San Francisco Center for the Book
Exhibition dates: October 28 – December 22, 2023
Opening reception: Friday, November 17, 2023 :: 6 -8 pm; RSVP here.
Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework. Featuring works by local, national, and international artists, this exhibition explores the vital role substrates play in human communities and how meaning is made from what we might call paper and papermaking.
Viewed together, the works on display seek to open a conversation around what paper is across cultures today: a vessel for collective memory, a body, a site of meaning, a living ancestor, and a form of cultural survival and resistance. To appreciate global paper cultures in a decolonial context, it is important to consider definitions of paper that move beyond those created and sanctioned by imperial powers. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, baskets, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of culture and memory. Some even hold status as animate members of their community. Among peoples subjugated under slavery and denied access to literacy and the requisite tools for creating paper and books, maintaining and building upon their threatened cultural knowledge required creativity like those exhibited in African American quilts. Paper Is People presents each cultural substrate as a new definition within contextualized multimedia displays that invite thoughtful participation and engagement of the senses.
This exhibition originated at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. It is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Craft Research Fund grant from the Center for Craft, and a Zellerbach Family Foundation grant.
Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures
MCBA Main Gallery
April 14 – August 12, 2023
Reception: Thursday, June 22, 7–9pm
Free and open to the public
Paper Is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, offers a new definition of paper within a global and decolonial framework. Featuring works by local, national, and international artists, this exhibition explores the vital role substrates play in human communities and how meaning is made from what we might call paper and papermaking.
Viewed together, the works on display seek to open a conversation around what paper is across cultures today: a vessel for collective memory, a body, a site of meaning, a living ancestor, and a form of cultural survival and resistance. Our ideas about paper are linked to how we value traditions of language, knowledge production, creative expression, storytelling, and history. Many of us think of paper as thin sheets fashioned from fibrous pulp, but this understanding leans heavily on European applications and usage, with its roots in ancient Chinese technology and centuries of violent occupation, enslavement, and trade.
In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, baskets, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of culture and memory.
To appreciate global paper cultures in a decolonial context, it is important to consider definitions of paper that move beyond those created and sanctioned by imperial powers. In the Indigenous and oral cultures represented here, baskets, tapestries, and other handmade substrates act as vessels and embodiments of culture and memory. Some even hold status as animate members of their community. Among peoples subjugated under slavery and denied access to literacy and the requisite tools for creating paper and books, maintaining and building upon their threatened cultural knowledge required creativity like the kind exhibited in African American quilts. Paper Is People presents each cultural substrate as a new definition within contextualized, multimedia displays that invite thoughtful participation and engagement of the senses. Visitors will have the opportunity to see paper samples, handle source materials, watch papermaking processes from source to finish, hear first-hand accounts from traditional practitioners, experience how contemporary artists are finding new applications for ancient technologies, and participate in a variety of workshops and talks.
Exhibiting artists include Alisa Banks, Hannah Chalew, Page Chang, Julio Laja Chichicaxtle, Kelly Church, Hong Hong, Chenta Laury, Aimee Lee, Radha Pandey, the Seringô Collective, and Skye Tafoya.
After premiering at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Paper Is People will be available to travel beginning in late August, 2023.
Paper Is People Workshops
All skill levels are welcome to join these special visiting artists for workshops that pair traditional methodologies with contemporary sensibilities.
MCBA offers two scholarship types for workshops—Financial Hardship Scholarships and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) Scholarships—to honor equity and increase access and artistic opportunities for those who have historically been underrepresented in the book arts. For individuals to whom these scholarships do not apply, register at the “Adult” rate and, if you are able, consider making a donation when registering to support MCBA’s efforts to make scholarships available.
Community Paper Stories
In-person with Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer
Saturday, June 24; 10am–4pm CT
Sustainable Papermaking with Repurposed Paper and Plastic
In-person with Hannah Chalew
Sunday, June 25; 10am–4pm CT
Ink-Making from Ecology: Grounded in Place
In-person with Hannah Chalew
Saturday, June 24; 10am–4pm CT
Vietnamese Papermaking
In-person with Veronica Pham
Saturday, June 17; 10am–4pm and Sunday, June 18; 1–4pm CT
Indo-Islamic Papermaking
Virtual with Radha Pandey
Saturday, June 3; 10:30am–12pm
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov. This research was supported by a Craft Research Fund grant from the Center for Craft.
Troubling: Artists’ Books that enlighten and disrupt old ways of being and seeing
Mar 4 – Jun 22, 2022
Rachel Feferman Gallery, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Bainbridge Island, Washington
Within the deep lineage of visual art that explores challenging subject matter, the genre of artists’ books has long played an integral role in educating about and advocating for themes of socio-political and cultural justice topics. Book artists utilize the book form in these cases to trouble—or disrupt— the status quo. In some instances, the artist is also the disruptor, as in Clarissa Sligh’s It Wasn’t Little Rock. The work describes her family’s experience with racism and school integration in 1956 where she was the lead plaintiff in a school desegregation class action suit. Co-curated by Ellen Sheffield and Tia Blassingame, Troubling: Artists’ Books that enlighten and disrupt old ways of being and seeing is an exhibition of artists’ books that explore racial, environmental, and LGBTQIA+ justice themes.
Artists’ books have an uncanny ability to take even the most challenging, complex, polarizing content and mix it with techniques from papermaking to paper engineering and printmaking with almost any other elements—from photography and poetry to cyanotypes and letterpress printing—in order to have a conversation with the reader/viewer. These conversations may be intimate, emotional, educational, thought-provoking, opinion-altering, and world view expanding. Especially relevant and timely given the collective anxiety of the continuing pandemic, escalating environmental crises, and ongoing devastating effects of systemic racism, our need for engaging with difficult issues is even more urgent.
In Reparations, graphic designer and former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party Emory Douglas forms a pictograph formed by chained human figures to make the point for reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans. Allison Leialoha Milham combines music with historical documents to discuss the occupied state of Hawai’i in Uluhaimalama: Legacies of Lili’uokalani.
Jaime Lynn Shafer’s Mix and Match Families fights against prejudices that question the validity, and at times, possibilities of familial units that society may not consider acceptable or normal. In Morgan Stewart’s A Bare Bones Guide to Pronouns, talking skeletons—in an angry and confrontational or simply informational manner depending upon the edition—introduce the use of and respect for a person’s pronouns.
Shu-Ju Wang’s Superfoodland!, an artist’s book in the form of a board game, examines the environmental effects of consumerism and our obsession with the latest superfood; Randha Pandey’s Deep Time presents a sequence of clove and indigo dyed papers depicting water and soil, erosion and sedimentation with topographical map die-cuts embodying these alarming environmental shifts.
To complement Troubling, the Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective members were invited by Blassingame and Sheffield to contribute images of their work to the window banner, bringing together seemingly disparate voices and identities, signaling to visitors strength in community. The installation hangs proudly in Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s Beacon Window Gallery, facing out toward the thousands of visitors arriving by ferry each day. The collaborative window piece contains images from Artists’ Books by five Book/Print Collective members Alisa Banks (Armoire), Nabil Gonzalez (Who Are You?), Sun Young Kang (Filtered Memories), Skye Tafoya (5:46 am, 2021), and Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo (#TakeCareOf).
The Book/Print Artist/Scholar of Color Collective is a group founded by Tia Blassingame in 2019 that brings Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) book artists, papermakers, curators, letterpress printers, and printmakers into conversation and collaboration with Book History and Print Culture scholars in order to build community and support systems.
