Workshop: Ulises x Nontsikelelo Mutiti

Join Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) and Ulises for a workshop with collaborator, graphic designer, artist, and educator Nontsikelelo Mutiti in conjunction with the exhibition Ulises: Assembly. In this workshop, Mutiti will guide participants in considering the initial stages of creating a book, considering context, form, and intention, providing examples from her career and forthcoming press Enemy. Participants are asked to bring a draft Table of Contents for group discussion and workshopping.

Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwean-born visual artist and educator. She is invested in elevating the work and practices of Black peoples past, present, and future through a conceptual approach to design, publishing, archiving practices, and institution building. Mutiti holds a diploma in Multimedia from the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA) and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, with a concentration in Graphic Design. Mutiti is the Director of Graduate Studies for Graphic Design at Yale School of Art. She has held academic positions at Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA), SUNY Purchase College, and VCUart at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Ulises is a bookshop and project space dedicated to artists’ books and independent art publications that explores the relationship between publics and publications. They provide an inventory of titles not widely distributed in the United States on contemporary art, graphic design, art theory, architecture, criticism, curatorial practice, and adjacent fields. They support people who make books and expand the boundaries of what art publishing can be. Hosting projects, exhibitions, and residencies, Ulises’s open-ended programming explores publishing as an incubator for new forms of artistic, editorial, curatorial, and pedagogical practice. Ulises sees the democratic potential of publishing as a vehicle for activism, education, assembly, and exchange. The name Ulises is a tribute to the work and legacy of Ulises Carrión, a Mexican-born poet, conceptualist, and avant-garde artist who was an early pioneer and theorist of the artist’s book, and the founder of the Amsterdam-based bookshop Other Books and So (1975–78).

Ulises is the collective labor of Nerissa Cooney, Lauren Downing, Kayla Romberger, Gee Wesley, and Ricky Yanas. It was founded in 2016 by Cooney, Downing, Romberger, Wesley, Yanas, and Joel Evey, with additional contributions from Tim Belknap, Jody Harrington, and Nabil Kashyap.

Image courtesy the Artist.

Generous support for TUAG programming is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.