This spring marked the fourth year that Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts has provided papermaking classes for young people in eastern Oregon. Crow's Shadow is a non-profit facility dedicated to providing educational, social, and economic opportunities for Native Americans through artistic development. Located on the Umatilla Indian Reservation just outside Pendleton, the fifty-five hundred square foot facility has as its centerpiece Crow’s Shadow Press, a fully equipped printmaking studio. The building, which once housed the St. Andrew's Mission School, is also home to a photography darkroom, a computer graphics lab, administrative offices, and a spacious gallery.
Artist James Lavadour, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, wanted to institutionalize the help and support he had received from community members while he was launching his painting career. In 1992, Lavadour and a group of his supporters founded Crow’s Shadow, which provides artists with the working space, instruction, and tools to develop their careers and explore their artistic vision. Bringing a diverse mix of artists and students together creates a dynamic environment for making art, so most workshops and events are also open to the non-Indian general public.
While printmaking is at the center of their mission, the organization recognizes a responsibility to respond to other needs in the local community as well. An on-going traditional arts program brings master weavers, bead-workers, and other cultural experts to the facility to help revive and promote Plateau arts within the Native community.
Crow's Shadow has hosted various papermaking activities over the years, including sending Native American artists to a Japanese-style papermaking workshop with Margaret Prentice at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland and hosting members of the Otomi tribe from San Pablito, Mexico, for an amate-making workshop. Eileen Foti, Master Printer from Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper and a long-time Crow's Shadow advisor, has also integrated papermaking into her printmaking workshops at the facility.  Earlier this year, Crow's Shadow received a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture rural development program to outfit a professional papermaking studio. A Hollander beater, hydraulic press, and drying system will be in place by the summer of 2002. Distinguished papermakers from around the world will be invited to teach workshops and collaborate with other artists.
Beyond working with the recycled fibers we currently use, through use of the new papermaking equipment, classes will be able to experiment with cotton, linen, flax, and the wealth of renewable plant life and indigenous fibers surrounding the Institute. These latter fibers have been used for basket twining and other long-established art forms, and can now be incorporated into printmaking and the book arts, where artists can explore the physical properties and conceptual aspects of the materials.
Papermaking has provided another opportunity for Crow’s Shadow to fill a need in the local community; art instruction for youth. The Institute found that the best way to reach the largest number of young people, both Native and non-Native, was through the public schools, and in 1998 Crow's Shadow launched its Artists in the Schools program. It was through this program that I began teaching papermaking to youths.
In 1999 Crow's Shadow extended its youth services by contracting with Homestead Youth and Family Services to provide art classes for its clients. Homestead is an adolescent treatment program that provides both residential and proctor (treatment foster home) environments for young men, ages thirteen through eighteen, who are considered at-risk for a variety of reasons. Papermaking and book arts became a part of the class offerings, along with printmaking and other art forms.
Because my papermaking background includes a lot of independent investigation and exploration, I wanted to structure my classes to allow students that same type of experience. I always begin the class by sharing something Robert Rauschenberg said in a National Public Radio interview a few years ago. He was asked if, after working for so many years, he ever ran out of ideas. He said, "..ideas aren't all that helpful to me. What I never run out of is curiosity. I just can't wait to see how things turn out."
We begin in that spirit. The students quickly progress from basic sheet forming to double couching, pulp painting, and creating mixed-media sculptural pieces. I give them an anything-goes talk, with only one guideline; they cannot write words or recognizable symbols (with the teens, just trying to monitor for gang symbols can be a full-time job). We talk about body movement, gesture, happy accidents, and a comment once made by Willem DeKooning: "I'm painting a picture of two women, but it might turn out to be a landscape." A big pile of duct tape, nylon screen material, fun foam, embroidery hoops of all sizes, plastic doilies, and anything else I can scrounge from second-hand shops and yard sales is offered for the students to use in any way they want. Although I do a brief demonstration on how to use stencils, make watermarks and shadow marks, and double couch, I am always amazed by how intuitively these young men start putting things together.
Being able to physically engage with the materials seems to be a welcome antidote to a structured living situation where they hear "Don't touch!" much of the time. The teens who are most used to pushing limits usually start acting out of line first, waiting to be reined in. When they realize that they really can do anything they want with the materials, they end up creating very interesting, energetic work. Attention span can sometimes be a challenge with young people, and the fact that they can have complete success on their very first piece of paper really helps them engage and focus.
Because of the limited equipment and materials for papermaking classes, we make do with whatever is available. Some classes are held outside at Crow's Shadow, in the breezy foothills of the Blue Mountains, and others are held at schools or in the Homestead multipurpose room. Because we are creating papers that will be works of art in themselves, we do not use pressing and drying techniques necessary for paper to be used for book binding or printmaking, which require a more durable sheet. Often we couch the paper onto cotton fabric, apply more pulp from squeeze bottles, and then simply hang the fabric squares on a clothesline. With the dry, high-desert climate of eastern Oregon, the papers can usually be peeled off the fabric after just an hour or two. Occasionally, I transport posts of freshly made paper to my own studio, where I press and dry them, then return the next day with the finished sheets.
My favorite part of the project is handing out the finished papers. This gives us a great opportunity to talk about art and its power to transmit both energy and a sense of movement, from the artist to the viewer. There are always wonderful, totally wild and energetic pieces along with quiet landscapes created by the simple, careful overlapping of two colors. I am thrilled to hear them describe being able to feel the way the artist was moving when he or she made the work.
Future papermaking at Crow's Shadow will provide an important link between youth and established artists, between the traditional art forms and printmaking, and between papermaking facilities in the mainstream art world and artists working on the Umatilla Indian Reservation.