Housed in the Visual Arts Department at the Mason Gross School of the Arts (MGSA) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, the Center has specialized in searching out unique and innovative approaches to collaborations between artists and master printers. As that search progressed, handmade paper elements were gradually introduced to many of the projects, giving the artists an extra medium with which to extend their ideas. Through a team effort, techniques were explored and developed to register and edition the paper, insuring that all copies of a single print were identical. Eileen Foti�master printer and print shop manager�holds the Master Printer Certificate from the Tamarind Institute. She works both individually and in conjunction with Gail Deery, resident papermaker and paper shop manager. Deery worked previously with Paul Wong at Dieu Donné Papermill in New York and later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from MGSA. Both Foti and Deery are working artists as well as master technicians. Through many three-way collaborations between guest artist, papermaker, and master printer, the Center gained the experience to merit a fully equipped papermaking studio. By 1995, nearly half of the collaborative projects included handmade paper and the Center's name was changed to Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (RCIPP). The only workshop of its kind in New Jersey, RCIPP takes up twelve hundred square feet within the six thousand square foot space occupied by MGSA in the impressive Civic Square Building in downtown New Brunswick. Before the move, RCIPP staff members were given the opportunity to custom design their part of the new building. With their direction, RCIPP's areas developed into comfortable, tightly efficient, safe, professional studios. In addition, computer facilities and private studios for resident artists were added. The paper studio has two Hollander beaters, installed in a soundproof room, and floor drainage throughout. Equipment for the paper studio came from the figurative ashes of a paper mill that Steven Kasher operated in New York City in the 1980s. Along with the beaters the studio has a 3 ft. x 3 ft. Dake Press, a vacuum table, and ample amounts of the standard hand-held equipment. Of great advantage is the location of the master print studio, conveniently next door to the paper studio. Collaborations between the two studios is encouraged for both visiting artists and MGSA students. "Beginning with the model of the GraphicStudio at the University of South Florida and Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico, university-based master studios have grown into many types," says Lynne Allen, associate director of RCIPP, associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at MGSA, and a master printer. (As education director, Allen had been in charge of training master printers at Tamarind.) Goals and missions of the university studios vary, as does student involvement and the amount of publishing. At RCIPP, studios are strictly for collaborative projects and MGSA classes; the facilities are not used for mass production. Graduate and undergraduate students act as assistants and volunteer for various jobs at RCIPP. Students enrolled in the BFA and MFA programs take classes with Brodsky, Foti, Deery, Allen, and other staff members. They can also earn credit at RCIPP as interns; the Center accepts approximately ten student interns per year. The students have the opportunity to assist in professional artists' projects�both seeing and hearing how these artists work. Outside of the MGSA degree programs, individuals may apply to work as assistants in exchange for use of the facilities. In September of 1997, RCIPP set up an arts video network to connect the Center to two hundred high schools in New Jersey. The video network will permit a large number of students to observe the New Jersey Print and Paper Fellows while they are working. While it does not have a formal board of directors, RCIPP does have an Advisory Council, comprised of corporate representatives, Rutgers alumni, and art experts. This group supports Brodsky, Allen, and administrator Nanci Hersh (an artist with a degree in printmaking from the University of Hawaii), who take care of all development and fundraising. Although RCIPP is housed at Rutgers University, the Center's yearly funding for projects, staff, supplies, and equipment comes from international, national, and regional grants, and from sales of prints created there. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is a consistent buyer. According to its mission statement, RCIPP is able "to fulfill its goals by inviting artists to be in residence." The Center invites artists in one of three categories: international, national, and regional. In the International program, RCIPP staff and outside advisors select artists from countries "where there is a significant contribution to the cultural dialogue of the United States." Through funding from the United States Information Agency (USIA), Artslink (a project funded by the Soros Foundation), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the Pew Trust for Mutual Understanding, RCIPP has hosted artists from many Eastern European countries, the Baltic States, the Republic of Macedonia, and Finland during the past two years. Within their international program, RCIPP also has strong Latin American representation. With NEA funding, the Center hosted three artists from Mexico in 1995-1996. Through the Mid-America Arts Alliance, an artist from Peru was in residence in October 1996. And in cooperation with the Rutgers Center for Latino Art and Culture, seven women artists from Latin American countries made print and paper at RCIPP during the spring of 1997, under a program called the Rutgers Dialogues Grant for Innovations in Curriculum. In a far-reaching humanitarian project, RCIPP has helped to initiate a papermaking center in Ecuador, funded by the United States Agency for International Development. Deery, who went to Ecuador to help establish the facility, explains that it now provides some economic support as well as artistic sustenance for people living in the mountain villages. For the last several years RCIPP has participated, as one of four American print shops, in Crossing Over/Changing Places, a traveling exhibition which has accompanied a series of exchange residencies with European facilities. The project, organized by the Crossing Over Consortium and funded in part by the Pew Charitable Trust and the USIA, sent Americans to Europe and brought Europeans to American print studios. Among other exchanges, Allen went to the International Graphics Center in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Zora Stancic from Ljubljana came to RCIPP; Brodsky traveled to Hungary and Sander Raczmolnar from Budapest then came to RCIPP; Deery went to Barcelona; and Foti worked in Rijeka, Croatia. The Crossing Over/Changing Places exhibition concluded its tour at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in October and November 1997. Through their national program, the RCIPP staff has collaborated with many well respected artists, including Miriam Schapiro, Leon Golub, Faith Ringgold, and Tom Nakashima. With funding from the NEA and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, RCIPP also sponsors the National Printmaking Fellowships for Minority Artists. Other NEA grants have funded Native American artists in a program to create mural-size prints for display on the reservations of their nations and at public sites in nearby major cities. Yet another grant supported Japanese American artists of the three generations since the Second World War. The first professional print and paper atelier in the state of New Jersey, RCIPP has enabled fifty-eight artists from throughout the state to make prints or handmade paper artworks at its facility, under its New Jersey Print and Paper Fellowship Program. The program is sponsored in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and each year six artists are selected to collaborate with a master printer or resident papermaker. Participants have included painters, sculptors, photographers, and installation artists. The New Jersey artists are chosen through a competitive process. Great care is given to building a multi-cultural pool from which the RCIPP jurors make their selections. Each artist works on-site for two weeks and receives an honorarium and the resulting prints or handmade paper works. Selections from the editions also go to the RCIPP archive, at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers, and the collections of several state institutions: the New Jersey State Museum, the Noyes Museum, the Montclair Museum, the Jersey City Museum, the Morris Museum, and the Newark Public Library. The fellowships allow artists to focus completely on their creative work for an intense period, during which they have all of the technical help, materials, and equipment they need for the highest level of creative expression. For the artists, it is a dream come true. A master printer or papermaker works with each resident artist for the entire two weeks of the residency. Through their help, insight, and understanding, these professionals encourage the visiting artists to experiment and innovate, to explore new directions. As Allen explains, "the prints produced by American artists at RCIPP are story telling prints, works of art whose conceptualism includes a narrative that reflects the artists' experiences by telling their own stories and developing their own representation." Brodsky describes RCIPP's interest in artists' work using similar terms: "We are interested in a particular kind of artist, someone who is contributing new narratives to the American cultural mainstream. We're interested in what the artist brings to the work in the way of new images. The emphasis is on the artist's individuality and what he or she can do to express ideas in print and paper techniques." RCIPP has a long roster of print projects with both established and emerging artists. Handmade paper elements began to be added to editioned work in 1991, through National Fellow Pacita Abad. Her work, African Mephisto, made in collaboration with Foti and Deery, uses lithography with handmade paper, chine collé, and bronze pigment. In a piece titled Indian People Wear Shoes and Socks/Indian Men Wear Shirts and Ties, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith chose lithography from photocopy images and stencil lettering, pulp painting, and stencil. The images in this two-panel piece are satiric in intent, playing with the stereotypes of Native Americans in mainstream popular culture. Smith worked with Deery on the diptych, each panel of which measures 41� in. x 29� in. They executed the images in pulp painting with lithograph overlay. The panel of Shoes and Socks shows a set of moccasins created by the artist using painted pulp. The lithographic portion depicts real Ralph Lauren socks that were transferred onto the litho plates, pointing to Lauren's use of appropriated designs. The Shirts and Ties image consists of a pulp-painted Native American ceremonial jacket with shirts and ties, transferred from newspaper ads. Two of Deery's recent handmade paper and print projects include a collaboration with Marilyn Keating, a 1995 recipient of a New Jersey Printmaking Fellowship, and one with National Printmaking Fellow Willie Birch. In Keating's work, Giving Fate the Finger, the female figure of the piece is based on Balinese puppet figures. The figure has only one breast; the scar of a breast lost to cancer is covered by a paper flower. It took two weeks to edition. Says Deery, "the whole thing was pieced together by the studio�the artist only did the prototype. It was truly collaborative, as the artist left to allow the technicians to edition the piece." The artist carved this sculptural edition in wood and added various handmade paper and printed elements. Deery did both the paper and print editioning. The headdress uses Japanese handmade paper with linoleum printing. The breast tattoo flower incorporates the same techniques and was then stitched onto cast paper and attached to the wooden torso. The figure has three skirts: the first is pulp painted with linoleum embossing; the second is abaca paper with watermarks; the third is abaca and pigmented Japanese fiber, with a linoleum print on top. In a gesture of warm appreciation and as a remembrance, Keating gave Deery and each intern who worked on the edition a miniature version of the piece, made from scraps. In her project with Willie Birch, Deery relied heavily on cast paper for a different sculptural approach. Birch, an African American painter and sculptor, has explained that his work reveals the urban present through his chronicles of street life. Birch has said that he wants to "force the viewer to see not only America the Beautiful but also the forgotten America that suffers from premeditated as well as unintentional neglect." Created at RCIPP, what he calls his "paper doll outfit for a man" expresses the idea that a man can put on whatever "clothes" (persona) he wishes and thus change his life. The surface of the life-size piece is covered with words and images relating to the Million Man March held in Washington, D.C., in October, 1995, and to the position of African American men in our society. Birch's handmade paper construction took four weeks to make, in an edition of fourteen. The project relied heavily on student interns for the cutting and collaging of letters and relief-printed elements. The techniques used to fabricate Birch's work include cast paper, printed Japanese paper, pulp painting, watermark patterns, and other decorative papers. Molds were used to fabricate the major elements. While the sheets were wet, they were folded and glued like seams of clothing would be sewn. As with real clothes, the shirt collar has Pellon and the tie was knotted while wet, in a Windsor style. The belt buckle is made from Japanese tea chest paper. To form the lettering appearing throughout Birch's outfit, Deery used a single large collograph plate to edition both the chine collé and the incised letters and punctuation marks. With a solid reputation and successful implementation of its original mission and goals, RCIPP is now poised for expansion. Deery says the Center plans to work on collaborative book projects and has recently acquired a Vandercook letterpress. She says the center would also like to arrange exhibits, increase staff, and explore the use of non-toxic materials. Never losing sight of its original commitment, RCIPP will continue to reach out, both locally and around the globe, for projects that make connections with diverse cultures and push into unexplored areas of the creative process.
