Home, Studio, Archive: exploring Feliks Topolski's life, work and legacy

Join our Archivist Cecilia Borgenstam in a conversation with Dr. Sue Breakell and Dr. Harriet Atkinson where they explore how space and materiality impact the provenance of artist archives. Rooted in Feliks Topolski's studio, the discussion will examine how artist workspaces can function simultaneously as sites of creative production and living repositories for their own history, and look closely at why art, material, and space remain inseparable in Feliks’ legacy.

Dr Harriet Atkinson is a historian of art and design at University of Brighton’s Centre for Design History. She leads University of Brighton’s MA Curating Collections and Heritage in collaboration with Brighton and Hove Museums. Her book Showing Resistance: propaganda and modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53 (Manchester University Press, 2024) won this year's Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period 1800-1960. She is currently part of the project team for the international project Graphic Design Histories for Creative Dissent, which focuses on graphic materials used in new social movements across Brazil, South Africa and the UK. 

Dr Sue Breakell is Archive Director and Principal Research Fellow at the University of Brighton Design Archives, and co-leads the Museums, Archives, Exhibitions strand of the University’s Centre for Design History. Recent research centres on archives as subject and method in art and design history. She co-edited (with Wendy Russell) The Materiality of the Archive: Creative Practice in Context (Routledge, 2023).

Cecilia Borgenstam is the Project Archivist at Topolski Studio, where she is leading the cataloguing of 6,000 drawings and business records by Feliks Topolski. Previously, she managed the studio of photographer Richard Misrach in the US, overseeing his professional archive and collection care. She holds degrees from Lund University and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her practice focuses on bringing structural cohesion to complex, hybrid artist archives and making them accessible.

Feliks Topolski (1907-1989) was a Polish born, London-based, artist who set out to “trap the spirit and shape of our time”, drawing almost exclusively from life, among people, with compassion, dedication and daring. He was a war and reportage artist and muralist and his drawings are alive with the movement, sound, tension and energy of the places and people he compulsively drew. Together his works form an extraordinary eye witness record of the C20th. The archive contains his reportage drawing, writing and painting and is currently being catalogued with the support of an ‘Archives Revealed’ grant from the National Archives.

This event is FREE, but booking is essential.

Access
The studio entrance and fire exit has two steps, see attached photo - there is a portable wheelchair ramp and wheelchair accessible toilet, please let us know in advance if you require them.

During this event, Studio may take photos for promotional purposes. If you'd prefer not to be included, please let us know.