kiln to Cone 6. Potters of all skill levels are welcome!

Katie Fee grew up in Low Country, South Carolina. Fee earned her BA in Art and Geology from the William & Mary and her MFA from Alfred University. Fee’s work has led her to kiln pads and clay studios around the world - most recently to France and Japan - as a visiting artist, wood firing specialist, instructor, and project manager. She currently works full time as Studio Manager for Theaster Gates Studios in Chicago, Illinois.

Course Fee: $500 + $60 Lab Fee + $40 Non-Refundable Registration Fee

Skill Level: Beginner to Advanced

This class will explore the world of plaster mold making! We will cover every step of the mold making process from start to finish. To begin, the class will discuss prototype selection and development. Utilizing found objects or sculpted clay forms, students will explore a myriad of mold making methods including draft molds and multiple part molds for complex objects. To finish out the week, the class will learn the process of slipcasting and how to make multiples at home. Mold making is a series of problem solving opportunities and this class will be catered to the students' individual goals - the more complex the better!

Jackie Head discovered her love of slipcasting porcelain tile forms and mold making while studying abroad in Jingdezhen, China in the summer of 2014. This experience heavily influenced the work she would go on to make while obtaining her BFA in Ceramics from Indiana University and MFA in Ceramic Art from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Jackie has completed residencies at The Archie Bray Foundation, the Cité Internationale des Arts, and the Morean Center for Clay. She currently resides in her hometown, Indianapolis, where she maintains a private studio.

Course Fee: $500 + $90 + $40 Non-Refundable Registration Fee

Skill Level: Beginner to Advanced

A one day workshop covering all you could want to learn about color, and then a little bit more. No matter where your interests in color lie, this workshop will be an in-depth exploration of this essential element of the creative arts. The workshop will cover what color is and how we use it. Its glorious history and function will be the subject of lecture, demonstration, and hands-on workshopping. While this is a painting focused workshop, the underlying principles color are transferable to other mediums. Come join the fun in this place of bountiful summer color.

Daniel Lloyd-Miller is a painter concerned with place and working from observation. He carefully chooses places to paint in order to harmonize and better understand them. This act of delving into and absorbing a particular place promotes an intensity of experience. He's currently exploring motifs of ‘visibility’ in addition to acute life-paintings of people on the train and other vignettes. Originally from Vermont, Daniel received his BFA degree from Mass Art, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has worked in Japan and France and has exhibited in multiple solo and group shows. Currently, Lloyd-Miller teaches painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Course Fee: $100 + $30 Lab Fee + $40 Non-Refundable Registration Fee

Skill Level: Beginner to Advanced

This workshop will cover everything you want to know about painting outdoors, and more! This two day workshop will bring participants outside with their paint of choice, geared up, and ready to work. We'll cover finding subjects, tracking light, and all the considerations you need to keep in mind when bringing your studio outside. This popular workshop is a unique opportunity to learn ways of delving more deeply into the complexities of garden and nature to create vibrant memories of summertime once the December snows arrive.

Daniel Lloyd-Miller is a painter concerned with place and working from observation. He carefully chooses places to paint in order to harmonize with and better understand them. This act of delving into and absorbing a special place promotes an intensity of experience. He's currently exploring motifs of ‘visibility’ in addition to acute life-paintings of people on the train and other vignettes. Originally from Vermont, Daniel received his BFA degree from Mass Art, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has worked in Japan and France and has exhibited in multiple solo and group shows. Currently, Lloyd-Miller teaches painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Course Fee: $200 + $50 Lab Fee + $40 Non-Refundable Registration Fee

Skill Level: Beginner To Advanced

The use of locally sourced, or “Wild Clays,” is hugely popular. Unlike commercially produced clays, wild clays can be highly variable and often possess properties that are uncommon, offering significant challenges to the production of studio art. This workshop will systematically demonstrate, step by step, how to characterize and incorporate wild clay into processes that can be duplicated in the studio. This workshop will address the unique properties of wild clay, blending with other raw materials to improve behavior, addressing problems, and frank discussions regarding whether the clay is worth trying to tame. For the first time in a workshop, students will be invited to bring samples of wild clay and have them scientifically analyzed so their local clay can be integrated into a Unity Formula. How exciting is THAT?! Don’t worry if you can’t find clay. This workshop has you covered. Come join us in the Catskills at the eastern terminus of the Ceramics Corridor!

Dr. William Carty retired in 2020 from Alfred University after 27 years as a Ceramic Engineering professor focusing on ceramic processing, traditional ceramics, clay bodies and glazes. He is now a consultant to the ceramic industry, lives in New Hampshire, and still teaches “Ceramic Science for the Artist” in the summer. He is a world-recognized ceramic expert and conducts research and advises graduate students at Alfred University. Dr. Carty is noted for his exceptional, and much appreciated, work providing links between artists and materials science.

Course Fee: $500 + $105 Lab Fee + $40 Non-Refundable Registration Fee

Skill Level: Beginner to Advanced

The Catskills are alive with nature. Learn to embroider and sculpt those complex buzzy, harbingers of summer. And while we might not want to admit this, bugs are among our most important cousins on this planet. As you know, they do a lot for us. Now let’s do something for them! Students will learn to create wings embroidered on fabric and wire and then sculpt them into an insect body to create a three-dimensional sculpture of the beautiful, sometimes annoying, invertebrate. Students will be taught basic and complex embroidery techniques. There will be fun discussions and demonstrations on how to analyze the subject matter and then create a strategy for sculpting the object. This workshop is perfect for those who want to learn embroidery and for those who want to sculpt.

Deborah Simon’s art focuses on humanity’s discordant relationship with animals. Drawing from her work in veterinary clinics and the Bronx Zoo Exhibition Department, her art examines how people consider, use, and disregard animals. Her sculptures and paintings of animals have been exhibited around the world, most recently a solo show, “Embroidered Morphologies” at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, Illinois, and in “Lagomorph: Rabbits and Hares in Contemporary Craft” at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts. “White Rabbit”, a solo window installation was featured at AHA Fine Art in New York City. She has received numerous fellowships including the Chulitna Lodge Creative Summer Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Saint Ann’s Warehouse Puppet Lab, Sculpture Space, Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program and the Cultural Space Subsidy Program. She has received grants from the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and NYSCA. Following studies at the Repin Institute of Art in Leningrad, USSR, Simon received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and MFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts.

Course Fee: $300 + $40 Lab Fee + $40 Non-Refundable Registration Fee