There’s a reason it’s called rag paper.   For centuries, ragpickers supplied the papermaking industry with cotton and linen. Discarded clothing scraps were the aluminum cans of the past. They provided a livelihood to the unskilled. At the dawn of the Industrial Age, everything changed. A rising bourgeoisie and the success of education lead to increasing demand for printed material. The impact upon paper and the rag   supply chain was unanticipated. Consumption of traditional cotton and linen scraps outstripped supply.   The price of rags rose. When demand for papermaking material exceeded supply, alternate sources were sought.    One long forgotten trove of very, very old rags was rediscovered in the 1800s: linen wrapped Egyptian mummies. A Maine papermill owner imported a boatload of them and removed the linen wrappings. The linen was then converted into pulp with the end product being butcher wrap.   Production of the brown   ...

More Than Meets the Eye   William T. Wiley and the Busted Plexi   "Eye Talisman Strain,"   1971.   A museum is a repository, a time capsule if you will that is added to periodically.   What it means in the long term is that something one has created is preserved for posterity and will hopefully be shared with and seen by future generations.   And while an artist created the work, it requires someone with a well trained “Eye” to select the work for inclusion in this open ended time capsule.   It is one thing for a museum to add the work of an established, “consecrated,” artist to its collection and another to see the value in a young, living, artists’ offerings.    It is validating for a living artist to have one’s Art in a museum’s collection. Ellen Johnson, who taught modern art history at Oberlin College, was a great friend to many artists.   She also possessed a discerning eye.   She surely suggested to her frie...

  Noguchi Doing Time     While it is true that at Poston Isamu Noguchi was neither fish nor fowl not fully Japanese and was in the internment camp voluntarily None of those   who had reason to not want him around had authority to release him.   He was a perpetual outsider in a similar way Jackson Pollock was portrayed as a cowboy but was anything but Except for the drinking   Two artists doing time in ill-fitting Pigeonholes             Sandy Kinnee New York October 10, 2019