Date: Wednesday 26 March 2025, 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Venue: York Art Gallery

 1:30pm-3:30pm, £5 per person

Book tickets here

Tickets will become available approximately a month in advance.

Pick up a pencil – draw and discover!

Give yourself time to sharpen and share your drawing skills in this two-hour sketching workshop with artist Griselda Goldsbrough.

Enjoy working in sketchbooks in a relaxed and friendly group, taking inspiration from the collections at York Art Gallery. Materials provided.

These informal practical art sessions are for adults only (16+) and are suitable for absolute beginners or those who create regularly.

Sessions will run on one Wednesday each month.(Please book separately for each session).

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Date: Sunday 30 March 2025, 10:30 am - 12:30 pm
Venue: York Art Gallery

10.30am – 12.30pm, free

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Date: Sunday 13 April 2025, 10:30 am - 1:30 pm
Venue: York Art Gallery

Dust Jackets
Sunday 13 April 2025
10.30am – 1.30pm | £40
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A letterpress workshop delivered by Thin Ice Press.

Join us for a fun printing workshop, inspired by Harland Miller’s iconic dust jacket paintings. Miller looks at books as objects with their own histories of being read, cast aside, and rediscovered, and uses playful or irreverent titles to bring them into the present moment. Participants will choose from a selection of backgrounds, pre-printed on our risograph at Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print, and will experiment with type to create their own unique printed artworks. All participants will go away with a set of A3 posters, celebrating the work of Harland Miller and his passion for books and wordplay.

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Date: Wednesday 23 April 2025, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Venue: York Art Gallery

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Date: Thursday 24 April 2025, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Venue: York Art Gallery

Gallery talk: The Art of Letters by Professor Helen Smith
Thursday 24 April 2025 | 2pm
Included in gallery admission

Harland Miller is fascinated by letters, from the exquisite initials of medieval scribes to the distinctive typography of Penguin Books. In this talk, Professor Helen Smith of the University of York, will explore our collective fascination with the beauty and variety of letters, taking in everything from quirky illuminated initials to missing letters, early typographic design, and those iconic Penguin covers. Helen will explore the work of artists, including Miller, who take letters as their subject, uncovering the visual allure of letterforms and the urge to play with shape and meaning.

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Date: Wednesday 7 May 2025, 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Venue: Tempest Anderson Hall, Yorkshire Museum

Join Mike Bamforth (Department of Archaeology at the University of York) for the next in our series of free talks in association with our current exhibition, Star Carr: Life after the ice.

About the Talk

Star Carr is renowned for the exceptional survival of organic artefacts. The waterlogged wood excavated at the site allows an incredibly rare glimpse into the use of a material that, whilst used ubiquitously in the Mesolithic, almost never survives. Large deposits of wood describe lake edge platforms and possible trackways into the lake, with many well preserved wooden artefacts recovered, including a bow, digging sticks and probable spear shafts. The wood assemblage helps our understanding of the type of woodland being exploited and the ancient woodworking techniques people used to shape and form this versatile material.

From the challenges of excavating and recording 11,000 year old wood, to the experimental programmes devised to better understand what was discovered and  ultimately to some of the reconstructions this led to, this lecture aims to give a broad overview of the study of wood and woodworking technology at Star Carr and how it can help us to better understand the lives of the people who lived there.

Image credit: Cambridge Archaeological Unit

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Date: Wednesday 21 May 2025, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Venue: York Art Gallery

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Date: Thursday 22 May 2025, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Venue: York Art Gallery

Gallery talk: The Modern Art of the Book by Professor Michael White
Thursday 22 May 2025 | 2pm
Included in gallery admission

Miller took inspiration from the covers of Penguin Books, the design of which was regularised in the 1940s by the celebrated German graphic designer, Jan Tschichold. This talk will investigate the sources of Tschichold’s guidelines for modern typography and book design in experimental works of art created in the 1920s by artists such as El Lisstizky and Kurt Schwitters. The story takes us from concepts of abstract art into popular book design and then back into art with Miller.

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Date: Sunday 25 May 2025, 10:30 am - 1:30 pm
Venue: York Art Gallery

Colour
Sunday 25 May 2025
10.30am – 1.30pm | £40
Book here

A letterpress workshop delivered by Thin Ice Press.

Colour is crucial to Harland Miller’s art. He has suggested, for instance, that ‘pink … suggests levity, the same subject in green has more gravity’. Join us for a fun workshop on colour and its impacts. Participants will create a set of keywords in wood type, and we will print them in multiple colours, playing with meaning, visual effect, and emotion. All participants will go home with a set of A3 posters, celebrating what colour can do, and how Miller’s work helps us to experience it differently.

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Date: Thursday 5 June 2025, 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Venue: York Art Gallery

Harland Miller Gallery Late
Thursday 5 June 2025
6pm – 9pm | £20
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