Piotr Szyhalski

In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and political and social upheaval in the United States, Szyhalski drew and inked a poster a day from March 24 until the U.S. presidential election on November 3, 2020.>Each of the 225 appeared daily on Instagram. Some were printed by followers and pasted on walls in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and Philadelphia; and the entire series was published as a book. The New York Times said the series used "the style and language of propaganda posters to capture the pain and absurdity of the pandemic, with heavy doses of sarcasm and rage at the federal government’s response... [T]he works are meticulous but piercing, like a carefully released primal scream."

Szyhalski received the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship for Visual Artists in 2009 and 2017.

"Originally premiered in 2001, Heitzeg’s massive opus was augmented this time by state-of-the-art graphics created by students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, impressively directed by Piotr Szyhalski and projected on a huge screen above the chorus. Each of the symphony’s six sections were introduced by vertical lines oscillating back and forth, leaving words in their wake, and interspersed with images of wood being sawed, shaped, and sanded to construct a chair, reflecting a poignant recurring sentence by Pablo Neruda, 'Peace begins in a single chair.'"

Piotr Szyhalski is a Polish-born and trained multimedia artist working in the United States since 1990. He has produced poster designs, mail art, photographs, painted murals, prints, web-based digital art, sound art, large installations, and public performances. Since 1998 he has worked under the pseudonym Labor Camp.

From Kalisz in central Poland, Szyhalski studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Poznań graduating in 1989 with an MFA in drawing under Waldemar Świerzy and an MFA in poster design under Jarosław Kozłowski. In 1990 Szyhalski came to the United States to teach graphic design at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Since 1994 he has been a professor of media arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.