Melissa Hilliard Potter, a multi-media feminist artist, writer, curator, and associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, and Maggie Puckett, an ecofeminist, socially engaged artist working at the intersection of art, craft, science, and activism met when Puckett was a student of Potter's at the Center for Book and Paper Arts (CBPA) at Columbia College. CBPA was founded in 1994 by Marilyn Sward and Barbara Lazarus Metz, to support the hand paper- making and book arts community of Chicago.2 The Center became a world-renowned papermaking and bookbinding program in the historic Ludington Building on Columbia's campus in the South Loop neighborhood. The formation of SIS was in part to amplify Sward's legacy and prevent the erasure of her feminist advocacy for book and paper arts. SIS's first project coincided with the development of the Pa-permaker's Garden (PMG), a former campus-based public art garden, founded by students and faculty of the CBPA. The PMG was instrumental in the launch of Columbia's Wa-bash Arts Corridor, a public-art project that has since become recognized internationally as a hotbed of street art, perfor-mance, and installation. At the PMG, SIS took curatorial and production ownership during a four-year residency, inviting guest artists, curators, and growers to plant beds each sea-son. In the heart of the ever-expanding arts corridor, SIS's very public presence as the first interdisciplinary papermak-ing garden of its kind, sustained the art community. When PMG was razed in 2017 for Columbia's new stu-dent center, Potter and Puckett imagined an expanded prac-tice and envisioned a new model to transform and transplant work from one permanent site to multiple sites. The first host site is Compound Yellow (CY), founded by Laura Schaf-fer, about eight miles west of the South Loop in Oak Park, in former The Suburban, run by Michelle Grabner, the influen-tial artist, curator, and educator. The move was inspired by several, interwoven factors. As Puckett and Potter investigat-ed how papermaking gardens figure into an artistic, activist practice, they were drawn to the mission of the Self- Reliance School (SRS), a collaboration led by Temporary Services and based at CY.3 Potter, Puckett, and Schaffer recognized the natural synergy between SRS's goals and SIS's pedagogical and artistic experiments to solve problems in creative disci-plines. They also sought to draw from Potter's fifteen years of experience in Serbia and Bosnia, working in collaboration with ethnobotanists Vlada and Branca Stevanovic and graph´ -ic artist Biljana V ´ukovic, to develop hand-papermaking stu-dios at the University of Belgrade and the Academy of Fine Arts, Sarajevo.4 The resulting current exhibition at Compound Yellow, titled Lucy Flower Self-Reliance Garden, pays tribute to its namesake Lucy Flower (1837–1921), the education reformer and children's rights activist who founded Chicago's first open-enrollment school for girls.5 The garden explores femi-nist theories of women's labor, women's empowerment, and self-reliance towards a more sustainable system. Featuring easy-to-grow foods like lettuces and herbs, medicinal plants such as calendula and clary sage, and plants for pleasure like wormwood, the garden is as much about training visitors to grow what they need to thrive as it is a radical site of experi-mentation for Potter and Puckett to expand and adapt to new growing spaces and environments. A highlight of their ex-hibition is the release of the illuminated Feminist Seed Bank book, the first of its kind—part archive, part manifesto, part scholarly evaluation. With introductory essays by Claire Pen-tecost and Tricia Van Eck, the book is a comprehensive Seeds InService catalogue. Formatted as book art, the rich illustra-tions are created through painting, hand papermaking, and photography to explore socially engaged, hand craft in unpre-dictable landscapes and shifting cultures. Alongside their work with Seeds InService, Potter and Puckett are individually in demand for pedagogical training and socially engaged garden consulting. Potter spent time at Haystack this summer, testing ethnobotanical applications of the garden-as-lab by sourcing local materials for handmade paper pulp to be used as artistic material. Through what Pot-ter has termed "feminist ethnobotany," she leads artists to explore plants for their edible, medicinal, and craft proper-ties. Results range from paper and dye samples, artist books, gardening, drawing, writing, and record-keeping. Puckett has been the long-standing artist-in-residence since 2015 at Altgeld Sawyer Corner Farm in Chicago, a community garden dedicated to teaching, learning, and growing veg-etables for the local community whose access to nutrient-rich food is limited. The space also supports growing fibers and dyes for artmaking, and Puckett has experimented with and distributed rare and heirloom seeds related to women's health, conflict zones, and immigration. Potter and Puck-ett's independent projects mirror some of the same feminist themes and goals prevalent in their SIS work. They resist the patriarchal system designed to divide and sustain inequi-ty and competition, and rather create opportunities to unite individuals, cultures, and communities. The work cel-ebrates and enacts the feminist social-practice strategies of honoring the collaborative process, drawing on empathy for empowerment, and enacting the radical artistic potential of feminist art.6 ___________ notes 1. "The Lucy Flower Self-Reliance Garden Launch," from the Compound Yellow website, https://compoundyellow.com/the-lucy-flower-selfreliance-garden/ (accessed June 28, 2018). 2. "Center for Book and Paper Arts, Visiting Artists Collection, 2005–2017" from the Explore Chicago Collections website, http://explore .chicagocollections.org/ead/colum/69/g15vk4n/ (accessed June 28, 2018). 3. Temporary Services, "Self-Reliance School" from the Temporary Services website, https://temporaryservices.org/served/projects-by-name/self-reliance-school/ (accessed June 28, 2018). 4. BJ Allen, "Melissa Potter Returns from Expansive Fulbright Work In Sarajevo," from the Columbia College Chicago's Art and Art History News website, https://blogs.colum.edu/art-and-art-history/2015/06/22/report-from-b-p-program-director-melissa-potters-expansive-fulbright-work-in-sarajevo/ (accessed June 28, 2018). 5. Dora Wells, "The Lucy Flower Technical High School," The School Review, vol. 22, no. 9 (1914): 611–619. 6. Neysa Page-Lieberman and Melissa Hillard Potter, "Feminist Social Practice: A Manifesto," ASAP/Journal, The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, John Hopkins University Press, vol. 3.2 (2018), ed. Jonathan P. Eburne; 333–348.
