Join Chicago-based visiting artist Susy Bielak for a hands-on printmaking workshop exploring migration, patterns, and ornament.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote, “to understand is to perceive patterns.” In this workshop, you're invited to engage patterns around us and patterns of your own design. Bielak will guide you through free writing exercises to evoke place and belonging, and you'll print and personalize a keepsake broadside poster. The design of these posters is inspired by decorative patterns from around the world, including Owen Jones’ 1858 Grammar of Ornament. 

Susy Bielak is a multimedia artist who mines personal and political histories, texts, and archives to find the allegorical possibilities and poetics of people, places, and materials. She works across drawing, performance, photography, video, and writing. Together with Fred Schmalz and collaborators across the university and beyond, Bielak is developing the multifaceted project I am made to leave I am made to return, anchored in the University of Pittsburgh’s Nationality & Heritage Rooms and Library Archives.