Art Making for the Living and the Dead

with Anders Zanichkowsky
PRINT 673 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 Lab Fee
July 13–19, 2025

When artists make work about death, we are affirming our relationships to the living world. Doing this well requires asking questions, respecting mysteries and ethics, and inviting collaboration: with the living and the dead, the past and future, the human and non-human. This interdisciplinary seminar will show students different ways to engage with death, mortality, and grief in their studio practice. We will discuss readings, films, artworks, and historical burial practices, and develop our own work in response through drawing, creative writing, and monoprint, relief, and cyanotype printmaking. Final projects can also use performance, video, poetry, or other media. A major topic for the seminar is Necropolitics: How social inequality and oppression defines an era of untimely death for people whose lives are deemed “ungrievable” (Judith Butler) and thus not worth saving; and creates communities of “disprized mourners'' (Dagwami Woubshet) whose grief goes unacknowledged and unhealed. We will discuss writings by those theorists as well as Christina Sharpe, John Berger, Teju Cole, and Mosab Abu Toha, and look at artists responding to and resisting the conditions of the Necrocene, including Alfredo Jaar, Tilda Swinton, Anna Campbell, and filmmakers Itziar Barrio and Tourmaline (“Atlantic is a Sea of Bones.”) Students will work through short but complex texts together, and learn to use creative writing to develop their own projects in printmaking or other media.

Anders Zanichkowsky, Burial Blanket, 2022, handwoven cotton with naturally dyed weft, 80 x 100 in.

Anders Zanichkowsky (they/them) is an artist, writer, and activist making work about grief, desire, and our longing for another world. They are equally at home in traditional craft and new media, working primarily in printmaking, textiles, video, and performance. Since 2021 their main studio practice has been the founding and running of their business, Burial Blankets, where they make handwoven shrouds for green burial meant for a lifetime of enjoyment and reflection. Anders has been an artist-in-residence with The Arctic Circle sailing expedition in Svalbard, Røst AiR in Sápmi/Norway, and the Chicago Park District's Cultural Asset Mapping Project. Their work has been exhibited across the United States, Europe, and Australia including the Wisconsin Film Festival, and featured in NewCity, the Chicago Sun Times, and on WBEZ. Awards for their research include a DCASE Individual Artist Grant, a SPARK grant from Chicago Artists Coalition, and a Temkin Award for their MFA thesis show You Are Running Into Danger. Anders has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019) and a BA from Hampshire College (2008).