Our Summer 2025 issue focuses on exhibitions and handmade paper in the public sphere. Guest edited by Radha Pandey, the issue explores aspects of creating, curating, and displaying works in/of paper. The articles share personal experiences, speak to unforeseen challenges, offer creative solutions, and reveal a breadth of experiences when exhibiting handmade paper.
Guest edited by Radha Pandey.
- Artist and educator Marie Bannerot McInerney discusses the challenging process of installing a recent site-specific installation, Falling Into Milk, at the Tarble Art Center in Charleston, Illinois. The installation was composed of a variety of paper pulps and fibers alongside a wide-range of natural and fabricated materials.
- Amy Richards writes about the 2023-24 "International Biennial of Paper Fibre Art" (IBPFA), which exhibited at the the Design Craft Hall in Nantou, Taiwan, and for which she served as the chief curator.
- Barbara Landes and Paul Sullivan, two artists who collaborate to make abstract art of handmade paper, wood, fabric, paint, and wire, write about three contemporary artists — Alexis Granwell, Megan Singleton, and Jennifer Davies — whose abstract objects explore the tactile possibilities of papermaking and evoke forms and movements found in nature.
- Paper artist Melissa Jay Craig discusses the process of making, after a three-year papermaking-hiatus while her studio was being rebuilt, her installation Hard Shift to the Right, which was composed of arranged sheets of her "Modified Rain Paper." Craig also provided samples of her Modified Rain Paper, made from bleached abaca, raw hemp, and a touch of cotton denim, for this issue.
- Anne Vilsboell describes the process of curating the exhibition "Paper—A Cross-Cultural Voice," which included the work of eight paper artists from India along with the work of five Western artists whose work has helped advance handmade paper art over the past four decades. The exhibition was shown at the Art Center Silkeborg Bad in Denmark and the Kasthurbhai Lalbhai Museum in Ahmedabad, India in 2022-23.
- Curator Eliana Blechman considers the challenges facing institutions as works of art made from paper pulp become more widely created and collected, due to such issues as inconsistent labeling of paper works and limited category options, lack of understanding of specific techniques and terminologies, and the inconsistent logic of art medium definitions.
- Lars Kim and Steph Rue detail the impetus for Hanji Edition, their ongoing project dedicated to promoting greater awareness of hanji—its intrinsic beauty, durability, and incredible versatility across a wide range of creative applications.
- Genderqueer artist and educator Kerry Downey meditates, in her essay "The Art of Anxiety in the Age of Digital Documentation," on the nature and meaning of materiality, objecthood, memory, collecting, and documenting in relation to her interdisciplinary art practice and her search for more diverse forms of representations.
- May Babcock reviews the book Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp, a definitive resource by Lynn Sures and Michelle Samour that showcases the art contemporary artists working in colored pulp while outlining the history of the early innovators in the medium.
- Alta L. Price reviews The Dictionary of the Book (Second Edition), Sidney E. Berger’s new version of his monumental, delightfully quirky volume of terminology related to the book (*which includes, of its approximately 2,000 entries, 182 that are paper-specific).
- Maria Zytaruk writes about how she and papermaker Brian Queen have begun cultivating, harvesting, and preparing their own flax for papermaking at the new Book Arts Laboratory at the University of Calgary. They also provided a sample of their Calgary Flax Paper.
- And Helen O'Connor closes with a remembrance of the life and work of Canadian papermaker, professor, researcher, agriculturist, poet, and "lover of life’s good things," Helmut Becker, who passed away in September, 2024.
