Join designer Gina Gregorio for a hands-on workshop exploring the power of repetition through collaborative block printing. Drawing inspiration from repeating patterns found throughout Cooper Hewitt’s collection, participants will use custom-made printing blocks to create dynamic patterned fabric. 

Working together, you’ll layer, align, and combine individual motifs into shared printed compositions, discovering how repetition creates rhythm, meaning, and visual structure. Informed by Gregorio’s practice in block printing and digital fabrication, the workshop invites participants to explore how a single unit becomes a pattern, a pattern becomes a surface, and a surface becomes something collective. 

Participants will take home a piece of collaborative work. 

About the “How We Make” workshop series 

Led by top designers, this hands-on workshop series explores both historic and contemporary design methods inspired by works in your national design collection. Open to all experience levels, each making session offers a unique opportunity to roll up your sleeves and come meet and make with the designers of our time. 

GUEST DESIGNER 

Gina Gregorio is a New York City-based textile designer with extensive experience across the apparel, home furnishings, and media industries. Her professional work spans a range of clients, including fashion designer Gary Graham, artist Kara Walker, and home and lifestyle brands Sister Parish, St. Frank, and West Elm. She also creates community-based textile work engaging social and political issues. 

Gregorio developed the Textile minor at Pratt Institute, and her courses integrate digital tools with hands-on practice in color, print, and fabric manipulation, with a focus on textile waste. She is also the founder of the Pratt Textile Dye Garden, which connects students to natural dyeing and sustainable material practice. She holds a B.F.A. from RISD, where she also taught Textiles for many years. 

ACCESSIBILITY & WHAT TO EXPECT:    

  • Format: The program will begin with a brief welcome and close looking in the galleries. The speaker will give a short presentation followed by a hands-on workshop, including time to ask questions and engage with other participants.
  • About the space: This program will take place in Cooper Hewitt’s Lecture Room on the ground floor of the museum. It is fully wheelchair accessible. There will be seating. There is an accessible restroom on the ground floor. Read more about accessibility at Cooper Hewitt.  
  • Accommodations: If we can provide any accessibility services to support your participation, email us at CHEducation@si.edu or let us know when you register. Please make your request as far in advance as possible—preferably at least ten days before the program date. 

SUPPORT 

Design Across Time: Exploring the Smithsonian’s Design Collection received major support from Jon and Shigemi Iwata, and Lisa Roberts and David Seltzer. Additional generous support has been made by Amita and Purnendu Chatterjee, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Foundation, Irene Au and Bradley Horowitz, and Chris and Irma Fralic. This project received funding from the Smithsonian’s “Our Shared Future: 250,” a Smithsonian-wide initiative supported by private philanthropy and created to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary and advance the Smithsonian vision for the next 250 years.

Logos for the Smithsonian’s “Our Shared Future: 250," the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.