As the artworks were unboxed in Columbus for the exhibition Art Paper/Art Books, Ohio Craft Museum's first 1996 exhibition, I saw no evidence of the watery, labor-intensive process involved in the making of these pieces. The work by the twenty-nine invited artists clearly showed that they had integrated mastery of their craft with well developed ideas. I witnessed an abundance of nature inspired works: embossed leaf shapes, sea shell forms, rocks, and landscapes. Other ideas covered transient relationships, censorship, religion, mythology, and endangered species. Seeing this collection of works by contemporary artists, all made with handmade paper, confirmed my belief that "paper art" has simply become part of the art world's dialogue. We can give a sigh of relief that the art vs. craft issue can be buried in its proper grave. The three year old, not-for-profit Ohio Craft Museum often uses guest curators to mount shows for its privately supported exhibition space, which also houses a library and a permanent collection. For this exhibition, guest curator Jack D. Smith, Emeritus Professor of Art at Kent State University, selected fifty-four works from artists in nineteen states. His career as an educator had enabled him to invite visiting instructors to Ohio to teach papermaking over the course of many years. Through these visitors he became familiar with artists who work with paper. He grew more knowledgeable when his wife, Kathleen Totter Smith, started making artworks in paper.  Many people have contributed to Ohio's success as a leader in the crafts; among them, Joanne and Hal Stevens are frequently mentioned. Hal Stevens, the President of the Museum's board, assisted with this show's installation, grouping clusters of works together. This helped create a sense of intimacy needed for the viewing of artist's books.  Ohio artists, including Tom Balbo, Sara Gilfert, and Peggy Kwong-Gordon, made about one third of the work exhibited. Balbo's huge cast paper wall work, titled Meeting in the Dark, shows green squares next to two small yellow figures, holding hands over a huge black circle with a purple spiral in the middle. Despite the bright colors, the work's dark emotional content gives it a powerful aspect. Sara Gilfert's larger-than-life, yellow faced mask, looking down through slit eyes, could be placed as coming from a West African society. Its title, Mask for the Goddess of East Arianrhod, suggests a possible use in a religious ritual. Two 10 in. x 12 in. pieces by Peggy Kwong-Gordon, titled Two Hands Weaving and Buddha's Hand, represented some of the smallest scale work exhibited. These remarkable abstract works capture the feeling of koans, questions raised by Zen masters which one cannot answer by any kind of logic. I do not exactly know what Kwong-Gordon's sources are, but when looking at her work I wonder: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" I found it refreshing to see less-established artists shown alongside people like Kathryn Clark and William Drendel, whose work one would expect to be found in a museum. Kathryn Clark's 4 ft. x 2.5 ft. paperwork, A Box of Pears, has embedded collage elements, including a label from a pear box, amidst thin washes of colored pulps. These exploded paper elements might be lost in too much space if there were not so much richness of texture in the seemingly spontaneous background. Intelligently, Clark does not to contain her pieces in a frame or include any kind of border on her work. This lets the image, which also includes drawing on the surface, bleed to the edge, making it seem like a fragment of something much larger. The concertina binding in William Drendel's Forbidden Word opens to red envelopes perforated with small square windows, which occasionally reveal printed text. When closely examining the text, barely visible inside the windows, one sees words with seemingly sexual overtones, highlighted in yellow marker. If one pulls the text out of its envelope and reads the highlighted words in context, one realizes that, when read by themselves, they are distorted; as part of their original sentence, however, they are harmless. Drendel's opinion about censorship is clear. Other works with political overtones included Joan Hall's Souvenir de Cuba and Raft II. In the former, our perspective is from a bird's eye view on a pulp-painted empty boat with a real T-shirt whose "Made in Cuba" tag makes sure the viewer does not miss the artist's intent. Hall succeeds in combining figurative elements, like the boat and water jugs, with abstract imagery to convey a feeling of despair. In this piece she integrates paper, rusty metal, and the T-shirt so convincingly that they work as a seamless whole.  Rather than harmonizing the materials, Caprice Pierucci Taniguchi emphasizes the contrast of wood and paper in her mixed media work. In Shell I, a skeletal open form, carved in wood, spirals around a similar paper form. The exhibition curator clearly recognized the strength of these wonderful oceanic sculptures and placed Taniguchi's 36 in. x 18 in. x 8 in. Vessel VII as the first work seen upon entering the museum. Barbara Tetenbaum's interpretation of Michael Donaghy's Caliban's Books breaks the traditional format of letterpress printing on handmade paper. The open page shows torn paper imbedded into watery colors of pulp painting. Tetenbaum set the amazingly legible text in curved lines which occasionally intersect. In reading the text, I felt believably tossed about like a ship on the sea. This book serves as a great example of an artist wanting a look or a feeling badly enough to push at the edge of technical possibilities.  Pati Scobey is another book artist in the exhibition with a powerful vision. In Vessel or Message, made in collaboration with sculptor and ceramist Lynn Chytilo, Scobey suspended from the gallery ceiling a 2 ft. cast paper boat partially filled with small books. A pedestal holding more small books stands under the hovering boat. Viewers feel either that they are at sea level with the boat, making the small books on the pedestal seem underwater, or that the small books are the water and the boat floats above it in the air. Chytilo wanted the surface of the boat to relate to typographical maps, so Scobey, a painter and printmaker, painted black lines on it. One of the little books reads: "ancient opening, there is a place outside of thought, It often occurs in 'waves'." Scobey says, "I thought of the words as elusive statements. I wanted there to be a little more thought besides the visual elements." The Back of Time, another arresting book by Scobey, has no front or back, no beginning or end. Except for the passage of time as one pages through the book, timelessness prevails. Hinged on the right and left sides, the book opens from the middle. The title derived from Scobey asking herself: "What would the front of time look like? What would the back of time look like?" Scobey draws on a basic harmonic pattern in nature. Each side of the book has eight pages and seven intervals, as do a spectrum of light, a musical octave, and a cell dividing. A cell divides outside of time when a transformation takes place and Scobey likens the jagged-edged crack down the book's middle to a transformation the viewer goes through. When turning the pages on just one side, the profile of a face is revealed. Images of the human figure, lightning bolts, birds, needles, and stitches dominate, with single phrase texts like "under falling questions" and "the snail complete in its little shell." Scobey painted bright colors in watercolor and gouache onto very heavy boards and then almost covered the colors with the dark blue-black printing. She made the shapes with stencils of torn paper and cut mylar, and printed them on a copper plate which she had etched and then printed in relief. Like scratchboard, it feels like the black has been scraped away to reveal the bright colors underneath. The images have a whimsical, graffiti-like quality. This is an exceptional group of works; unfortunately the exhibition will not travel to other locations. In lieu of a catalogue, Ohio Craft Museum plans to send each artist a video as documentation; perhaps this will also be available to the general public. The small Museum staff clearly extended a huge effort to make this ambitious show a reality. Before the twentieth century people used paper as a material on which to place information; Art Paper/Art Books is a reflection of paper's evolution.