Virtual Education
Online Public Programs
UPCOMING
A Cosmology of Inclusions with Jaz Graf
TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 2024 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT
Mixed-media artist, Jaz Graf, explores how materials collide and synthesize to convey embodied and metaphorical stories. Her love of inclusions in the papermaking process has been essential in the development of her ongoing personal mythology. Graf plays with materials and their inherent and potential meanings. She considers Thai mulberry as plantcestor, offering remedy, rumination, and reverence. Graf will talk about a new body of work created at Dieu Donné’s paper studios during her West Bay View Foundation Fellowship in 2022-23. She delves into her iterative projects inspired by textiles, ancient manuscripts, and design motifs of her cultural heritage.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jaz Graf’s transdisciplinary practice ruminates on our connection to place, the location of identity, and the paradox of presence. Her work delves through the meaning of familial roots, reimagining humanity’s relationship to earth. Graf is a recipient of a West Bay View Foundation Fellowship, Newark Creative Catalyst Grant, Salzberg Book Arts Residency and Civil Society Institute Fellowship. Her work has been featured at The Newark Museum of Art, NJ as well as published in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, AM New York News, and on NJ-PBS television news. Graf holds a Master of Arts degree in Studio Art Printmaking from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from the University of Iowa.
Website | Instagram
Process & Practice: Shervone Neckles in conversation with Tatiana Ginsberg
TUESDAY, MAY 21, 2024 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT
For nearly two decades, interdisciplinary artist Shervone Neckles has undertaken an intimate exploration of her Grenadian-American family's history. Revisiting her family archives, collecting oral narratives, and traveling to her homeland has unearthed a lineage of knowledge production that serves as a continuous wellspring of inspiration for her studio practice. Through her artwork she weaves together primary source materials with mixed media techniques that includes printmaking, sculpture, textiles, and installation. Her work reconstructs narratives that illuminate her own interiority, exploring her relationship to selfhood, memory and home, as well as her family's migration narrative from Grenada to the United States. During her Workspace Residency at Dieu Donné in 2021, Neckles created Memory Works, handmade paper artworks that contain ingredients from Grenadian family recipes. Considering recipes as matrilineal heirlooms, Neckles’s artworks form an archive of family traditions narrating a story of global migration and family history. In conversation with her collaborator at Dieu Donné, Director of Artistic Projects Tatiana Ginsberg, she will discuss papermaking within the context of her multifaceted artistic practice and the process of creating Memory Works.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
As an interdisciplinary artist, Shervone Neckles makes embellished textiles, prints, sculptures, installations, and public art to retell Afro-Caribbean histories and mythologies. Her multimedia installation—an examination of selfhood and memory—was featured in the 2019 Venice Biennale’s Grenada Pavilion. She also recently created an outdoor installation at the Lewis H. Latimer House Museum (Flushing, Queens) to commemorate the life and legacy of the African-American inventor, which has traveled to Downtown Brooklyn (NY), Museum of Science (Boston, MA) and Chelsea City Hall (Chelsea, MA). In 2022-2023, her work was presented in a solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art (Jacksonville, FL), a group exhibition at Moore College (Philadelphia, PA), and she participated in a residency Dieu Donné (Brooklyn, NY). She recently debuted a permanent public art installation, The Lunar Portal, at the University of Pittsburgh Mercy Pavilion Plaza (Pittsburgh, PA). In 2024, she has a forthcoming public art installation with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Bronx, NY.
Hidden Labor in the Art and Craft of Papermaking
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, 2024 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT
In this talk, artists Aimee Lee and Velma Bolyard will discuss their creative work in and with handmade paper and the traditions they draw on, based on their recent essays in Papermaker’s Tears: Essays on the Art and Craft of Papermaking, Volume 2. In conversation with the series editor Tatiana Ginsberg, Dieu Donné Director of Artistic Projects, Aimee and Velma will discuss their research and personal experiences of keeping traditions alive through use. Aimee Lee writes about toolmakers Ronald MacDonald and Howard Clark, whose handmade tools have allowed generations of papermakers to beat pulp and form sheets. Velma Bolyard’s essay traces her personal journey of discovering shifu, woven paper cloth, and teaching it to others. Both artists make, spin, dye, and weave paper into dimensional forms and books, and draw upon traditional and contemporary practices.
“What is a papermaker’s tear? When a sheet of paper is freshly formed and still fragile, the pulp is easily disturbed. A droplet of water from the papermaker’s hands or from the deckle as it is being removed can easily fall onto the newly formed sheet, leaving a little crater. If not repaired, this will be a thinner part of the sheet, and like a watermark, it will be visible when the sheet is backlit. This is called a papermaker’s tear, or vatman’s tear. Though technically defects, papermaker’s tears are beloved by bibliophiles and paper enthusiasts because they are marks of the maker, little imperfections that remind us of the person behind the sheet.”
You can learn more about the new volume of Papermaker’s Tears: Essays on the Art and Craft of Papermaking here.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Aimee Lee is an artist who makes paper, writes, and advocates for Korean papermaking practices. Designated as an Ohio Arts Council Heritage Fellow, she is a two-time Fulbright scholar to Korea, where she learned about making hanji, its applications, and its tools, and has studied with various Korean national and provincial holders of intangible cultural heritage since 2009. Her research led to the first hanji studio in North America, an award-winning book, Hanji Unfurled, and an active studio practice that includes jiseung, joomchi, paper textile, botanical paper, book art, and natural dyeing techniques. She has shared these techniques and stories across the world and from her private hanji studio east of Cleveland. Website
Velma Bolyard is a mother, artist and teacher. Living north of the Adirondacks, she forages for and cultivates fibers, dye and papermaking plants. She makes paper, threads, spins kami-ito, weaves shifu and most recently makes fish skin parchment and spins and cultivates wild silks for her artists’ books. A papermaker since 1977, her specialty is local plant papers and flax which she colors with plants and earth pigments. She delights in edges, selvedges, deckles, and ecotones where the woods meet open land; that’s where she finds the material and stories for her work. Small adventures, stories, sometimes show up as poems in her books. Velma retired from teaching special education and now focuses on making paper, shifu and artists’ books. She teaches papermaking and book arts at St Lawrence University and has travelled in North America and Australia to teach workshops and master classes, and recently returned from the CODEX Book Fair. Website
Tatiana Ginsberg studied papermaking and book arts at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and received her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In between she spent two years in Japan researching naturally dyed papers under a Fulbright grant. Returning to the U.S. she taught papermaking, printmaking, book arts, and drawing in universities for more than a decade. As Director of Artistic Projects and Master Collaborator at Dieu Donné she works with other artists to make new work in handmade paper. She also edits the series Papermaker’s Tears: Essays on the Art and Craft of Paper for The Legacy Press. Her own work combines traditional and contemporary methods of papermaking and is exhibited nationally and internationally. Website
Past Online Events + Workshops
Global Perspectives in Hand Papermaking (2021)
“Global Perspectives in Hand Papermaking” was a virtual lecture series featuring papermakers from around the world. The series explored both historic and contemporary approaches to papermaking through talks by individuals with expertise in papermaking in Japan, Korea, India, Chile, and Spain. Among the topics discussed were traditional fibers, tools, and papermaking techniques, as well as contemporary trends in production papermaking and artistic experimentation.
Special thanks to the Windgate Foundation for their generous support for Global Perspectives in Hand Papermaking.
Past online lectures can be viewed here, with closed captioning available for each.
Remote & Online Learning
Papermaking lectures are available by our Professional studio staff for a small fee. Our staff works with each instructor directly to gear the presentation and talk to their particular interests.
Various pricing options are available, with lengths of lectures varying from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours. Remote lectures can be done by Zoom or other preferred group video call platforms.
To schedule a class, please email dieudonne@dieudonne.org.