In organizing Memphis College of Art’s 2002 Biennial Exhibition, “On Paper: Collaborations in Print and Pulp,” curator Cynthia Thompson put together a fine cross section of contemporary work. The exhibition was the cornerstone for an extended weekend–long, feet-first dive into the deep end of the print and pulp pool, including workshops, a lecture by artist Liliana Porter, and a symposium that featured some prominent members of the print and papermaking world. The symposium panel included Judith Brodsky from the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (RCIPP), Brian Garner and Isabelle Geiger from Baltimore’s Goya-Girl Press, as well as Megan Moorhouse and Mina Takahashi from Dieu Donné Papermill in Manhattan. Writer and editor Faye Hirsch moderated the panel. Too often in shows that deal with specialized fields—like printmaking, papermaking, ceramics, and metalsmithing—the conversation centers on one’s technical ability or craft, and somewhere along the way the idea of making a good, solid piece of art gets lost. Crucial to the future of these particular media is a show in which the work can embrace or push the envelope of a particular method or tradition of a craft, and the works can stand admirably on their own. In this case they did so, without needing explanations of "pulp pigment transfer" or "chine collé." The pieces in the show gravitated towards the small; most were inside two feet squared, and at least half tended to be long on surface and short on anything solid to really sink one's teeth into. Take, for example, the very gestural works contributed by Martha Macks (Cactus I and II); Mary Judge’s foggy Heaven and Earth Series; Charlotte Yudis’s soft focus White Turnip; May Stevens’s metallic powder-heavy Twas Brillig / Away We Go; and Katherine Mojzsis’s watery Moses Parts the Milky Way. (I do not intend to degrade these artists or the quality of their work; rather I want to point out that the meal that was the show simply served too many variations and helpings of pea soup.) That said, the pieces with photographic elements or stark, crisp imagery tended to stand out and, perhaps unfairly, became more memorable. For instance, Juan Logan’s Trying Not to Forget, Donald Baechler’s Red Flowers, and Lilliana Porter’s ultra-graphic Dialogue in Chinese could not help but function for the show like shining beacons of solidity, our lighthouses in the fog. (Porter's and Baechler’s wit also served as a breath of fresh air in an otherwise somber exhibition.) Among the standouts in the show was Perennial Reactor by Melvin Edwards, a perfect pairing of media and image: thick, stenciled lines and delicate, creamy paper with cockled edges. Chain links coil to resemble a head and shoulders cut off from a body, standing black as pitch and unbending against the emptiness above. Roxy Paines’s heavy relief Fecund is visual evidence of an excellent artist’s collaboration with a first rate papermill (Dieu Donné). The rough, uneven surface of the upper portion is like a richly colored, pebbly beach of compost pitted against the smooth, stark-white sea of paper in its lower quarter. In the context of this show, the piece gleamed like a botanist’s prized discovery or a NASA specimen, in a super-clean, shadow box frame. With its many-eyed figure, Magdelena Compos-Pons’s untitled lithograph on handmade paper with pulp painting was one of the show’s richest works. The graphic, almond-shaped slits with their watery blue irises appear flat against a deeply shadowed human back. Our view of the body is cropped just below the hips and at the nape of the neck. The figure stands with her back to the viewer and the backdrop is a wall with more blurry eyes, rendered in blacks and grays. Even from across the gallery, Compos-Pons’s piece was inviting. I wanted to spend some time with it. Its depth provided a well-needed place in the exhibition to lose oneself in a strong, richly layered image. Amanda Guest’s two quiet pieces, She Rose as She Fell and White Line 1, left me curious to see more. In She Rose as She Fell, the simple but elegant image of a letter-like shape was built by grouping strands of cut paper and imbedding them into handmade linen paper. The strands behave like lines drawn one on top of or next to one another. These lines are keenly aware of the translucent paper’s edge as they meander and merge, forming a confluence in the center. Since they were imbedded in the paper, the dark strands are grayed, but we see them peek out from the edge of the paper in their raw darkness at the bottom corners, then loop over and under at top right. White Line 1 carries with it the delicate strength one might find in an accomplished oboist's solo. These two works show tenderness and some of the most sensitive drawing in my recent memory. One of the weaknesses of the exhibition lay in its low artist-to-work ratio. (Ten of the twenty-five artists had two pieces included in the show; the rest had just one.) It was sometimes difficult to gain a proper understanding of an artist with a single piece. Nevertheless, through the sheer number of artists, the exhibition was able to shed light on the variety of exciting work being made through printshops’ and papermills’ collaborations with artists. This Biennial has allowed Cynthia Thompson to draw on her history as a collaborator and a teacher in order to bring some of the most noteworthy and vital developments in the print and paper fields to her school and to Memphis. Hamlett Dobbins