Inside Drawings: A Workshop on the Materiality of Unique Works on Paper
A workshop at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, funded through Getty’s Paper Project initiative.
Date: June 3–7, 2024
Location: Menil Drawing Institute, The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
The Menil Drawing Institute at the Menil Collection in Houston is dedicated to the study and display of drawing, with a focus on scholarship and raising public appreciation of the medium—from early drawings to modern and contemporary works. Inside Drawings: A Workshop on the Materiality of Unique Works on Paper addressed the physical components of drawing practices to give curators of drawing collections a broader understanding of unique works on paper for the purpose of better defining, researching, and interpreting drawings. Heightened knowledge of material composition, application of drawing mediums, material aging, and reaction to adverse conditions benefits curators’ abilities to interpret, question, and care for the drawings in their purview.
This weeklong workshop utilized the collection and staff of the Menil, involving outside experts in the fields of paper conservation, papermaking history, materials study, conservation imaging and science, and curation of drawings. There was hands-on opportunities to deepen understanding of materials, as well as visits to exhibitions, collections, and an artist’s studio. Participants discussed curatorial strategies through case studies of current Menil exhibition projects and study of artists’ works.
The workshop offered ample networking opportunities throughout the week, including dinners, receptions, and discussions amongst participants that will be designed to both explore topics covered in the workshop and to consider concepts raised by drawings in participants’ home collections. The event enriched multiple facets of curatorial practice, from research and display to acquisitions and publications.
This workshop consists of an international cohort of early to mid‐career curators, with up to fifteen years of experience, who work directly with a collection of drawings. The selected group includes curators from encyclopedic museums; smaller, focused collections; university art museums and independent scholars.
Patrycja de Bieberstein Ilgner was born in Katowice (Poland) 1976. She has studied art history and cultural sciences at the University of Bremen (Germany). From 2005 to 2010 she has worked as academic researcher for the Research Centre for Artists’ Publications at the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen. In this context she was also curatorial assistant for the exhibitions Gerhard Rühm | Edited Works 1959–2006 in 2007 and Art on Air – Radio Art in Flux in 2008 and Franz Mon * 1951 plus in 2009 at the Weserburg. From 2009 to 2010 she coordinated the comprehensive network project Living Memory. Artists’ Publications in Europe – A Network for Indexing, Presentation and Communication, supported by the European Commission. Since 2010 she has been assistant curator at the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation in Bremen and director of the Wols Archive Ewald and Sylvia Rathke. She assisted in the preparation of the Wols retrospective 2013/14 at the Kunsthalle Bremen and the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. In this context, she worked for 6 weeks at the Menil Collection in Houston and wrote an article about Wols, which was published in the exhibition catalogue. In 2015, she completed her PhD thesis on the intermedial aspects of Gerhard Rühm’s work with Magna Cum Laude. In addition to numerous publications, she published the catalogue raisonné of Wols’ paintings in 2021 and a further publication with a selection of the artist’s masterpieces on paper with the publishing house Schirmer/Mosel in the following year 2022. Currently, she is preparing a catalogue raisonné of Wols’ drawings and watercolors.
Laura Bruni is a curator and art historian and she is currently Acting Senior Curator of Collections and Research & Curator of Exhibitions at the Henry Moore Foundation, Studios & Gardens. Prior to joining the foundation, Laura was Assistant Curator at Tate (2017-2023) where she co-curated exhibitions, displays and new commissions including JMW Turner with Lamin Fofana: Dark Waters (2022 – 2023), Lucian Freud: Real Lives, (2021), Whose Tradition? (2020), Radical Landscapes, (2022), Theaster Gates: Amalgam (2019). Laura has presented her research at international symposia organised by the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Tate, eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Laura also held curatorial and research positions at Tate Modern, Fondazione Calzolari and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and holds a BA in English, French and German Languages and Literatures, and an MA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Marianne Dobner is a curator at mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, where she curated exhibitions such as Elisabeth Wild. Imagination Factory (2023), Adam Pendleton. Blackness, White, and Light (2023), Jesse Stecklow. Terminal (2022), ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS a glittering alternative (2020), DEFROSTING THE ICEBOX. Guesting at mumok: The Hidden Treasures of the Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Weltmuseum Wien (2020), MISFITTING TOGETHER. Serial Formations of Pop Art, Minimal Art and Conceptual Art (2020), Cécile B. Evans. AMOS WORLD: Episode One (2018), Julian Turner. why not (2017), Fischerspooner. Sir (2017), Hannah Black. Small Room (2017), and Anna-Sophie Berger. Places to fight and to make up (2016). She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Vienna, where she is completing her dissertation entitled ANDY WARHOL EXHIBITS. A Critical Approach towards Andy Warhol’s Exhibition Practice (1952–1987). From 2015 to 2016, she was director of the Galerie Bastian in Berlin. From 2012 to 2013, she was an assistant curator at Museum Brandhorst in Munich, where she assisted on the world’s first exhibition of Andy Warhol’s work in books, titled Reading Andy Warhol (2013). She studied art history in Vienna, Paris, Munich, and Berkeley. She holds a BA in art history from the University of Vienna and an MA from the Elitenetzwerk Bayern (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich / Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt / University of Augsburg).
Laurel Garber is the Park Family Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. At the PMA, she organized the 2021 exhibition, Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, the first major survey of Amos’s career. In May she opened the exhibition Mary Cassatt at Work, which examines Cassatt’s professionalism, her scenes of gendered labor, and her inventive artistic techniques in her prints, pastels, and paintings. The exhibition will be on view all summer in Philadelphia before traveling to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in the fall. Laurel earned her PhD at Northwestern, MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and BA from Cornell University.
Elisa Germán is the Lunder Curator of Works on Paper and Whistler Studies at the Colby College Museum of Art, where she is responsible for the museum’s collection of prints, drawings, and photographs, artwork by James McNeill Whistler in the Lunder Collection, and oversees the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies, in partnership with the Hunterian Art Gallery (Glasgow) and the National Museum of Asian Art (Washington D.C.) Elisa is currently organizing two exhibitions, Surface Tension: Etchings from the Collection (July 2024 – January 2025) and Is anything the matter? Drawings by Laylah Ali (October 2025 – April 2026), and will soon inaugurate a new works on paper gallery (Fall 2024). Previously, Elisa held positions in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, served as the President of the Association of Print Scholars, and was the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Drawings at the Harvard Art Museums, where she co-curated the exhibition, American Watercolors, 1880–1990: Into the Light (May – August 2023). Elisa is currently preparing a manuscript based on her dissertation, completed at Boston University in 2020, which will provide a historical overview of Spanish printmakers and illustrators from Goya to the mid-twentieth century.
Dr. Charlotte Healy has been a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago since 2021. She is on the curatorial team for Willem de Kooning Drawing, the first major survey of the Dutch-American artist’s drawing practice. For this unique remote position, she is based in New York City to have access to the resources of the Willem de Kooning Foundation. Previously, she was the 2020–21 Morgan-Menil Pre-Doctoral Fellow, in residence first at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and then at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston; this fellowship is awarded to scholars with demonstrated expertise in the field of modern and contemporary drawing. In 2018–20, she was a Museum Research Consortium Fellow and then a Research Assistant in the Department of Painting & Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. At MoMA, she contributed to the planning of the exhibition Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction and coedited the accompanying catalogue, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Alice Award and received the 2022 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award. She obtained her BA in art history and mathematics from Williams College in 2010 and her PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 2022. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Paul Klee’s Hand,” examines the role of the hand, along with its various associations and manifestations, in the work of the Swiss-born modern artist and Bauhaus master. In general, her scholarship focuses on issues related to the materials and techniques of twentieth-century art. She will be presenting a paper coauthored by conservator Margaret Holben Ellis on the materiality and temporality of Willem de Kooning’s drawings at the 2024 Congress of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) in Lyon, France.
Victor Hundsbuckler is curator of 17th-century French and Italian drawings at the Musée du Louvre. Before 2018, he was in charge of the historical collections of the Monnaie de Paris, for which he was responsible for the new museum project inaugurated in 2017. In 2019, at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, he curated the exhibition devoted to the Italian drawings from the Mariette collection. In 2022, for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, he conceived “Histoires de papiers/Stories of Paper”, an exhibition offering a global history of the artistic uses of paper, from the ancient Orient to contemporary art. In 2025, Victor Hundsbuckler will present an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, featuring a graphic double of the Galerie Farnèse, a veritable “17th-century Sistine Chapel”, bringing together a large number of the Carracci’s preparatory drawings. Victor Hundsbuckler is also preparing the inventory of 17th-century Roman drawings held by the Musée du Louvre. He is a professor at the Ecole du Louvre, where he teaches the history of drawing. In both his publications and his teaching, Victor Hundsbuckler seeks to combine his expertise in ancient drawing with his curiosity for contemporary art.
Dr. Rosalind McKever is Curator of Paintings and Drawings at the V&A. She specializes in modern European art, its reception in Britain and North and South America, and its relationship with fashion and design. At the V&A she co-curated the 2022 exhibition Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear. In 2018 she co-curated Boccioni: Continuity in Space at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo and later co-edited the publication Boccioni in Brazil (EDUSP, 2022). She has published widely on Futurism and modern Italian art in Apollo, Art History, the Burlington Magazine, the Getty Research Journal and many edited volumes. She has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues, including Courtauld Impressionists (National Gallery, 2018) Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light (National Gallery, 2019), Cézanne at the Whitworth (Manchester, 2019), Divine People: A Portrait of Ambrose McEvoy (Philip Mould, 2019) and most recently Beldy: Seta, Cotone, Lana, Raso (Studio Museo Casorati, 2024). She also writes on contemporary artists with an interest in fashion, including Sylvie Fleury (Pinacoteca Agnelli, 2023) and David Remfry RA (Lund Humphries, 2025). Her book Vanessa Bell: Modern Living is forthcoming in 2025 with Thames and Hudson. Rosalind has previously held the Harry M. Weinrebe Curatorial Fellowship at the National Gallery, London, and the Jane and Morgan Whitney Senior Research Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She has served on the Curatorial Committee for the Association for Art History and participated in the Association of Art Museum Curators Engagement Program. She studied History of Art with Italian at the University of Leeds and obtained her PhD on Italian Futurism’s relationship with the past at Kingston University in collaboration with the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in 2012. She has taught art history at Kingston University and the University of Sussex.
Tania Moore is the Joyce and Michael Morris Chief Curator at the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia in the UK. She has most recently curated the What Is Truth? season at the Sainsbury Centre, including the exhibitions In Event of Moon Disaster, Liquid Gender, and Jeffrey Gibson: no simple word for time. Publications include What Is Truth? (editor, Sainsbury Centre, 2024); Rhythm and Geometry: Constructivist Art in Britain Since 1951 (co-editor, Sainsbury Centre, 2021); and Henry Moore: Friendships and Legacies (author, Sainsbury Centre, 2020). She has contributed chapters on post-war and contemporary sculpture to publications including Magdalene Odundo: The Journey of Things (InOther Words, 2019); Elisabeth Frink: Humans and Other Animals (Sainsbury Centre, 2018) and Becoming Henry Moore (Henry Moore Foundation, 2017). In 2019, she received the New Collecting Award from the Art Fund to acquire sculptors’ drawings by contemporary women and non-binary artists for the Sainsbury Centre collection. With the grant, she has acquired works by Leilah Babirye, Lubna Chowdhary, Shawanda Corbett, Mona Hatoum, Leiko Ikemura, Rachel Kneebone, Wangechi Mutu, Cornelia Parker and Ro Robertson. Prior to the Sainsbury Centre, Tania worked at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Henry Moore Foundation, and Pangolin London. She received an MA Museum Studies and BA History of Art from the University of Manchester.
Heather Nickels is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, as well as an independent curator, arts writer and consultant. Recently, she provided support as a Consulting Project Associate for the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, which opened in late-February 2024 and runs through July 2024. From 2019–22, Nickels served as the inaugural Blackmon Perry Curatorial Fellow in African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (MBMA) in Memphis, Tennessee (previously titled the Joyce Blackmon Curatorial Fellowship). In this role, she organized several exhibitions, most notably Persevere and Resist: The Strong Black Women of Elizabeth Catlett (June 5 - August 29, 2021), which was accompanied by a full-illustrated catalogue. At MBMA, Nickels also organized a small, permanent collection show entitled, A Journey Towards Self-Definition: African American Artists in the Permanent Collection; served as a site curator for the traveling exhibition Andy Warhol: Silver Clouds, and the one-work exhibition and short-term loan project from Art Bridges, “The Thankful Poor by Henry Ossawa Tanner”; and reinstalled the former African art galleries, which included a commissioning new work from a local artist. From 2016-2018, Nickels completed a two-year project research associateship at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, where she worked as a Project Research Associate on the exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (which later traveled to the Orsay Museum in Paris, France), and held a one-year curatorial position in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from September 2016 to September 2017. Nickels has also worked in curatorial and editorial capacities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New Museum and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She received her B.A. in Art History from Barnard College of Columbia University in 2016, and her M.A. in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, U.K. in 2019.
Dr. Judith Rauser studied art history, philosophy and rhetoric in Tübingen, Hamburg (Germany) and Basel (Switzerland) and completed her doctorate at the University of Hamburg in 2017. After a master thesis on Adolph Menzel’s gouache series Armory Phantasies, her PhD thesis Iron Bodies. Depictions of Armor in Image and Body Politics during the 19th and 20th Century discussed the visual presence of armor in British and German painting, works on paper and photography. The methodical approach combined the analysis of the anthropomorphic object armor, the iconography of the materials iron and steel, and the representation of material qualities (e.g. imprenetrability, shine) in different artistic media. Analyzing aspects of materiality in relation to historical discourses about gender and nationalism, allowed to demonstrate why armor served as iconic representation of “modern masculinity.” After first experiences in trainee positions at Hamburger Kunsthalle and Fondation Beyeler (Basel, Switzerland), Judith Rauser has worked as a curatorial assistant, assistant to the director and researcher at the Hamburger Kunsthalle since 2016. She contributed to exhibitions such as The Light of the Campagna. Drawings by Claude Lorrain from the British Museum and Goya, Fragonard, Tiepolo. The Freedom of Imagination. In July 2019, she joined the team at Kunstmuseum Basel as an assistant curator at the Department of Prints and Drawings. She recently co-curated _The Collector Curt Glaser. From Champion of Modernism to Refugee, and curated Made in Japan. Color Woodblock Prints of Hiroshige, Kunisada and Hokusai, both exhibitions with a strong background in the history of collecting, and, at the same time, research and re-cataloguing projects. In July 2024, she will be taking on a curator position at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, a German museum with an eminent collection of 18th and 19th century works on paper and a recently acquired collection of 19th and early 20th century photography.
Clara Roca is Curator of the modern graphic arts, books and photography collection (representing at the Petit Palais – Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, France, since 2019. She is a graduate of the Ecole nationale des Chartes (2016) and the Institut national du Patrimoine (2019). Her education includes, among others, an internship at the Graphic Art Department of the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, where she curated the “Edouard Bénédictus, Le spectacle en couleurs” exhibition (2019, Musée Nissim de Camondo). She also collaborated to the researches for the exhibition « Le dessin sans réserve. Collections du Musée des Arts Décoratifs » (2020-2021) which accompanied the revival of this wonderful drawings collection. At the Petit Palais, she curated or co-curated the following exhibitions: “Laurence Aëgerter. Ici mieux qu’en face“ (2020-2021), ”Walter Sickert. Peindre et transgresser” (2022-2023), as well as three shows focusing on the museum’s prints collection: “Edition limitée. Vollard, Petiet et l’estampe de maîtres” (2021), ”L’esprit Art nouveau. La donation Pierre Roche au Petit Palais” (2022),”Trésors en Noir & Blanc. Estampes du Petit Palais, de Dürer à Toulouse-Lautrec” (2023-2024). She is currently working on an exhibition dedicated to the museum’s jewelry drawings collection (2025). Mirroring her research interest, these exhibitions as well as her publications, conferences and classes aim to address systematically the question of the creative process, the artist’s choices of resources and techniques, to engage wider audiences with the materiality of works on paper.
Elizabeth M. Sandoval is Assistant Curator at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). While she specialized in Netherlandish and Franco-Flemish manuscripts and paintings from the late Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, as a curator at an academic art museum, she cares for all objects in the collection; these were made across different media, and date from antiquity to the present-day. Increasingly, she deals with drawings and other works on paper through acquisitions, exhibitions, collection care, and scholarly work - much to her delight. In preparation for a new museum building set to open in 2027, Elizabeth is leading the collection assessment of the seven thousand works on paper, carefully considering the condition of each. She has curated exhibitions on medieval reading practices and Christian numerology. Additionally, she has co-curated shows on contemporary art by feminist and queer artists, as well as the redesigned collection galleries, all of which have included drawings. Her research interests include the relationship between text and image, the history of the book, medieval image theory, and curatorial practices that draw connections between today’s viewers and artworks made across wide geographies and chronologies. She is concurrently working on two projects: one is concerned with a manuscript written on paper with drawing inserts on parchment; the other is a book project on the metaphor of the book of the heart in particular fifteenth-century case studies. She has worked and held internships at The Morgan Library, The Hispanic Society of America, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. She has received research and curatorial fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Morgan Library. Elizabeth studied art history and English literature at the University of California, Irvine (B.A.), curriculum development at Teachers College (M.A.), and art history at The Ohio State University (M.A. and Ph.D.).
Erin Sullivan Maynes is Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She was previously Assistant Curator in the Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies at LACMA and the Hoehn Curatorial Fellow for Prints at the University of San Diego (USD). She has curated and co-organized exhibitions including Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany (with Rachel Kaplan, 2022-23), Women’s Work: Art by German Women (2021), The Bauhaus at 100: Modern Legacies (2019), and Picturing the Masses: Germany 1900-1939 (2018) at LACMA and Art Cash: Money in Print (2018), British Modern: Prints from the British Museum (2017), Xerografia: Copyart in Brazil, 1970-1990 (2017) and Rembrandt: A Decade of Brilliance, 1648-58 (2016) at USD. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Southern California in 2014. Recent publications include Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany (LACMA, 2022) and the essays “Protean Papers: Material Transformations in German Works on Paper and Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Drawings and Prints,” in Historic Avant-Garde Work on Paper (Routledge, 2024) and “Shadow Schein and Scherenschnitte: Lotte Reiniger and the Silhouettes of Early Weimar,” in Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Her current exhibition project is Against the Grain: A Global History of Block Printing, slated to open at LACMA in late 2025.
Vera Hendriks is a Curator of Art Collections and a researcher of 17th and 18th century Dutch drawings at Teylers Museum, located in The Netherlands. As a curator, she oversees a renowned collection of Dutch and Italian old master drawings, featuring works by artists such as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Hendrick Goltzius. With a Master’s degree in Art History from Utrecht University, Vera has specialized in old master drawings. After completing her studies, she worked at the study room of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, which boasts a preeminent collection of drawings and prints, with a particular focus on the Dutch 17th century, and at the Kröller-Müller Museum, where Vera was a researcher for the exhibition ‘Aged Well. Drawings from the Kröller-Müller collection: 1500-1850.’ Most notably, she curated an exhibition titled ‘Panorama: Four Centuries of Vistas’ at Teylers Museum, which showcases drawings from the 16th to the 20th century that challenge the definition of the word ‘panorama’, including naval scenes and portrait sized panoramas. Currently, Vera is also involved in research at Teylers Museum, where she is contributing to forthcoming collection catalogue on 17th and 18th century Dutch drawings. The catalogue will feature an extensive section dedicated to the materials used by the artists. This project has deepened Vera’s understanding of the historical context and material characteristics of these works, further fueling her curiosity and enthusiasm for the study of drawings.
Irina Zucca Alessandrelli is an art historian and curator based in Milan, Italy. Since 2013, she has been the Curator of Collezione Ramo, which is a collection of Italian drawings from the 20th and 21st centuries. Over the years, she has acquired 700 works on paper from some of the most representative modern and contemporary artists. She has been promoting this impressive collection through exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Her first public presentation, “Who is Afraid of Drawing?” was held at the Museo del Novecento in Milan in 2018, which later traveled to the Estorick Collection in London in 2019. She also co-curated “Silent Revolutions: Italian Drawings from the Twentieth Century” with Édouard Kopp at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas in 2020. In her book “Italian Drawing of the XX Century” (Silvana ed. 2019, Milan), she contextualized Collezione Ramo. In addition to her work with Collezione Ramo, Zucca Alessandrelli is the curator of Milano Drawing Week, an annual citywide event that showcases modern and contemporary drawing exhibitions in museums and private galleries around Milan. She selects the best representatives of contemporary drawing. For each solo show, she invites the artist to choose a 20th century artwork from Collezione Ramo to be presented alongside their work. Collezione Ramo has promoted the event (fourth edition) in collaboration with the Milan City Council’s Department of Culture. Since 2021, Zucca Alessandrelli has also been the curator of the DISEGNI/Drawings section at the Artissima International Fair in Turin. In this role, she invites international galleries to present a solo show by a selected artist. Zucca Alessandrelli earned her BA in Modern and Contemporary Italian Art with Honours from the Università degli Studi di Milano and an MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University in New York, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar (2006/2008). She intends to continue proposing exhibitions on modern and contemporary drawing to create a culture on this medium and overcome the stereotypes of inferiority that still weigh on drawing compared to other artistic expressions.
Timothy Barrett is professor emeritus in the University of Iowa Center for the Book and the School of Library and Information Science. Following a Fulbright Fellowship studying papermaking in Japan, his research on early European handmade papers was funded by the NEA, the Kress Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services and a MacArthur Fellowship. His primary research interests have been Japanese papermaking, early European papermaking technology, the role of gelatin in paper permanence, and aesthetics in handmade paper. Specialized handmade papers produced by Barrett and his students were designed for use by fine press printers, book artists, and conservators of rare books and works of art on paper. Paper made by Barrett’s team now sits beneath the Charters of Freedom (The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, and The Declaration of Independence) at the National Archives rotunda in Washington D. C. Barrett is author of three books, one website, eight videos, and thirty-six articles or book chapters on the history, technique, science, and aesthetics of hand papermaking. He was director of the UI Center for the Book between 1996 and 2002 and again became director in the fall of 2012 until his retirement in May of 2020.
Tatiana Ginsberg is an artist, papermaker, and researcher. She studied at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and received her MFA from the University of California Santa Barbara. In between she spent two years in Japan researching naturally dyed papers under a Fulbright grant. Studying at one of the oldest dye studios in Kyoto, she learned the art of dyeing paper in brilliant colors for temple festivals, sutra copying, and other uses. Together with Doi Yuko, she worked on the translation of Washi Sōkan (Washi: The Soul of Japan—Fine Japanese Paper in the Second Millennium), a twelve-volume compendium of paper samples and essays. Returning to the U.S. she taught papermaking, printmaking, book arts, and drawing in universities for more than a decade. For The Legacy Press, she edited the series Papermaker’s Tears: Essays on the Art and Craft of Paper. And as Director of Artistic Projects and Master Collaborator at Dieu Donné Paper Mill in New York City she works with other artists to make new work in handmade paper; in this capacity she has collaborated with artists such as Do Ho Suh, Nari Ward, Samuel Levi Jones, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Diana Al-Hadid, and Howardena Pindell. Her own work combines traditional and contemporary methods of papermaking and is exhibited nationally and internationally. www.tatianaginsberg.art
Marcia Kure is a multidisciplinary artist whose work employs diverse material strategies to engage with systems of power and control. Careful consideration of source material linked to capital, labor, bodies, and the environment is central to Kure’s practice, which often incorporates the study of line, drawing techniques, and natural, plant-based pigments to explore consumer culture, economic systems, markets, and networks. Trained at the University of Nigeria and a graduate of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Kure’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including solo shows in Nigeria, Germany, the Netherlands, England, and the USA, as well as prestigious international events like the La Triennial in Paris (2013) and the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Seville (2006). She has participated in group exhibitions such as “Body Talk” at Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels and “Not a Single Story” at Wanås Konst in Sweden. Additionally, Kure has held esteemed positions, including Visiting Professor at the Royal Art Institute in Stockholm, Sweden (2019-2020), and has been a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution (2008) and Visual Artist in Residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2014). Her work is housed in numerous prominent collections worldwide, including the British Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Newark Museum, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Menil Collection, among others.
Leah Levy is the Executive Director and a trustee of The Jay DeFeo Foundation, which was endowed by the artist Jay DeFeo (1929-1989). In 1995, Levy organized the conservation of DeFeo’s painting The Rose (1958-1966), now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. She did her undergraduate and graduate papers on the subject of artists’ drawings. From 1974 to 1983, she directed the Leah Levy gallery in San Francisco, and next was founding curator of Capp Street Project, an artist-in-residency program in San Francisco that facilitates site-specific installations. She has organized exhibitions as an independent curator and authored several books and many essays. Most recently, she edited the monograph Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work (DelMonico Books, 2023). Levy serves as Honorary Chair Aspen Institute Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative Advisors, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Artist’s Legacy Foundation and the Nancy Graves Foundation.
Timothy David Mayhew has researched traditional drawing materials and techniques of 14th to 19th century European master artists. He has lectured at The Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Harvard Art Museums. In 1994, he began a series of annual lectures at the Harvard Art Museums, which continues to this day. Mayhew has published four manuscripts in the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation (JAIC), including Natural black chalk in traditional old master drawings; Steatite and calcite natural white chalk in traditional old master drawings; Natural yellow chalk in traditional old master drawings; and Natural red chalk in traditional old master drawings. Mayhew consulted on the Getty Museum’s 2016 exhibition, Noir: The Romance of Black in 19th-Century French Drawings and Prints, and wrote the catalogue chapter, Dessin au fusain: Nineteenth century French charcoal drawing materials and techniques. In 2019, Mayhew consulted on the Cleveland Museum of Art’s exhibition, Michelangelo: Mind of the Master. The exhibition included a didactic display case of traditional 14th to 16th century drawing materials from Mayhew’s personal collection, and he gave a lecture entitled, Traditional 14th to 16th century drawing materials and techniques. Mayhew worked with the Cleveland Museum of Art as a consultant on their 2023 exhibition, Nineteenth-century French Drawings, and authored the catalog chapter, Traditional 19th century French graphite drawing materials and techniques. Mayhew’s undergraduate studies were at the University of Michigan and received his doctorate from Wayne State University in 1978. He resides in New Mexico and founded the Atelier Cedar Ridge, a working studio and research facility to study the unique drawing materials and techniques of European master artists.
Catherine (Kate) Maynor has been Paper Conservator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), Washington, DC, since the fall of 1986. Previously, Kate received her Master of Arts degree and Certificate of Advanced study from the Cooperstown Graduate Program and received training at the Northeast Document Conservation Center (Andover, MA), the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (Philadelphia, PA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Soon after arriving at SAAM, Kate was invited to join the editorial board of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) Book and Paper Group’s pioneering publication, the Paper Conservation Catalog. Kate served as Project Director from 1989-1994 for the NEH grant supporting the publication and advised the AIC paintings and textiles specialty groups on launching similar projects. Over the years, Kate has examined innumerable artworks in SAAM’s diverse collection for acquisition, loan, and exhibition, advising on all aspects of care, and has treated objects ranging in scale from watercolor miniatures on paper to 8-foot-long collages by Christo for the 2010 display of the Running Fence… project. To prepare for the major museum building renovation starting in 2000, Kate worked with SAAM and National Portrait Gallery colleagues to help design the new, visible labs of the Lunder Conservation Center. Public outreach and education have always been an important and impactful part of Kate’s career. She has enthusiastically presented numerous public gallery talks and other presentations for SAAM-generated and outside exhibitions, inviting audiences to engage in close looking and deeper appreciation. Kate has shared insights into the work of Self-Taught artists, a notable aspect of SAAM’s collection, via presentations at SAAM and other institutions. Recently, Kate has joined her Lunder Center colleagues in offering online programs, reaching varied audiences.
Jan Burandt joined the Menil Collection in 2007 as conservator of works of art on paper. She has collaborated on the Menil Drawing Institute since its inception and moved the paper conservation studio there in 2018. She cares for the drawings, photographs and prints of the Menil Collection. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, was President of the Western Association for Art Conservation from 2022-23, and is a member of the Print Council of America. Jan holds a Masters in Art Conservation from the State University College at Buffalo and a C.A.S. from Harvard University Art Museums Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Prior to conservation training, she studied studio arts, earned a BFA in Sculpture and worked with artists and galleries. Her background in studio arts leads her to have a strong interest in the complex non-traditional problems encountered with contemporary art, and in collaborations with artists to address their aesthetic concerns regarding their work. Jan has published articles on the characterization of artist’s paper and paper based photographic materials. She has interviewed many artists about their studio practice, some of these interviews are included in the Artist Documentation Program. Jan is passionate about mentoring and is a co-organizer of Inside Drawings.
James Craven joined the Menil Collection in December 2020 as the Conservation Imaging Technician. He is responsible for condition and treatment photography, advanced visualizations, and image analysis of art for the conservation team. Building on a long career in photographic science he brings an important technical approach to conservation documentation, concentrating on detail and accuracy through imaging. At the Menil he exercises many advanced imaging techniques including hyper-spectral imaging, photogrammetry, aerial drone photography, and x-radiography. James is the lead of the AIC Imaging Working Group’s X-Radiography topic, working with museum professionals around the globe to create a repository of x-ray imaging information.
Dr. Edouard Kopp is the John R. Eckel, Jr. Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute, a program of the Menil Collection in Houston that seeks to foster scholarship on and raise public understanding of the drawing medium, notably through exhibitions, publications and fellowships. In this capacity, he is responsible for the management and growth of the Menil’s drawing collection, and for the Institute’s programming, educational outreach and administration. He was previously the Maida and George Abrams Curator of Drawing at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Mass., and before that Associate Curator of Drawing at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. His main area of scholarly interest is the history of drawing, with a particular focus on the eighteenth century and, increasingly, on the modern and contemporary period. Edouard holds an MA in modern art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and a PhD in early modern art from the same institution. His doctoral research led to an exhibition Bouchardon: Royal Artist of the Enlightenment, which he co-curated at the Musée du Louvre and the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2016-17, and to the publication of the monograph The Learned Draftsman: Edme Bouchardon (Los Angeles, 2017). His recent publications include Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2022) which he co-edited, and Robert Motherwell Drawing: As Fast as the Mind Itself (Houston, 2022) which was published to coincide with a retrospective of the artist’s drawings held at the Menil Drawing Institute. He also authored Ruth Asawa Through Line (Houston, 2023), with Kim Conaty from the Whitney Museum of American Art, where the eponymous exhibition was presented in the fall 2023 before coming to Houston this spring. He is a co-organizer of Inside Drawings.
Kirsten Marples is Curatorial Associate at the Menil Drawing Institute, where she oversees the Janie C. Lee Drawing Room. A specialist in late nineteenth-century European art, particularly Symbolism, she is currently curating a permanent collection exhibition titled Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms (September 20, 2024–January 26, 2025). She contributed to Ruth Asawa Through Line (March 22–July 21, 2024), co-organized by the Menil Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and to the exhibition’s accompanying scholarly catalogue. Her exhibition Hyperreal: Gray Foy (April 21–September 3, 2023) was the first solo museum exhibition devoted to the meticulous and deeply imaginative drawings of midcentury American artist Gray Foy. In addition to her curatorial work, Kirsten facilitates scholarly and curricular engagement with the Menil’s collection of drawings. Prior to her work at the Menil, Kirsten held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; and the Saint Louis Art Museum, among others. Kirsten earned her PhD in art history from Washington University in St. Louis and received an MA from Rutgers University.
Kelly Montana is Assistant Curator at the Menil Drawing Institute, where she began as a Curatorial Assistant in 2015. She has curated exhibitions on modern and contemporary drawings for the museum, including Hanne Darboven: Writing Time and Brice Marden: Think of Them as Spaces, among others, and co-curated the group exhibition Dream Monuments: Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s with guest curator Erica DiBenedetto. She has commissioned three site-specific projects for the Menil’s Wall Drawing Series, working with the artists Marcia Kure, Marc Bauer, and a forthcoming work by Ronny Quevedo. Current research interests include video art, sculptural paper objects, and drawing practices in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s-80s. Prior to the Menil, she held positions at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum. She received her MA from the University College, London.
Areli Navarro Magallón serves as the Administrative Assistant for the Getty Paper Project at the Menil Drawing Institute. In addition to continuing her professional relationship with the Menil Drawing Institute, for whom she assisted in researching the 2021 exhibition Draw Like A Machine: Pop Art 1952 – 1975, she has also fostered an emerging curatorial trajectory curating photography-specific exhibitions. These include Entre Umbrales y Portales by Troy Ezequiel Montes, a participating exhibition in FotoFest Biennial 2024. She has collaborated with many Houston institutions, including partnerships with Arte Público Press, DiverseWorks, the Locke Surls Center for Art and Nature, and ART IS BOND. gallery. She holds a B.A. in Art History and Literature from Rice University, where she specialized in Modern and Contemporary Latinx art. She completed two major field research investigations abroad on populist art and material cultures funded by the Mellon Foundation and Rice University. These included Memory, Mortality, and Material Creation: An Experiential Inquiry on the Relationship Between Art, Death, and the Self and Fake Flowers Can’t Bloom: Tracing the Political Impotence of Street Art in Valparaíso, Chile.
Joseph N. Newland has been Director of Publishing at the Menil Collection since late 2011. After academic work on Sino-Japanese Buddhist architecture and art, much of the art on paper, and a gap year in a fine print gallery that was a ULAE dealer in their heyday, he worked in museum publishing in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City, and Philadelphia before Houston. Along the way he learned to love papers, inks, and dry mediums, and he has thought a lot about documentation and description of same. A major professional concern in the art books he produces is revealing to the reader through pictures and texts what can be seen when viewing the artworks, as is how the ink kisses the paper. The latter is the most evident in the Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings; and the former in the Menil Drawing Institute series that he co-conceived with David Breslin and Binocular Design, and Edward Kopp. Some favorite book projects include Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961–2001; C.C. Wang: Mind Landscapes; The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India; Robert Motherwell Drawing: As Fast as the Mind Itself; Artists We’ve Known: Selections from the Walter Hopps and Caroline Huber Collection; and Ruth Asawa Through Line.
Dr. Corina (Cory) Rogge is the Director of Conservation at the Menil Collection. She earned a B.A. in chemistry from Bryn Mawr College, a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Yale University and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Texas Health Sciences Center (Houston). Before joining the Menil Collection in the summer of 2023 she served as the Andrew W. Mellon Research Scientist at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2013-2023) and the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor in Conservation Science in the Department of Art Conservation at State University of New York Buffalo State College (2010-2013). She is the Vice President and Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation and an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation. While much of her research focusses on 20th century artists, paints, and pigments and she is the principal author of Franz Kline: The Artist’s Materials, she works on materials across all cultures, media, and ages.
