Peter M Bergman
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Peter Miles Bergman (he/him) began his career in commercial printing, culminating in pre-press for magazines. For the last 17 years he has been a professor of Art and Graphic Design at Metropolitan State University of Denver – teaching editorial design, typography, print production, letterpress and zine publishing. Peter has run his own publishing imprint “ is PRESS” for the last 13 years, attending 30+ zines fests and art book fairs. In 2025 Peter is overjoyed to have taken on stewardship and ownership of Quimby's Bookstore and to have moved back to Chicago, where he received his MFA in Visual Communication Design from SAIC in 2007. Peter is a new faculty lecturer in Visual Communication Design at SAIC starting in 2026 specializing in Professional Practices for VCD.
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My research practice integrates contemporary artistic interventions, social practice, and critical documentation that examine and challenge systems of inequity through multiple modes of creative expression. This approach has evolved through my formal education and professional experience, bridging traditional studio practices with emerging forms of social engagement. Like many artists and designers – like my own students – I have learned and adapted the methods of my most influential professors. As a young artist earning a BA in Studio Art from UCSD (1991–1996), I was influenced by the “art as life” performance and documentary strategies in classes taught by 20th century Performance Art masters Allan Kaprow and Eleanor Antin. During my MFA in Visual Communication from SAIC (2005-2007), I adopted design as a tool of authorship strategies from Stephen Farrell in my first-year seminars and learned how to embed narratives into site-specific installations in thesis advising with BJ Krivanek.
In the 10-year interim between my degrees, I made my living working in various print production and pre-press jobs, from screen printing to pre-press for packaging, books, catalogs, and magazines. My hands-on, applied professional experience informs my active and ongoing creative practice to this day. Film stripping for pre-press turned me into an ace collage artist. Setting up files for web offset printing made me a super-expert zine publisher.
My current research focuses on identifying, documenting, and intervening in complex systems of inequity, discriminatory urban planning, and detrimental sociopolitical patterns through participatory art practices. My art-making approach is multimodal; I document long-term, art as life engagements using social media, zines, artbooks, websites, exhibitions, artist talks, and stories. I’m a prolific documentor of daily life and uncover most of my research topics through daily rituals in public space, long urban dérives, voracious consumption of local media, and both organized and DIY mutual aid work. My work tends to engage in one of two categories: creative interventions that use humor to reframe polarized narratives, and subtle artistic interventions that highlight overlooked social issues within urban landscapes.
An example of this methodology that combines these two themes is the four-part Leftist Leaflets in Little Free Libraries (LLiLL) project, which was featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s exhibition Citizenship: A Practice of Society (2021–22) as a full room installation. LLiLL documents a three-year project that started with a neighborhood intervention of putting leftist, punk, feminist, queer, and racial justice zines in little free libraries in an affluent and politically conservative neighborhood, as a meditation on the first amendment. After installing a Little Free Library in front of my own home and putting it under surveillance, the project evolved into an examination of how virtuous deeds under surveillance-capitalism – political actions, activism, creative practice, and side hustles – are subsumed through social media into categorized data feeding advertising algorithms. The LLiLL series of zines includes issue #4, published a year after the Citizenship exhibition. Issue #4 documents six months of an official registered Little Free Library stocked with books from the American Library Association’s list of “banned and challenged classics,” clean hypodermic needles, and a sharps box, placed within an encampment of people experiencing addiction and housing insecurity.
My 17 years as faculty in Communication Design at MSU Denver, combined with my active exhibition and publishing practice, has prepared me to mentor emerging artists in developing their own interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art-making. For the second half of my career, I’m seeking to align my considerable experience as an educator and administrator more with my identity as an artist and with my transdisciplinary approach to art making. My track record as an artist and educator aligns well with the Department of Contemporary Practices’ focus on integrating critical thinking, cultural competency, and social engagement within an inclusive, decolonized, studio-based curriculum. Above all, I’m most excited about the opportunity to work with emerging artists who are open to an interdisciplinary approach to creativity and the role art plays in society.