Ox-Bow: the art colony on a bend of the Kalamazoo River

Tucked behind the dunes outside Saugatuck, on a lazy bend of the Kalamazoo River, there’s a place where art students have been spending their summers since 1910. It’s called Ox-Bow. The name comes from the oxbow, the looping curve the river makes there. For more than a century it has been a working hideaway for painters.

It began the way good things sometimes do: a young woman invited her friends over. Elizabeth “Bessie” Bandle was studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the summer of 1910 she brought a group of fellow art students out to her family’s place near Saugatuck to paint and relax. The gathering took hold. By 1921 it had been formalized into a summer painting school, run partly out of an old riverside hotel that was half falling down. Two Art Institute instructors, Frederick Fursman and Walter Clute, were among the artists who shaped its early years.

The setting did the rest. The campus sprawls across a hundred-odd acres of forest, dune, and lagoon. There are rustic cabins and a lagoon so still it doubles as a mirror for the trees. Cut off from town by water and sand, it became exactly the kind of place where you can disappear into your work. Generations of artists did just that. Over the decades they experimented with everything from impressionism to abstraction. Ox-Bow is still tied to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and students can still earn credit for a summer spent there.

It sits a short hop from the galleries and ferry crowds of downtown Saugatuck. But it feels like another world — quiet, buggy, beautiful, and almost unchanged. More than a hundred years on, the river still makes its slow loop. And somebody is almost certainly out on the bank with a brush, trying to get the light right.