Occasionally I will get a call from someone who wants me to rescue an artist who is despondent. Usually a few years out of art school, the artist has done all the right things: exhibited in shows, compiled a decent résumé, sent their images to galleries, and read the books on self-merchandising. What school did not prepare them for was life on the outside—and how could it? In schools everything is set up for you. The studio space is rented, the rooms are lit and heated, assignments are given and work expected, critiques frequent, and friends and faculty come to your openings. The community is built in. If you show up and work, you are part of a world where everyone understands what it is to be an artist. The day after graduation all that is gone—poof! You may keep up with a few friends but nothing else is the same, and no one is waiting for your work. Where is your community? How will you find facilities to make art? These questions can also be asked of artists who could never afford the time or money to go to art school—for example, those who develop their interest in art once their kids are grown and they have time for personal pursuits. This is where community art groups come in. Inevitably the artists I am supposed to help have never heard of the local guilds and groups; if they have, they dismissed them while seeking attention from the gallery world. But for every artist given encouragement by galleries, dozens are supported by community arts groups. And while every art practice has a national guild, it is the intimacy of local groups that can keep an artist from giving up. Local guilds provide a gathering point for people in the arts to meet, celebrate their work, and make connections. Communities for Paper Artists jill littlewood Members of the Handmade Paper Guild of Southwest Michigan at a surface design workshop in February 2008. Courtesy of Liz Faust. Members of the Friends of Dard Hunter enjoy their annual meeting in Washington, DC, October 2007. They are shown here at their pre-conference workshops at Pyramid Atlantic, Silver Spring, Maryland. Photo: Lauren Shelton. Courtesy of Friends of Dard Hunter. 38 - hand papermaking In 1988 Eve Reid founded the Handmade Paper Guild of Southwest Michigan. Reid initiated the guild so that she and her students could share ideas and socialize beyond the classroom. The group, originally twelve members, met before class and began a series of successful endeavors: monthly meetings with lectures, demonstrations, or guest artist presentations; an annual show of members' work; field trips; informational sessions on exhibition preparation (how to mount, mat, and photograph work), writing workshops for résumés and artist statements; a newsletter; a Christmas sale; a day of trading or selling art equipment; and collaborations with other artists such as calligraphers and book artists. The Guild also discovered ways to be visible in the community. It offers a scholarship each year for the papermaking class, it gives a subscription of Hand Papermaking to the library of Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and it presents an award for outstanding entries to the Southwest Michigan area show for work on or of paper. In the beginning Reid did much of the work herself, including organizing and hosting monthly meetings and writing the newsletter. Now the Guild has a treasurer, secretary, hospitality person, and newsletter editor. In addition to giving Reid a break after years of service, the organizational structure gives members a way to invest themselves in the group and create its future. For Winnie Radolan, The Guild of Papermakers, which she founded in the Philadephia area, serves many of the same functions. Similar to Reid's group, The Guild of Papermakers evolved from the wish to continue meeting outside the classroom. Unlike the Kalamazoo Guild however, this guild has far-flung members. For example, Tom Bennick of Idaho can tell you how much the Guild means to him since there are so few papermakers close to where he lives. However, most of the seventy-odd members live close to Philadelphia and get together for meetings, events, and exhibitions. Radolan prefers an informal dynamic, so there are no elections, bylaws, or regular meetings. In keeping with her relaxed and inclusive personality, Radolan asked members to contribute their impressions of the Guild in answer to my query about their group: they treasure the stimulation, the connections, the team work, the wealth of technical knowledge that is freely shared, and, for one member, the associations outside graduate school. While local groups are the intimate face of connection, there is valuable cross-pollination in seeing what papermakers in other parts of the world are doing. The Friends of Dard Hunter and the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists are two groups that provide national and international links. Each organization hosts conferences that bring paper lovers together for a rich exchange. Far and away the most radical change in the way artists build community has come through the Internet. Not only is organizing local groups easier with email communication, but many new groups have flourished because voices can chime in from all over the globe. The PaperMaking Yahoo! Group, with 1,500 members, is an extraordinary example. Papermakers from Australia chat with those in England and their conversation is read in the United States. A group in India asks for help starting a paper business and receives many useful suggestions from all over the world. Members ask and give sophisticated technical advice and all of it is archived so a newcomer can access this wealth of knowledge by perusing the collected exchanges. In addition, there are photo books of individual work and of group-sponsored exchanges: samples of plant papers, paper bowls, and Christmas ornaments. There is even a zine that the members create periodically by submitting their pages and paper samples. The Friends of Dard Hunter has a Yahoo! group that has the same feeling of collegial camaraderie, though in numbers it is much smaller. Also on Yahoo! there is a group called Hollander Joachim Tschacher from Germany, at the IAPMA Congress 2006 in Austria, teaching how to make paper rope—it was amazingly strong. Photo by and courtesy of Andrea Peterson. A handmade paper hot-air balloon workshop led by Helen Hiebert at the IAPMA Congress 2007 in Oxford, England. Courtesy of Hilary Sussum. Beaters, with 500 members. The Book Arts List Serv, hosted by Peter Verheyen, is a rich source of information for book and paper artists. The postings will lead you to many other virtual sources, such as a YouTube video about papermaking, or an announcement that the latest issue of Bonefolder or Umbrella is available online. A general Internet search for information on papermaking will yield over 2,590,000 hits in a few seconds. This is the Internet at its best, connecting and informing at the speed of light. Times have never been so good for artists to find their communities, in their neighborhoods and around the world. A list of communities for paper artists, compiled by the author, appears on Hand Papermaking's website at www.handpapermaking .org/magazine. Ed.