The children's program, Saturday Morning Discovery, offers free weekly art instruction to 100 children a month and has become a model for similar programs around the country. Adult programs have expanded to add instruction in photography, papermaking, and surface design. More than sixty nationally recognized artists visit the Southwest Craft Center every year to conduct workshops, give lectures, and install exhibitions, and to collaborate in one of the six studios. Since 1971, the Craft Center has been housed on the grounds of the old Ursuline Academy. This girls' school and convent was commissioned in 1848 by the French immigrant Ursuline nuns, a Catholic teaching order. A French-trained architect, Francois Giraud, began construction that same year using the pise-de-terre or rammed earth building process. The French country style buildings, with their thick stone walls, nestled among sheltering pecan trees on the banks of the downtown San Antonio Riverwalk, offer a distinct contrast to the surrounding urban environment. It is, in part, this unusual setting which makes working at the Southwest Craft Center a unique experience. With the generous support of Margaret Pace Willson, the paper studio was added under the directorship of Jeffrey Moore in 1984. Moore came to the Southwest Craft Center from Anderson Ranch, an arts center in Aspen, Colorado. Having begun a paper studio while director of Anderson Ranch and with a background in printmaking, he saw the many possibilities paper would bring to the Center. He invited Maine papermaker Bernie Vinzani to come in to assess the space and to offer suggestions for converting the oldest building on the grounds into a paper studio. Vinzani designed the space with the assistance of Susan Mackin Dolan, who became the first resident papermaker. Together they assembled and installed the necessary equipment. The new studio was christened Picante Paper Studio after the Pace family company, Pace Picante Sauce. Along with the paper studio, Moore launched a collaboration program at the Center, beginning in the paper studio. Many of these collaborations put established artists working in their own medium together with artists new to the medium. The first collaboration in the paper studio brought together Dolan, Vinzani, Katie MacGregor, and Dick Wray. Wray, a painter living in Houston, had never worked with paper. The pieces they produced ranged in size from 30" x 40" to 30" x 84", finished both in the pulp stage and painted on after the paper was dry. It was a learning experience for everyone to see what could be done in the new space with a painter who liked to work large and quick. One of the next collaborations brought in Judy Dater. A photographer working jointly with the photography and paper studios, she produced a series of figurative works on artist-made paper using Liquid Light. The images that Dater used were figure studies done during a workshop she had taught in France. The models were a group of Gypsies posing in ruins, which gave the images a tragic overtone. Paper was made from white, black, and red abaca and cotton blends, with elements added with stencils. After treating the sheets with a formaldehyde solution, Liquid Light was painted on the surface in the dark room. The sensitized paper was then exposed with projected negatives and contact printed with stencils. Dater's pieces, created with a border of figures around a central tone image, had a strength that excited everyone working on the project. A second collaboration involving a non-paper artist brought in Robert Sperry, a ceramic artist from Washington state. Sperry began his career as a painter and approached ceramics from that perspective. In 1985, he was producing ceramic pieces by applying glazes to a kiln shelf, firing them and then adding slips and re-firing. He worked with pulp the way he handled clay, with the same type of no-rules approach. Working with red, black, and white, Sperry tore, poured, and threw pulp to create a series of two-dimensional abstract pieces. He enjoyed the experience and liked the resulting work so much that he returned a year and a half later to trade a ceramics workshop for the opportunity to work again in the paper studio. Another artist who has worked in the paper studio on more than one occasion is William Wegman, known for studio portraits of his weimaraners. During his first visit to the Craft Center, Wegman conducted a video workshop and did a joint collaboration in the photography and paper studios. He worked in much the same way as Dater, making paper with stencils and then applying a photographic image to the surface. His second visit to San Antonio brought him together with Vinzani and MacGregor, in the paper studio, and Melanie Rush, an artist-in-residence in photography. Two editions of pulp paintings were completed in the paper studio. In the darkroom, Liquid Light was used again, this time on paper that was produced in the MacGregor-Vinzani Paper Studio in Maine. Rush was able to restore many of Wegman's negatives that had been damaged during a studio fire several years earlier. This enabled him to create a double print of his first dog, Man Ray, using his earliest image of the dog together with his last. Charlotte Robinson, a mixed media painter and fiber artist living in Washington, D.C., returned home to San Antonio to work in the paper studio and to present a one person show at the McNay Art Museum. Charlotte was attracted to the Riverwalk for her inspiration. Her experience in paper followed an extensive period of research curating a traveling show, The Artist and the Quilt. Her paintings, prints, and paper works reflected her interest in pattern, texture, and color which evolved from this study. New York master printer Craig O'Brien visited the paper studio on several occasions, bringing artists he had worked with in his own studio. Dolan and O'Brien worked with New York artists Robert Natkin and David Shapiro, and with Dutch painters Kees Dolk and Titus Nolte. Dolk and Nolte, who had previously collaborated on numerous projects, each added elements to a series of pulp paintings produced at the paper studio. They also worked on a mural project with the children in the Saturday Morning Discovery program. One of the last artists invited by Dolan to San Antonio before her move to Vail, Colorado, in 1987 was Eric Avery. A printmaker working in the Mexican-border town of San Ygnacio, Texas, Avery offered a linocut workshop and then worked with Dolan to cast his own work in paper pulp. They found that they could ink the image with an oil base ink and transfer it to the paper as it dried on the form. Since the first experiments, Avery has changed his approach to the images and the pieces of wood he selects for his own work, and has added papermaking equipment to his own studio. His two-dimensional images have evolved into wall relief objects. Nance O'Banion, a paper artist working in Oakland, has visited the paper studio several times since 1985, for workshops and collaborations. In the summer of 1989, she and Angelita Surmon, from Portland, Oregon, began a collaborative project that culminated in a gallery installation in the fall of 1990. Pieces from this installation have since been included in two exhibitions in San Francisco. Soon after the O'Banion-Surmon opening at the Craft Center, Dolan paid a return visit to collaborate with Margaret Prentice. The two print- and papermakers completed the paper for a series of two-of-a-kind images. The artists have taken these papers to their studios for the printing stage, to be completed sometime in 1992. Since stepping into the director's chair at the Southwest Craft Center in 1987, Ric Collier has continued the collaboration program and has tried to include more regional artists. Larry Graber, a San Antonio painter and sculptor, transferred computer images to large sheets of abaca. Danny O'Dowdy, a multi-media artist working in Corpus Christi, embedded neck ties into large sheets of cotton and abaca. He has taken these back to his studio to work dry pigments, acrylic medium, and other added elements into the paper. During 1989 Collier invited local paper artist and faculty member Gene Elder to work with thirty artists in the paper studio. Elder curated and worked with the artists over a period of nine months. The resulting exhibition, Power to the Pulp, opened in October of 1989 and impressed the area art community with the broad range of expression available using artist-made paper. In 1990, Collier experimented in a new collaborative direction with Convergence I. Each of the six full-time studio artists at the Center was asked to invite another artist to work in any of the six studio areas for a week. Twelve artists worked, both individually and as a group, for five days and nights, ending with an exhibition, celebration, and dance. It was an angst-filled, exciting week because many of the artists did not know each other and no one, including Collier, knew what to expect. The results were so exciting that the experiment was repeated with a new group of invited artists in May of 1991, and plans are being made for Convergence III in 1992. Many other artists have visited the Southwest Craft Center to work in the paper studio, to present workshops, and to collaborate, including Terry Allen, John Babcock, Sas Colby, Amanda Degener, Helen Frederick, Susan Grant, Betye Saar, and Joyce Scott. Collier and I, the current resident artist in the paper studio, are working on plans for future collaborations including books and installations. The presence of collaborating artists in the Picante Paper Studio has acted as a catalyst for new ideas and represents an effort well worth continuing and expanding.
