Shortly after the death of Columbia College Chicago Center for Book & Paper co-founder Marilyn Sward in 2008, I recovered a collection of her unmarked work stored in our studios. The Center was experiencing pressure to downsize its institutional footprint, and artworks and materials gathered since its opening in 1994 were slowly being moved to archives. One afternoon, my colleague Jeff Abell urged me to meet him at the Center, as some unmarked materials were slated for disposal. He knew that he and I were the only people still at the Center who could interpret them. Among dusty and torn samples, student works and tear offs, was more than 20 years of Marilyn’s own work.

As I evaluated the materials, I was able to piece together small elements of her history. A series of grass-based papers, for instance, had a notation in her handwriting: “Painted Dog Project.” As I looked at their colors and textures, I understood they were made from the grasses of the plains where endangered painted dogs roamed in South Africa. Jeff told me she had done a papermaking program there many years ago. A few of her alternative photo process works on esparto-mix paper featured images of her at work in her Wisconsin studio. Other papers were probably from China, Indonesia, and Brazil, where she had taught workshops. Her Midwest prairie papers were immediately recognizable as the same material I use to make paper. Through her process of hand papermaking, Marilyn explored themes ranging from cross-cultural exchange, chance, collaboration, process, and embodiment. I describe this precious body of work as a material autobiography.

Under the best circumstances, an archive accessioning process is a complicated and non-linear affair. The Columbia College Chicago institutional archive was opened in 2005. As a teaching institution founded in 1890, this meant more than a century of the school’s uncataloged historical materials—an insurmountable task. As one part of the institution, the Center for Book & Paper lacked formal storage or inventory methodologies for the singular collection representing decades of collaboration with artists, curators, and students. I remember a day in my office when I realized works by our Yanomami guest artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe were in a portfolio leaning against a window that had recently flooded.¹ With the help of Gina Ordaz, an alum of the Book & Paper program and program administrator at the time, we prioritized the materials that would be delivered to our archivists.

Columbia College’s archivists Heidi Marshall and Dominic Rossetti were instrumental in cataloging and preserving many of the Center holdings with a finding aid now available on Digital Commons.² Some of the content was gathered through oral histories conducted with Center staff and faculty. Dozens of boxes remain uncataloged, but are available for in-person research. Today, digitization of such materials requires funding rarely available to financially strapped institutions. Other obstacles include lack of staffing as schools have been pressed to cut budgets in these difficult pandemic years.

Given the challenges, I took an alternative approach to preserving and distributing Center projects. With the help of our archives team, I created an online exhibition featuring a three-year collaboration with Hakihiiwe at the Center. In collaboration with our graduate students, I designed several handmade paper editions with him.³ Hakihiiwe’s artworks contribute to the rare documentation on this culture currently under threat of environmental devastation. Our Center’s director Steve Woodall created a print-on-demand publication called Practice featuring interviews with artists and collaborators. Yet, I remained unsatisfied with the lack of Marilyn’s presence in what was available in the Center archive materials. She was a much-beloved teacher, and brilliant administrator. She was also an artist whose interdisciplinary practice in hand papermaking contributed to a singular pedagogy in the medium of hand papermaking.

Like all busy academics in the throes of an ever-changing institution, I did not act on these feelings for quite a long time. In 2019 the Center for Book & Paper officially closed, and I felt a personal and professional need to explore Marilyn’s legacy in greater depth in a film I titled Marilyn’s Paper. With the cinematography and artistic direction of my friend and colleague Jelena Jovčić I considered Marilyn’s work in the context of feminist and socially engaged pedagogical movements—the subjects of my writing, curatorial, and artistic practice.

As I began to explore Marilyn’s materials in greater depth, I lamented the lack of identifying labels on much of the collection. Few photographs or papers had dates or locations noted; only some I could place based on my life at Columbia and in the paper community. One piece of archival material that was clearly dated was her thesis paper, written in 1987 when she graduated from the Interdisciplinary MFA program at Columbia College Chicago. Until that point I did not even know that Marilyn had graduated from the program at which I taught. It changed the trajectory of my film, as it featured some of her notebooks, which gave me a window into her material process. The blood-red paper, circular sheets, and endangered grasses from the African plains featured in her portfolio were not random experiments, but rather specific engagements with the ecofeminist theories evident in her paper.

A great deal of my “collaboration” with Marilyn has been speculative and the basis of an artistic interpretation of her life. In her 1987 MFA thesis, she cited the critic Lucy Lippard to support her work in the context of feminist explorations of the goddess. Through this research, she revealed connections between plant-based hand papermaking and a more balanced relationship with the natural world. I wondered, might she have known someone from The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles?⁴ Through additional research, I found that Marilyn was involved in a goddess ritual collective based in Chicago. All of these influences are reflected in her work, demonstrating her strong belief in the value of process and its relationship to materials sourced from the land. I found a quote in her notebooks: “The object is the source, the making of the object is the center.”⁵ I believe this quote points to her interest in process as a form of collaboration with the land, which represents an ecofeminist ethos in her work.

In this regard, I reflect on archiving as an ongoing process as well. Ultimately, Marilyn’s legacy is alive in the generations of students she taught. Since the Center closed, I hold the strong conviction a “center” is a group of people dedicated to an idea or practice; studios and equipment are meaningless otherwise. So are boxes of materials undocumented and largely unavailable. Though Marilyn’s legacy remains under-researched, her material explorations and philosophies are timelier than ever. Ecofeminism—a term until recently scorned as essentialist—is now the subject of major exhibitions and contemporary criticism. At the heart of a truly feminist practice, which I believe Marilyn’s to be, we acknowledge these histories are not linear or static. Every year, I start my papermaking class with her portfolio as an open invitation to the magic of the hand-papermaking process. Without fail, each year something miraculous unfolds in the papermaking studio, a perfect reflection of Marilyn’s indelible mark on the world.

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NOTES

1.
Editor’s note: For more on Hakihiiwe’s work, see Laura Anderson Barbata’s article in this issue, starting on page 29.

2.
To access the Guide to the Center for Book & Paper Arts archives, go to https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/casc_fa/17/.

3.
To view the exhibition, co-produced with Interdisciplinary Arts graduate students, go to https://shero.omeka.net.

4.
In a previous article for Hand Papermaking magazine (Winter 2018), I interviewed Sukey Hughes and Patricia Reis about their experiences teaching hand papermaking in The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles as part of its community outreach classes. At The Woman’s Building craft was central to the evolution of a new woman-centric pedagogy, and papermaking played its part.

5.
Marilyn Sward, MFA in interdisciplinary arts thesis paper, May 1986, in the holdings of Columbia College archives.

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