Radical Paper with Lynn Sures and Michelle Samour

Living Room

February 14, 2025, 12-1 pm

Parlors, House, Floor 1

The Phillips Collection’s Living Room is a series of intimate conversations featuring artists, authors, curators, collectors, and museum professionals. These programs offer rare opportunities to engage in discussions that connect the museum’s collection with broader dialogues.

Join The Phillips Collection and Pyramid Atlantic for an intimate conversation and book signing with Lynn Sures and Michelle Samour, authors of Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp. The landmark book takes an up-close look at the range, versatility, and brilliance of art created with colored paper pulp. Helen Frederick, artist and founder of Pyramid Atlantic, will introduce the authors and participate in a Q&A followed by a book signing.

About Radical Paper

A landmark book that profiles an artistic movement that has operated largely outside the mainstream art world, Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp serves as both an overdue history and up-close look at the range, versatility, and brilliance of art created with colored paper pulp.

Although handmade papers have been employed by artists for centuries, the use of handmade paper and colored paper pulp as an integral element in creating art—as opposed to serving only as the surface on which art is created—has seen remarkable development over the last 70 years. As early practitioners like Douglas Morse Howell, Laurence Barker, and Kenneth Tyler mapped out new directions in using colored paper pulp, their work inspired the careers of generations of artists who have taken this medium in fresh and unexpected directions. This foundational book—the first of its kind—features 73 artist innovators whose work, grounded in the common medium of paper and pulp, takes flight through an array of applications, modalities, and techniques, from the pictorial to the structural, representational to abstract, two- and three- dimensional, spanning the meditative to the mercurial.

Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp introduces and expands the medium to artists, curators, collectors, art historians, and the broader public as it highlights the dynamic scope and inventiveness of today’s leading practitioners.

LYNN SURES creates multi-media works examining the juncture of geology, physics and the origins of humans. She has been a SARF Fellow in Kenya and a US State Department American Artist Abroad in Sri Lanka. As an artist-in-residence she made works at Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades, Spain and the Press at the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe, NM. Collections which hold her works include US Dept. of State; US Library of Congress; Yale University; Schomburg Collection at NY Public Library; Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum; MCF, Fabriano, Italy; MAP, Bangalore, India; and Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt. Sures is Professor Emerita, Corcoran College of Art & Design (GWU), DC.

MICHELLE SAMOUR’s work explores the intersections between science, technology and the natural world, and the socio-political repercussions of redefining borders and boundaries. Her artist residencies include Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and The Banff Centre. She has exhibited her work at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Kohler Art Center, and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. She has received grants from the MA Cultural Council and a Society of Arts and Crafts NE Artist Award. Collections which hold her work include the International Paper Company, Meditech, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Watson Library. Samour is Professor Emerita of the SMFA at Tufts University.