Paper has long been a cherished medium for those who make and consume art. As I mentioned in my piece on the excellent show “Picasso and Paper” at the Cleveland Museum of Art—only one month left—it allows the artist to experiment in ways that more expensive mediums do not. But what about when the paper becomes the work itself? The history of such artworks is explored in a new book by Lynn Sures and Michelle Samour, Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp. We caught up with them fresh from their talk at The Phillips Collection to hear more about this inventive medium.
I’ll begin with the first question in the book, which yields a long and intellectual answer: What is colored pulp, and how is it identifiable in a work of art?
Lynn Sures: Colored pulp is a liquid medium that consists of finely beaten plant (cellulose) fibers suspended in water, and colored with pigments or dyes. Depending on how it’s processed, when it’s dry it takes on diverse levels of translucency or opacity, and it can be soft to the touch or even hard enough to resemble and feel like a drum skin. It can be cast in a mold to form a rigid object when dry or start as a thin, flexible wet sheet that will accept the addition of layers of different colored pulps. One of the things we’ve shown with Radical Paper is that it often can’t be readily identified in a work of art without the viewer having developed a familiarity with its guises. This is one of the reasons that we wrote the book, to educate people so that they can appreciate the potential of this amazing medium. It’s there, and we—artists, collectors, galleries, curators, educators—can be on the alert and get used to seeing it, knowing it.
Artists have used colored paper since the late 15th Century and continue to use it today. What do you think makes it so popular with artists?
Michelle Samour: It’s such a seductive medium. Once you get your hands in colored pulp, you’re hooked. It’s wet, messy, physically engaging and despite how many years one has used the medium, it always presents new challenges. It can be used both two- and three-dimensionally in combination with other media and has many applications and methodologies. For example, wet pulp can be applied to a newly formed sheet of paper and brushed or poured onto its surface, much like one would apply paint—this application is often referred to as “pulp painting” and is a particular draw to painters from outside the field of hand papermaking. Many of the processes are also similar to printmaking where, for instance, it can be squeegeed through a screen or applied through stencils. Sculpturally, pulp can be applied like clay to an armature as in Wangechi Mutu’s rich earth-colored works or alternatively, as in Peter Gentenaar’s high-shrinkage pigmented pulp works, twisted and contorted from flat wet pieces into sculptural forms as they dry. Paper pulp is a chameleon-like medium.
I can’t help but notice the presence in the book of recently rediscovered artists like Howardena Pindell and Pacita Abad. Is colored pulp having a moment?
Lynn Sures: Colored pulp has been having a moment since the 1970s. It’s been, in a lot of ways, a secret moment, as many individual artists across the world caught wind of it and added it to their artistic repertoire. Some, such as James Rosenquist, David Hockney and Helen Frankenthaler, discovered working in collaboration with prominent studios like Tyler Graphics, where they could collaborate with master technicians–we all know how printers work with artists to make their editions, for example. Most artists experimented solo in their own studios, coming up with an arsenal of techniques and unique approaches that remained underappreciated or altogether unknown to the untrained eye. Now in 2025, colored pulp is having a “coming out” moment. Brilliant artists like Pacita Abad or Howardena Pindell, who have worked in the medium, are the tip of the iceberg.
This book features 245 wildly diverse works of art from seventy-three artists working with the medium. Do you have any personal favorites or any you might like to highlight for their innovation?
Michelle Samour: I think what’s so exciting is the diversity that you mention. Because folks have a very limited perception of what handmade paper and pulp should look like, the works featured in the book explode these preconceptions. Douglass Morse Howell was really the innovator of colored pulp as an art medium in the mid-20th Century. His image of The Clown uses only colored pulp made from colored fabric. Instead of applying the pulp to a newly formed sheet of paper, he built up areas of colored pulp into a sheet—the surface and the substrate being one and the same. Howell wrote on the back of the piece: “DONE IN THE HAND-PAPERMAKING! Not painted.” This was really the beginning of the artist-to-artist chain, innovating and sharing information with one another. Alan Shields, whose image Rain Dance Route appears on the cover of Radical Paper, was another notable innovator whose rich, layered and stitched lattice sheets challenged previous conventions of the unbroken flat sheet of paper. And then there is Robert Rauschenberg, who collaborated with Ken Tyler, and poured his pigmented pulp objects, liberating the sheet from the confines of the rectangle. These artists and others paved the way for the innovative and diverse work that is being made today.
Your book also features a host of as-told-to essays from artists who work in the medium, including ones by prominent names like Natalie Frank and Will Cotton. Did any of these artists offer insights about the medium that surprised you?
Lynn Sures: Even with years of experience working in the medium within our own art practices, speaking with artists like Natalie Frank and Will Cotton about their own motivations for using colored pulp was a great window into their fascination with it. Preston Sampson mentioned an initial hesitancy about working in a collaborative studio situation and vividly described the personal impetus for his work—and why the medium serves him. Lina Puerta had a kind of formal introduction to the medium that whetted a desire to learn to use it herself, and now it complements her longtime love of collage. Probably the most surprising for me was Leonardo Drew, who launched into an unfettered embrace of pigmented pulp that bent it dramatically to his artistic requirements, keeping his collaborative papermakers on the edges of their seats.
Colored pulp has a sculptural element. Does it reproduce well digitally, or must it be experienced in person?
Michelle Samour: Viewing a work in person is a richer and more informative experience than engaging with it digitally, but that’s true of most artwork that is not created digitally. One of the reasons that we designed Radical Paper to be large-format was to pull the viewer into the artwork and showcase its nuances and subtleties. And, of course, the quality of the printed reproduction is critical to seeing the enormous range of colors and textures of pulp that the artists have used to create these extraordinary works.
What’s next for the medium?
Lynn Sures: It’s clear from responses we’ve received about Radical Paper that the medium is breaking out in the open and will be pursued by more artists—they’ll have pigmented pulp in their toolbox, using it whenever it serves their art practices. Students and their teachers will become more familiar with the myriad possibilities of the medium, which up to now has often been a limited “how-to” rather than an expansive “why” topic in arts education. Colored paper pulp will no longer remain a fringe art medium—it will now catch the eye of the broader art world and be used in radical applications, joining the ranks of physical media that artists use to ignite commentary, like any works of art we pay attention to.
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