Bookmaking Workshop with Madeleine Aguilar

Madeleine Aguilar introduces the practice of autobiographical comics in this interactive bookmaking workshop. Participants are led through exercises to document and translate their own personal narratives into pictures and words. Using bookbinding tools such as beeswax, bone folders, awls, and needle and thread, participants learn simple techniques to bind their homemade stories.

Madeleine Aguilar creates humorous retellings of childhood memories from each house she has lived in, often returning to the methods and imagery developed from making comics to create a narrative in her work using fiber, drawing, and printmaking mediums. Madeline was born in Phoenix, AZ in 1998 and currently attends the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of many self-published comics and is a regular contributor to F Newsmagazine. She has performed at the Queens Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Alberto Aguilar’s first large scale survey explores how the Chicago-born and based artist’s various life roles and surroundings have shaped a searching, inquisitive practice that is grounded in, and produces, a radical everyday. Aguilar’s creative work often incorporates whatever materials he has at hand and has extended into collaborations and exchanges with others, including his own family. Navigating measurement and limits, of his own body or in his ready materials—whether it’s the structure of a sheet of mini legal paper or the territory of an area rug, to name a few examples—his work bridges media, from painting and sculpture to video, installation, performance, and sound as well as the use of social media and teaching as art forms.