Drawing the Invisible

ASL interpretation and live captioning in English will be provided. If you would like to request interpretation in another language, please email lhurwitz@bklynlibrary.org, and we will do our best to accommodate.

One of the special powers of comics is how artists can illustrate unseen feelings and forces. In this 90-minute workshop, we’ll use visual metaphor to draw things about your body that no one can see. Workshop leader, Shay Mirk, will share comics that show examples of how cartoonists visualize unseen elements, from feelings like anxiety and desire, to invisible disabilities and illnesses, to cultural systems like fatphobia and white supremacy. She will ask participants to think about parts of their lives and bodies that cannot be physically seen and suggest prompts for illustrating those invisible realities.

All attendees will receive a free snail mailed copy of the Cool Work x Interesting People: Graphic Medicine zine.

Shay Mirk is a graphic journalist, editor, and teacher. She is a contributing editor at comics magazine, The Nib, and author of Guantanamo Voices (Abrams, 2020), an illustrated oral history of Guantanamo Bay prison, which Kirkus called “extraordinary… an eye-opening, damning indictment of one of America’s worst trespasses.” She is also a zine-maker who once made a zine every day for a year. Her comics have been featured in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Bitch, and NPR. She is white, nonbinary, and queer.