Piotr Szyhalski: We Are Working All the Time!

The Weisman’s survey exhibition, PIOTR SZYHALSKI: WE ARE WORKING ALL THE TIME!, features works in a variety of media across three decades of Szyhalski’s prolific and pioneering practice, including poster design, web projects, mail art, painting, installation, and public performance. The exhibition will include a number of artist-led “activations” in and around WAM, with moments of performance, printmaking, and in-gallery “office hours” by Szyhalski on select Fridays throughout the show’s run.

A Polish-born and -trained, American multimedia artist, Szyhalski has built a dynamic, richly varied body of work over the last thirty years and has exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. He is Professor of Design and Media Arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design; his work as an educator is deeply intertwined with his artistic practice. This survey is the first exhibition to feature artworks spanning the breadth of his extraordinary career, critically considered together. 

Most recently, Szyhalski is best known for his daily chronicle of life in America during the height of the pandemic: COVID 19: Labor Camp Report (2021).  For the Report he created a new, hand-drawn poster each day for 225 days—a vivid visual digest of current “news shrapnel”—shared via the Labor Camp Instagram feed. The COVID Report posters, which received national and international press attention, will be on view as part of the exhibition at WAM—all the more compelling when experienced in the context of ideas threaded through his larger body of work.
 

Opening Reception Sept 15th
 WAM host's their first big event since 2022 with an opening reception on September 15th from 7-9 PM. This is a ticketed event. $25 for general admission. $20 for WAM members, UMN faculty and staff. Free for students. Light refreshments will be provided in the Riverview Gallery. Learn more.
 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Piotr Szyhalski’s work has been exhibited worldwide at such venues as the International Center of Photography, the New York Expo Film Festival, Siggraph, ISEA Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the San Jose Museum of Art, and Experimenta Design in Lisbon, Portugal, and featured in a variety of catalogs and publications. His pieces are in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others.

In addition to his own performance-based projects, he was commissioned to develop large-scale, interactive, live projections for Wim Mertens quartet in Brussels (1998), the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (2001), and VocalEssence (2004). He released two CDs as Labor Camp Orchestra for the multimedia installations Theater of Operations (2007, 2009).

 Editor's Note:
If you would like to learn more about the artist, check out our profile from the McKnight Visual Art Fellow Series as well as this wonderful piece by Mike Curran. Szyhalski was also one of 70 artists who took part in our MPLSART Sketchbook Project.