‘Office Hours’ with A.F. Oehmke

The assistant professor of art is nuts about her workspace in Horvitz Hall, where she turns walnuts and pecans into ink — and much more — for her artistic endeavors.

By Ryan E. Smith | Photos by Simone Martel ’27
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A.F. Oehmke

A.F. Oehmke, assistant professor of art, in her Horvitz Hall 208 office.

The uncluttered, modern space on the second floor of Horvitz Hall where A.F. Oehmke works serves both as her office and de facto studio. Those two complementary functions are on display on every wall, every shelf, every surface.

And so, the flat filing cabinets that sit on the smooth, concrete floor are filled with student-made books and prints from her “Design Foundations” class — as well as her own laser-etched, mirrored acrylic art featuring phrases from African-American Vernacular English.

Oehmke’s office in Horvitz Hall is a space for her to work with students and on her own art.
On Oehmke’s bookshelf, publications like “Graphic Design: The New Basics” mingle with Dr. Seuss, a brick and a tube of caulk.
Oehmke stores some of her art in her office’s flat filing cabinet.
“My practice is really about: How does the work create a dialogue within itself? So they’re all finished, but they’re also all kind of always in progress as well.”

The bookshelves next to Oehmke’s large U-shaped desk are home to texts about typography and graphic design — and also painters tape, dropcloths and an 80-pound bag of concrete. 

The white walls are adorned with print-outs about Department of Studio Art classes and College civil rights policies — and a large, framed piece of art for which Oehmke used walnuts to make both the stamps and the ink that she used.

Of all the things in Oehmke’s office that make an impression, the nuts may be the most personal. There are hundreds of them taken from places of great meaning to her — her grandmother’s backyard, her family’s ancestral home in Mississippi, and, of course, Kenyon.

Walnuts and pecans fill jars and buckets, separated by where they came from. “My work is really interested in place,” she says.
The nuts come from her grandmother’s backyard in Flint, Michigan; a plot of land in Mississippi where her grandmother was raised; and Kenyon’s campus in Gambier. “Thinking about those trees is also tracing this migratory lineage that my family took,“ Oehmke says.

The nuts are packed in oversized jars, mixing with water and denatured alcohol to create ink. They’re collected in buckets, where Oehmke hopes the little worms living inside them escape and leave beautiful, wiggly trails on bits of paper. And they have left their mark on her art — quite literally — when she sometimes uses them as stamps dipped in their own ink.

“WHO IS WE,” asks one of Oehmke’s pieces of art, which dominates the room. Like many of her works, it makes use of African-American Vernacular English, walnut stamps, walnut ink and — you guessed it — a homemade frame of walnut wood. “The reason I work in this scale is because it’s what fits in my car,” she says, before adding, “I did recently get a bigger car, so ….”

Oehmke arrived at Kenyon in 2023 as a visiting faculty member after receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in interdisciplinary sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Master of Fine Arts in 2D design from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. She was promoted to a tenure-track position a year later.

Since then, she’s made this space in Horvitz Hall her own — a welcoming place for her students to seek advice, a robust environment for thinking and creating, and an occasional home away from home for her Greater Swiss Mountain Dog, appropriately named Pistachio.

Students in Oehmke’s ARTS 105 (Design Foundations) class this semester made prints using a typeface they created out of LEGO bricks.
Oehmke’s large desk is mostly empty but is home to a large cup filled with paint brushes, scissors, and colored pencils.
There’s also a bold, blue piggy bank — a remnant of a summer camp where she used it to teach painting to 8-year-olds. Underneath the desk is a bed for her dog and occasional officemate, Pistachio.

“Office Hours” is an occasional series that highlights faculty and staff members through their work spaces.