Book-binding workshop with Regin Igloria
Heavy Lift | Book Binding Workshop | Installation View | Press Release | Gowanus Open Studios
Book-binding workshop: October 17, 2-6pm (free, all ages)
Who doesn’t love a blank book — it holds so much potential. For diagrams or a diary, for poems and sketches, recipes and todo lists, mementos and manifestos!
Imagine a blank book that is handmade, from all sorts of paper and bound in interesting ways with twigs, cord or snaps? Even better.
Within Heavy LIFT Regin Igloria will teach the book binding workshop. Regin knows that making books is a hands-on way to help connect a community or family.
Books are small, intimate and tactile. Regin encourages people to use the things that are already in their house when making these books because it helps to reduce trash and also makes them more unique and personal. feel free to bring any materials you want to include.
Born 1974 Manila, Philippines. Lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Regin Igloria maintains a studio practice which revolves around teaching and working in arts administration. He teaches a variety of visual arts courses in multiple disciplines for numerous organizations and institutions. In 2010 he founded North Branch Projects, a community bookbinding initiative which allows him to combine aspects of his studio practice, teaching, and the book arts.
His teaching experience began at Marwen, where he also took on various administrative capacities. An alumnus of the youth program, he helped establish their first Alumni Advisory Board and served as a co-chair, managed the Alumni Gallery, and served as a teaching artist for many of their studio courses as well as national study trips to New York City, Maine, Boston, and Minneapolis. He taught for the children’s program at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, where he also served as a studio assistant and worked with many influential artists. Academic teaching experiences followed, including a semester at Rhode Island School of Design, Adult Continuing Education classes at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois State University, and currently Carthage College.
For eleven years, he managed and directed the residency program at The Ragdale Foundation, where he gained much of his arts administration experience. Currently, he oversees education programs and multiple administrative tasks as the Director of Education. His work at Ragdale helps create opportunities for advancing the work and supporting the creative processes of other artists, a
Nature and travel have always been prevalent themes in his work, but actually immersing himself in both allowed him to understand its direct impact on the human condition. A solo bicycle trip done on the West Coast and exposure to the outdoor lifestyle in Colorado brought forth many simple truths: 1) everything he wants he cannot afford, 2) the things he wants he does not really need, and 3) he can never work enough, even in solitude. Ironically, he has since found himself living and working in very wealthy communities where luxury and privilege daily temptations, a struggle brought upon himself only by choosing to be an artist. His work considers the compromise between these kinds of opposing forces, the efforts that yield loss, the accumulation of equipment that becomes more burden than blessing, and the constant search for a better place.
Regin collaborates regularly as a member of Free Air, an evolving group of performing artists, as well as with groups who do community work, both as makers and as facilitators. This includes Compound Yellow and Students Run Chicago.
