Spring 2023 Lecture: Sleboda

Don’t miss the final lecture in our 2023 Spring Lecture Series on Apr. 17 featuring Christopher Sleboda and Kathleen Sleboda, Drawn Down Books.

Get to know Christopher Sleboda and Kathleen Sleboda

Christopher Sleboda is a designer, illustrator, curator, and educator. He currently is an Associate Professor of Art at Boston University, where he teaches graphic design in the University’s School of Visual Arts. From 2005 to 2020, he served as the Director of Graphic Design at the Yale University Art Gallery. In addition to overseeing graphic design and wayfinding for the museum—from exhibition identities, motion graphics, and signage to brochures, programs, and art books— Sleboda worked closely with graphic design students in the Yale MFA program, organizing talks by visiting graphic designers and curating the annual Odds and Ends Art Book Fair. In 2022, he launched Multiple Formats, a yearly symposium and book fair focused on artist books, graphic design, and pedagogy. Sleboda has also taught at RISD since 2016.

Sleboda is the co-founder of Draw Down Books, a platform where he designs, publishes and sells titles that focus on graphic design, typography, photography, illustration, architecture, and art. Draw Down has offered Sleboda opportunities to curate exhibitions, exhibit and speak at artist book fairs, and take an active role in the independent publishing community.

Since 2003 Sleboda has produced work under the studio name Gluekit. This award-winning practice provides graphic images and photo-illustration for an international clientele, with projects ranging from theater graphics to editorial illustrations and book covers. His designs have won numerous awards, including recognition by AIGA 50 Books, the Type Directors Club, Print magazine, and various national and international competitions. Sleboda’s work is featured in over a dozen books about graphic design, product design, and illustration, and he is the author of three monographs, Cleon Peterson (2015); Hardcore Fanzine: Good and Plenty, 1989-1993 (2019); and I Got Something to Say: Poster Inventory, 2013-2021 (2022).

Kathleen Sleboda is an art director, graphic designer and illustrator. Her work crosses disciplines and often weaves together the acts of making, curating, collaborating and documenting. She is co-founder and design director of Draw Down Books and from 2013 to 2019 she curated the website Women of Graphic Design.

For the past 15 years she has designed books and printed materials for cultural institutions while lecturing and writing about graphic design, independent publishing, Indigenous knowledge systems and the preservation of cultural heritage. Sleboda is also a principal of the illustration studio Gluekit and has worked on commissions for clients in publishing and advertising across a range of media. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications about design and illustration. She currently teaches graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design and Boston University, and has been a visiting critic at the California College of the Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, Parsons School of Design, the University of Connecticut, the University of Utah, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Yale University.

From 2003 to 2008 Sleboda worked as an archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where her focus was on the preservation of audio and visual materials as well as on improving community access to collections created by and about American Indian and First Nation peoples. Originally from San Francisco, she graduated from Yale University and the University of British Columbia and now splits her time between Boston and Connecticut, on the traditional homelands of the Quinnipiac, Pawtucket and Massachuset. She is Nlaka’pamux and a member of the Coldwater Indian Band of Merritt, British Columbia.

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Unless otherwise noted, lectures are held in McCarty Auditorium in the Art + Architecture Building at 5:30 p.m. For last-minute changes to this event, check this page as well as the college’s Facebook page.