Join us for Samizdat Sundays—hands‑on textile workshops inspired by the spirit of creative resistance and DIY culture found in samizdat traditions. Each week offers a different project, connecting archival stories of subversion with contemporary making.
We encourage participants to bring an item each week—a T‑shirt, a pair of jeans, or any textile you’re ready to transform, repair, or experiment with.
Each session is free, open to all skill levels, and guided by artists who delight in subversion and play. Come for one or come for all—together we’ll stitch, alter, repair, and imagine new forms of expression.
Join us for Samizdat Sundays—hands‑on textile workshops inspired by the spirit of creative resistance and DIY culture found in samizdat traditions. Each week offers a different project, connecting archival stories of subversion with contemporary making.
October 4: From One to Many
Taking inspiration from Jan Sawka’s Invasion/Trees series, which was featured in the Undercurrents I show in 2023, we will tell a story through a series of three or more pieces that share the same elements but demonstrate a transformation. Sawka’s series began with a print of a tree in a landscape. Each piece in the series is based on this same image, yet each one is different, and a story is told through a growing red cloud or fog that seems to overtake the image as the pieces progress. We will not begin with prints, but can echo Sawka’s strategy by choosing an element (or two) that will appear in each of the pieces in our series. Perhaps your element will be a shape (circle, square, triangle, etc.) or a color (blue, purple, yellow, etc.), or a pattern or texture (textile works are welcome!). Begin with a shared element and see where the series/story takes you!
October 11: “OPEN AT YOUR OWN RISK”
Taking inspiration from Schaden (Damage), an artist magazine produced in East Berlin in the 1980s, we will make a sealed “magazine” that can only be read by cutting open the edges of the envelope that contains it. In exemplary samizdat fashion, Schaden magazines were handmade and limited in scope, with just 15 copies of each issue produced. The magazine contained poems, prints, charts, musings, photographs and ephemera, including pages made of foil and tissue paper. Hidden, secret, and filled with discarded and surprising materials…what’s not to love?!
We are approaching Days of the Dead and Halloween, times when many remember their lost loved ones. Perhaps your Schaden-style magazine is a memorial book to one you’ve lost (person, pet, idea, place, etc), or perhaps yours is a continuation of the series pieces we made last week. Like the Schaden magazines, ours will be an envelope with pages inside that are stapled/sewn/fixed on the binder side so that the envelope has to be cut open for the magazine to be read. We will have a collection of envelopes of various sizes, including some that are absurdly small and others that are quite large. Perhaps your Schaden-style magazine will fit in your back pocket; perhaps yours will need a custom-made envelope because it is so large. As always, see where these ideas lead you and go with it! Your envelope (and its contents) may be made of cloth, requiring an unraveling to open, or perhaps your envelope will be an idea of an envelope rather than a physical thing. Will yours have a warning on it, as I’ve titled this week’s project, or will yours have an invitation, like a bottle of potion in Alice’s Wonderland, asking someone to “Open Me?” Or perhaps yours will have only an address or no marks at all.
November 8: Moon Flags
The new exhibition, “Competing Cosmologies,” explores the intersection of art and science during the Cold War, a time of space exploration and interplanetary dreaming, when people were mistaking floating balloons for alien spaceships and writers, painters, and screenwriters were imagining clashes with martians and other creatures from far off galaxies (who almost always had bodies and faces that were similar to ours, with two eyes, two arms, and two legs), all while governments were in a race to put men (and dogs!) into space and onto the moon. The race to the moon was, apparently, in part a race to place a flag on the moon, which is what Buzz Aldrin did in 1969’s Apollo 11 mission, when he planted the United States flag (brought in a “flag transportation assembly”) on the moon before blasting off back to Earth. Aldrin later said that he suspected the flag was blown down during the blast off, but even if it still stands, it is most likely bleached out to white as some of the other nylon moon flags have done since, thanks to the powerful, unmitigated rays of the sun. The US has placed six flags so far and China has placed one (in 2020) and I think it’s interesting to imagine the flags turned into the white flags of surrender, as everything ultimately surrenders to the sun and the processes of decay inherent in our beautiful, life-giving universe.
For today’s workshop, we’re going to make a flag to honor our celestial companion. Will your moon flag be in reverence of the moon or possessive of it? Will your flag be hung above your moon altar or tucked into a box and kept on your fireplace mantle, unfurled, perhaps, when you light a fire, a replicant of the blazing sun, in your fireplace? What do you imagine a flag to be? The moon to be? Will your flag be bleached by the sun’s rays, as the moon appears to be, or will it be full of Earth’s colors? Your flag may be a shoulder patch or a paper collage, or a full-fledged patchwork or embroidered flag, or perhaps an idea of a flag, held in space by concept rather than a physical thing. Let’s bring the brilliant celestial body of our night sky down to earth today!
November 15: What Is Above Is Below
At the second-to-last regular season game at Dodgers Stadium this year, a wayward eared grebe flew into the game, landing on their belly in the center of the outfield. The grebe, it seemed, had mistaken the shiny green grass of the field for the aqueous plants on a placid lake, fooled by the day-for-night lights of the stadium, perhaps, as they made their migratory way to another part of the state. Fortunately, the poor fowl found their way out of the false pond and flew out of the stadium, presumably not much worse for their unfortunate belly flop.
I thought of this when I was thinking of project ideas around the new “Competing Cosmologies” exhibition, which explores the intersection of art and science during the Cold War. This global competition has led to countless satellites being sent into outer space, our constellations cluttered with competing, unmanned space contraptions, some pointing down spying eyes, others sending down internet signals to bring access to the most remote regions of the earth. There are companies that want to send tens of thousands of satellite mirrors into space that would turn day to night anywhere (with precision, they claim) by reflecting the sun’s light onto the earth. How confused will we all be once the sky is filled with satellites and mirrors, when one is not wishing on a star but a satellite, and when there is no longer any “night” at all to hold the night sky?
We truly can see that what is above is below. The trash of our world now fills the skies. But here at Samizdat, we know that “trash” may be transformed into treasure, so today, let’s work with our discarded materials to turn “trash” into a two-sided, or perhaps two-facing map that represents the skyscape above and the landscape we live on. Perhaps your “map” is like the sky-moon-stars body of the ancient Egyptian goddess Nut as portrayed in tombs, or perhaps yours is like the remarkable Skidi Pawnee star chart at the Field Museum in Chicago, an animal hide marked with all of the visible stars in the North American sky, or perhaps your map will be like the cluster of dots hovering above an animal figure in the cave at Lascaux. What happens when we bring the stars and moon down to earth and carry them in our pockets? What happens when we imagine the mountains and oceans in the universe, when we see their undulations and rhythms in the spaces between stars and on the surface of the moon? Day-for-night, night-for-day; signals going back and forth; material above, material below (and what is “above” and what is “below” in our wall-less, roofless universe anyway?)…these are all notions to ponder as you make your map.
About the teaching artist
Kate Ingold is an LA-based artist and poet working with the discarded, the damaged, and the worn out. Materials and methods include textiles, collage, photography, video, ceramics, and performative installation. She works in series driven by conceptual concerns and is currently making work in two interwoven projects: Relics for Future Rituals and Damaged Goods/Small Repairs.
RSVPs for this free program do not guarantee admission. Limited seating is available on a first come, first served basis.
An ADA-accessible entrance to the Wende Museum Community Center is available through the garden gate from the parking lot. This gate will be opened approximately 15 minutes prior to the program.