Katie Kiesewetter

May 2022 | Iowa City

Graphic Design // Typography // Zine Making

Industry experiences, no matter whose body they embody, are diverse and loaded with feminist & political & racial & social & other discourse due to the complicated intersections of identity markers, labor, and class status binding us all together in this gorgeous mess of a lifestyle. This zine discusses the benefits, setbacks, and various complications that come with working in service and hospitality. I also did a little *field* research and polled my friends and the public on a few industry-related topics that are smattered throughout the zine in order to present stories other than my own.

Behind, Sharp! presented much of the research for my MA exhibition, shown in May 2022 in the Ana Mendieta Gallery and reprised in September 2022 in the K.K. Merker Gallery.

April 2023 | Iowa City

Graphic Design // Typography // Zine Making

Behind, Sharp! #2 follows the theme of the first issue but with some Parisian flair. In August of 2022, I took a trip to France after a devastating breakup. This issue includes transcriptions of my handwritten journals and an article that outlines the differences in wages, tips, and compensation for United States and French front-of-house service and hospitality workers.

With Behind, Sharp! being the genesis of me sharing my graduate research in zine form to reach a wider audience (appearing in my MA show), Behind, Sharp! #2 was featured in my MFA show. Both are cited in my Master’s Thesis: “Gratuitous Hospitality.”

September 2024 | Chicago

Graphic Design // Typography // Zine Making

Behind, Sharp! #3 is a natural continuation of the series but holds focus on the City of Chicago, its labor laws, and my experiences working at a bar in Wrigleyville. Also included is a variety of tomfoolery, including horoscopes, a future-predicting maze, and a quart-deli sketch exercise.

December 2021 | Iowa City

Graphic Design // Typography // Zine Making

The course addresses knowledge-production from an experiential, hands-on approach with research materials acting as informative and supplementary to students’ creative work. Drawing from DIY culture and Riot Grrrl feminism, the assignment structure remains open to allow students to create their own content and realize the power of self-authorship as they learn from primary source materials that were also self-authored.

It was important to me that the research and sketchbook exercises live in the world, too, so I made the syllabus into a zine and distribute it in bookstores, zine libraries, and online.

PRINT & FOLD YOUR OWN ZINE!
The PDF is available to download by clicking here. (You just don’t get my cute lil’ signature at the bottom of the letter or the sassy pink paper.) It is intended to be printed front/back on a tabloid sheet of paper, then assembled into the traditional single-cut, eight-page zine. If any of the prompts inspire you, please share your work with me on Instagram! @radkatdesign

December 2018 | Iowa City

Letterpress // Typography // Zine Making // Binding

My Apologies (and other things that aren’t my fault) is a poetic zine about the many ways in which femme-identifying people are expected to apologize for even the most mundane actions, whether they’re sorry or not.

October 2018 | Iowa City

Graphic Design // Photography // Zine Making // Sticker Making

Modern Witches was initially made for my BFA exhibition, Burn Her. While it existed nicely in a gallery space, I wanted to take the piece a step further by distributing the zines in various locations in downtown Iowa City before the 2018 General Election to encourage voters to elect representatives who will represent women. I enlisted the help of a few friends so that we could get both the zines and some corresponding stickers in the hands of actual human beings (as well as in as many bars and public bathrooms) as possible.* It was important to me not to exclude the public by confining this piece to the gallery. The response was nothing but positive. Many people enjoyed the humor of the text and image pairing while concurrently appreciating the severity of the topic at hand.

*Special thanks to my dearest friends, Alexi Alexakis and Zach Suiter, for assisting me with zine distribution and sticker sticking. It was a pleasure.

Modern Witches (the zine) was recently acquired by the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art!