Richard Solomon, president of Pace Editions, relied for over a decade on "Joe's genius for bringing the right process to the right person." Thus Ellen Lanyon got feathers embedded into handmade paper to draw and print upon, James Brown got nailed-together copper plates for a maverick drypoint, and April Gornik got her photoengraving printed on both sides of the sheet for depth and glow. Chuck Close got so many technical stunts performed on his behalf that, en masse, they must be understood as the devotions of a full-blown muse. What nobody ever got from Wilfer, under any circumstances, was short shrift. "He never, ever said no to me about anything," exults Jim Dine.   Indeed, examining all of this heterogeneous work in a gallery long after the fact of its making gives us little insight into Wilfer's own artistic preferences. One hypothesis might be that his aesthetic was inseparable from, if not eclipsed by, his work ethic�both the necessity of working to support his family and his delight in working for its own sake. His upbringing in Racine, Wisconsin, was strictly blue-collar, and by the age of twenty-two he was married to Julia Falconer with two daughters, Kate and Anne. His formal education at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee and the University of Wisconsin Madison was necessarily interrupted by various low-wage, often overlapping, jobs. He worked in construction, delivered mail, cleaned machines on the shoe polish line at the Johnson Wax factory, mopped floors at the Piggly Wiggly. The prospects would have seemed rather dim, especially for a career in the rarefied art world, if they had belonged to someone other than Wilfer. But, in the words of Chuck Close, who would meet him in a later incarnation, "Joe was a genius, off the charts. There was no stopping him. All he had to do was convince people about what he already knew he could do." Still, there were skeptics. When he decided to return to school, his supervisor at Johnson Wax subjected him to a psychiatric evaluation. "No one leaves a stable job at Johnson Wax"�except someone whose talents and ambitions are of such a radically different stripe that they are incomprehensible to those around him.    Shortly after arriving in Madison to continue his schooling, Wilfer landed a work-study job at the Madison Art Center, a community-oriented museum for contemporary American art that had been founded in 1964. Within eight years he rose from janitor to director of the institution, all while earning his undergraduate and master's degrees. Wilfer's activist tenure at the museum would reverberate throughout his career, both concretely in subsequent administrative positions and more broadly in defining his own philosophy, often in opposition to received art-world wisdom. The prodigious lengths to which he would go to attract visitors and raise funds (including a hilarious, humbling weight-loss pledge drive that was picked up by national radio) remain local legend. He also organized many impressive exhibitions, ranging from single-artist shows by Alice Neel, Philip Pearlstein, and Jack Beal to "Holy Cow," an exposé of the bovine presence in the visual arts, and "King Toot," a spoof of the King Tut phenomenon for children that roamed the state in a donated tractor trailer for two years.   In 1974, Wilfer took a leave of absence from the Madison Art Center in order to establish the Upper U.S. Paper Mill at a former dairy farm in rural Oregon, Wisconsin. In a videotaped interview from the same year, he gives a concise and rational explanation for how he got involved in hand papermaking: "I was studying printmaking and it seemed like the only thing I couldn't control as a printmaker was the surface I was printing on." He was not alone in this predicament. Sue Gosin, founder of Dieu Donné Papermill, elaborates: "After the printmaking revolution of the 1960s, what was left to do but delve into the paper? We thought of using decorative techniques, not for pure decoration, but to make artistic statements." In Wilfer's case, there was also an extremely visceral attraction to the medium itself. He relished both the irregularity of the textured surfaces he could produce by hand and the messy, intuitive process of producing them. In a 1977 article in American Artist about the burgeoning community of hand papermakers, Wilfer rhapsodizes that "handling paper is like handling porcelain," and you sense that his fingers were itching to get into a vat of pulp as he said that. Setting up his own mill allowed Wilfer to indulge his unabashed love for manual labor. In a letter to the artist Alan Shields, who would execute several handmade paper projects at Upper U.S. once it got off the ground, Wilfer's delight and pride in the mechanics involved in renovating the property is palpable: "The work began on the new mill about three weeks ago . . . cleaning out barn . . . ran 100 amp service out . . . cut out the metal stanchions . . . air-hammered out the elevated sections in the floor . . . broke out concrete for a drain system . . . and have found some really nice fluorescent fixtures that are being torn out of a department store."    Upper U.S. was much more than a handyman's lark, however. Wilfer had major professional ambitions: to collaborate with as many artists as possible; to establish a nonprofit educational arm called Friends of Paper; to manufacture white, buff, and cream papers in various standard sizes; to distribute papermaking equipment he would invent himself; to market a papermaking kit as an educational toy; and even to produce watermarked bank certificates for third-world countries (which never quite came to pass). In any case, this would appear to be the moment when Wilfer decided to forgo the potential glory and major headaches of attracting an audience for his own work�praised though it was�in favor of a more artisanal, collaborative stance. He would spend the rest of his life providing the means for others to express themselves.    It was an inspired decision. In a tape-recorded letter to his brother right before the opening of Upper U.S. he confides: "Personally I feel my contribution to the art world can really be most significant along these lines. I don't fancy myself . . . I don't have the kind of ego or desire to be a hot-shot New York or California artist. I'm quite content to work with people and help them do things they couldn't do by themselves." Bill Weege, a professor of Wilfer's who became a close friend through numerous mutual projects, explains that "he thought there were enough artists and he didn't have to be another one. We shared the philosophy that two heads are better than one, working together is a lot of fun, you give the artists ideas and means of executing things. Joe would just as soon print as do something higher up conceptually. Any level was fine with him as long as he was working."   A major accomplishment of this Upper U.S. period was the first international hand papermakers' conference that Wilfer organized and hosted in 1975. Not only was he acutely aware of his own papermaking lineage�Douglass Howell, one of the two figureheads of the hand-papermaking revival in the United States (Dard Hunter being the other), taught Lawrence Barker, who taught Walter Hamady, who taught Joe Wilfer�but he had also done some research into the commercial papermaking history of his home state and decided to hold the conference at the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton. At Wilfer's behest, forty-five delegates from across North America�plus one from Japan�who had all been working in virtual isolation met each other for the first time, gave lectures, showed slides, and shared techniques. Sue Gosin recalls that in attendance were "all of the core group who ended up being really important in the field for the next twenty years. The conference was an incredible show-and-tell for everyone. It might not have grown into a movement if not for Joe Wilfer." Jim Pernotto, whose cast-paper reliefs were inspired by work shown at the conference, observes that afterwards all of the participants returned to their various corners, kept on working, and "it just metastasized."   In 1980, Wilfer was lured away from his beloved Wisconsin by the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, based in New York City with a summer program in Maine. His directorship of the school turned out to be transitional, but it was crucial for his career in introducing him to a much larger pool of artists with whom he might collaborate. The challenges and potential rewards were alluring enough to keep him on the east coast for good. One of his new acquaintances from Skowhegan was Chuck Close, who in due course found himself approached on a weekly basis by Wilfer�on the prowl, as always, for projects.    What Close rates as "a textbook example of the ideal collaboration between artist and artisan" began rather inauspiciously in 1981. Wilfer managed to persuade a reluctant Close�who had never seen a pulp-paper piece he liked�to plot and code a photograph, as he would normally do for a painting, mezzotint, or lithograph, from which Wilfer could make a prototype. Close warned him that he would need to coax a wide range of grays out of the pulp, and to achieve a subtlety that Close felt was usually lacking in the "super-crafty" medium. When the results were initially disappointing, Wilfer's tenacity and charm kept the project alive. It occurred to him that a plastic grid used to cover fluorescent lights in the ceiling would make a perfect template, and soon enough he was installed at Dieu Donné then in a rented studio on Canal Street, and then, when he lost that lease, in the basement of Close's studio building�diligently filling 6,800 plastic cells with twenty-four shades of gray pulp over handmade carrier sheets of white, black, and gray according to Close's specifications. Pernotto, who curated a 1989 exhibition of Close's works on paper at the Butler Institute of Art in Youngstown, Ohio, contends that the portraits subsequently published by Pace Editions "broke new ground in scale, technical control, and aesthetic achievement in handmade paper."   It is important, though perhaps obvious, to note that Close's aesthetic achievement would not have been possible in this case without regular infusions of enthusiasm and ingenuity from Wilfer�not to mention his extraordinary patience and flexibility in executing the editions. The galvanizing "Wilfer factor" should not be underestimated. Jim Dine has described him as "a kind of entrepreneur without money," and, as we have seen, this aspect of his personality was instrumental in virtually all of his professional endeavors. When handmade paper was at issue, his entrepreneurship took on an almost evangelical quality.    Even as a graduate student, Wilfer was already exhibiting this fervor. In a novel twist on the familiar academic rite of passage, he had shipped out eighty tubes of his handmade paper to artists he admired with letters asking that they work on it and return it to him for inclusion in his Master of Fine Arts exhibition. Among those who fulfilled his request were Ed Pashke, Ed Ruscha, William T. Wiley, Richard Artschwager, Aaron Bohrod, and H. C. Westermann. Alan Shields received a tube but did not respond. Six months later, by coincidence, he was sent to Madison to work with Bill Weege, who remarked on Wilfer's MFA show. Shields said he had not been inspired by the handmade paper, and Weege led him to the basement of the Madison Art Center, where Wilfer was working in a shower room for the sake of drainage. Shields was a swift and avid convert. For the next two decades, he declares, "We glorified paper. Once I developed an understanding of why paper stayed together, of its watery structure, I could engineer things I couldn't do in any other medium."   Other artists, like Close, were less readily persuaded. Having set a trend in motion with his 1975 conference, Wilfer then had to convince potential collaborators over the next two decades that handmade paper was a valid medium with great aesthetic potential and not a mere fad. Sam Gilliam was one of the first to succumb: "The more I resisted, the more he insisted. I finally found myself making an edition of the ugliest but most sincere works . . . By 1976, I was ready for a real important paper project with Joe. I worked as his assistant demonstrating papermaking at a summer art school in southern Michigan. A most elegant and beautiful series of works resulted. Ever since then I have been open to the possibilities of making art on paper." Mary Heilmann, too, "was kind of prejudiced against it at first. I had a bias because of all the sculpture being made. It's a hard medium because the paper itself is so beautiful, at least it's so obvious, that it's hard to overcome." Ultimately, she found it seductive that "the paper was the piece as much as the images on the paper." Wilfer himself put it thus in an interview with Jules Heller for the 1977 book Papermaking: "For the first time in history, artists can work with paper as a medium, not merely as a surface. They can create any size, shape, thickness, or texture they may desire. They can think of a total piece, and the paper can be more than a carrier of ideas�it can be an integral part of the work."   By the early eighties, Wilfer was holding frequent workshops, making paper whenever and wherever he could�one of his makeshift studios was in the basement of a V.F.W. building; he had to dismantle his equipment every Friday to make room for weekend bowling lanes�and consulting on pulp-related topics far and wide. In 1982 he established and directed the papermaking operations at Austin Productions in Holbrook, New York, and every so often he returned to Madison to help out with a project at Bill Weege's Jones Road Print Shop & Stable. In the spring of 1984 he taught at the University of Wisconsin as a sabbatical replacement for Walter Hamady and was a glorious mentor to, among many others, his future Pace assistants Ruth Lingen and Kathy Kuehn.    All the while, Wilfer continued his intensive collaboration with Chuck Close in Manhattan. In 1984 Richard Solomon hired him to be Pace Editions' director of publications on the basis of the cycle of paper multiples he was producing in Close's cellar. Initially discouraged by their large size, Solomon was ultimately enchanted with them and he now deems Georgia, a 1985 collaboration in which Wilfer broke Close out of his customary grid with an elaborate and irregular brass grille as the template for thirty-six gray values, "one of the most ingenious single works of contemporary printmaking." Two of the first projects that Wilfer oversaw in his new position at Pace were a Louise Nevelson cast-paper bas-relief and a Julian Schnabel series consisting of nine-color lithographic reproductions of United States Geological Survey maps superimposed with aquatint and spit-bite. The completed Schnabel prints were stunning, but had been time-consuming and expensive to execute by the usual contractual or freelance arrangements. Solomon and Wilfer thus began conferring about the possibility of establishing an in-house publishing facility for Pace Editions. At about the same time, Jim Dine moved from Vermont to New York City and offered them a big press and drying rack. Wilfer found a great space for rent on Spring Street in SoHo, hauled in Dine's equipment, rigged a paper mill in a corner of the room, and the Spring Street Workshop went into operation.   From 1985 until the onset of his illness in 1993, Wilfer made the Spring Street Workshop into a joyful and energizing place. Bob Dylan was often playing�even over the din of Wilfer's treasured power tools. According to Jim Dine, he "loved the camaraderie of the printing studio, he made that camaraderie, he made a lot of noise, he was a man of good cheer. He'd bring people in all the time, German printers and whatnot." Santiago Moix remembers him dancing while he worked. April Gornik appreciated the "Midwestern spirit of conviviality and fun that he lent to the whole enterprise." (The weekends he would spend at the shop in dogged concentration are less amenable to anecdote.)   Wilfer's extroverted temperament was a boon to artists, because it went hand in hand with an unusual sensitivity to their needs, both psychological and material. Wilfer had been the first male cheerleader at his junior high school in Racine, and he was magnificent at encouraging artists, beckoning them in unforeseen directions, offering them astute advice in non-threatening ways. He had a great eye that was hard-wired into his hands. Donald Baechler characterizes Wilfer as "one of those rare guys who could look at a painting and see how to translate it into a print." In their simplicity, Baechler's painted forms lent themselves to rough-hewn handmade paper, so together they produced several editions in that medium; whereas Wilfer never proposed working in handmade paper to Lois Lane, probably sensing that it would not appeal to her. Instead, he had paper silk-screened with stars or with a William Morris�like willow pattern as the substratum for her multilayered relief prints. One day he whisked her uptown for a tour of fancy wallpaper boutiques and treated her to lunch. (In March of 1997 Lane and Ruth Lingen printed a book called I Know Where I'm Going, dedicated to Joe Wilfer because "it's about dames and paper, the two things he loved most.")   In many ways, however, Wilfer was a die-hard, tool-crazy man. When Jim Dine scavenged some massive butcher blocks from the Bowery, "I said I wanted to cut the things with a chain saw, and there was no blanching about that." Far from blanching, Wilfer must have crowed with glee. The diptych Love and Grief is carved on both sides of the same block with a chain saw and with a Japanese hedge-trimming tool. In printing Andy Spence's relatively straightforward woodcuts, Wilfer scraped and burned away the soft wood with a wire brush and a welding torch so that the grain would print distinctly from the block onto the page. For his part, Claes Oldenburg wanted to create sophisticated images on the workshop's Vandercook press and also settled on woodcuts, which for technical reasons demand a rather unspontaneous approach. Wilfer managed to retain the spontaneity of Oldenburg's original drawings in the way that he cut the line into the block. "To see Joe translate a loose drawing," Oldenburg has said, "that was amazing." One cannot help but suspect that woodworking was one of the merit badges Wilfer earned on the way to becoming such a precocious Eagle Scout ("I peaked at eleven," he was fond of saying).   When it came to ink, Wilfer loved to lay it on thick: "You knew it was ready when it sounded like Velcro ripping," reports Ruth Lingen. Sometimes he would print with a very gloppy gray ink and then run white over the top for a sort of solarized, halo effect. This technique provided the border for some of Michael Young's geometric compositions, which were themselves produced by silk-screening with a powerful flocking glue and sprinkling on sand in various grades and colors that Young had collected from around the world. Wilfer also used lots of viscous ink, in as many as ten layers, to print Michael David's woodcuts, which yielded a very shiny and painterly quality. It is only fitting that one of Wilfer's most ingenious turns with pigment should have come in a collaboration with Chuck Close. Having perfected the process in basic black and white, Close was trying to make direct gravure "fingerprint" etchings in a palette of primary colors, but light was passing inopportunely through the red, yellow, and blue inks. Wilfer suggested mixing PABA, the colorless sunscreen ingredient, into the ink. Close thought that this was "pretty damn clever, though of course he'd always figure out the smartest way to do anything. He'd poured driveways in the past, but he'd probably figured out the smartest way to pour driveways, too."   Close's affectionate assessment rings entirely true. Wilfer was an indefatigable problem-solver who also happened to delight in reinventing the wheel, over and over again, just for the exquisite hell of it. Longtime confederate Bill Weege remarks that "it was comical at times. We'd go through all these elaborate convolutions and come back to something that had existed for hundreds of years." Likewise, hand papermaking was an ancient craft ripe for rediscovery. It was Wilfer's good fortune that most of the techniques from centuries ago had not been recorded for posterity, so there were no rules to follow. He could improvise to his heart's content. This was a man, after all, who as director of the Madison Art Center in the 1970s had taken great pleasure in parking his car at the top of a hill so he could release the brake after a long day at the office and coast for blocks, through several intersections and around several bends, right into the parking lot of the Caribou Bar, where he moonlighted as a bartender�without once turning on the engine. Throughout his life, Wilfer pursued his vocation just as he drove that car. No one ever made genuinely hard work�often in the service of others�look and feel quite so much like coasting.

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