Simona Bortis-Schultz – To Hold Your Heart in Your Teeth – Artist Talk

Thursday, 18 July 2024, 19:00
Softcover, Stumpergasse 53-55, 1060 Vienna

To Hold Your Heart In Your Teeth is a Romanian proverb that means to brave forward despite fear.

Made by generations of women, the folk garment of the Romanian blouse secured its language through times of fierce changes. This book is a cultural-historical biography of the blouse, from Neolithic beginnings in northeastern Romania and western Ukraine, through the period of folk revival, the communist era, and the post-communist immigration out of the region.

Weaving personal narrative with this historical research, Simona Bortis-Schultz, author and designer of this book, is a New York-based child of this immigration.

To Hold Your Heart In Your Teeth is an homage as it stands in solidarity with generations of resilient women, writing out the design qualities of this feminine fortitude, and the charm of the garment they made to survive.

Simona Bortis-Schultz is a New York based illustrator, designer and educator. She immigrated to the US, as a child, from Romania. Her work focuses on visual narrative projects involving surface design, motion design, and other available mediums. For many years Simona’s client experience included advertising, branding and marketing work for national and international clients such as Adidas, Alvin Ailey, Beekman 1802, Blue Q, Pitney Bowes, Nike, and Scholastic Education among others. Simona has received numerous awards for art direction, design and illustration both nationally and internationally.

2023, Published by Set Margins, 214 pages, English, Softcover, 15.9 x 23.5 cm, Swiss bound, Edition of 1250 copies