NEW YORK, NY.- The Grolier Club kicks off its 2026–2027 season with the milestone 1,000th exhibition presented at the Club, a new show highlighting revolutions in contemporary American hand papermaking. On view September 8 through November 28, 2026, in the Club’s Ground Floor Gallery, Pioneers in Hand Papermaking: 50 Years of Innovation at Dieu Donné celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Dieu Donné Papermill, a non-profit studio based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A leader of the grassroots hand papermaking movement that emerged in the 1970s, Dieu Donné’s master papermakers work with contemporary artists to develop their imagery using the papermaking process.

Featuring more than 110 works from the collections of Susan Gosin, Dieu Donné co-founder and Grolier Club member, and the Dieu Donné Archive & Collection, the exhibition includes custom sheets of paper and two- and three-dimensional works by 80 artists, including Diana Al-Hadid, Lynda Benglis, Mark Bradford, Michele Oka Doner, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, Howardena Pindell, Do Ho Suh, and many others. Techniques featured in the exhibition include line and chiaroscuro watermarking, pulp painting, stenciling, and paper casting, with videos that show artists’ reimagination of these processes, alongside papermaking tools and materials. Pioneers in Hand Papermaking is curated by Susan Gosin with Cynthia Nourse Thompson, and an accompanying publication, Dieu Donné: Paper Making Art, from Chronicle Books is available during the exhibition.

Exhibition Highlights

Pioneers in Hand Papermaking opens with examples of historic and contemporary watermarking, stenciling, and painting with colored pulp. A watermark design lies hidden within the structure of the paper fibers, not on the surface, and fascinates visual artists with its mysterious quality. A colorful example on view by Richard Tuttle, Dawn, Noon, Dusk: Paper (1), Paper (2), Paper (3) (2003), features a ghostlike watermark image with pigmented thread drawings. William Kentridge’s Sheets of Evidence (2009), an artist book of 18 watermarked drawings, hides secrets in plain sight inside a sheet of paper. Instead of traditional wire, Kentridge used laser-cut, adhesive-backed vinyl to make the watermarks.





Stencils allow artists at Dieu Donné to apply colored paper pulp, wet into wet, on top of a wet base sheet. In Dharmajika Near and Far (1997), Arlene Shechet built spiraling compositions, inspired by Buddhist architectural blueprints, by spooning fine blue pigmented linen-rag pulp into cut mylar stencils. Glenn Ligon’s Self-Portrait at Eleven Years Old (2004) is an image of his childhood icon, Stevie Wonder, stenciled in a retro Ben Day dot style. Ligon says the work “is about how you can become so intensely identified with pop culture figures that they become part of how you see yourself in the world.”

The pulp painting process involves applying pigmented pulp onto a base sheet that acts like a canvas. After the pulp is pressed and dried, the layers become permanently bonded as a unified painting. For the colorful work Patriarch (2013), Firelei Báez marbled pulp paint directly into the liquid pulp. Once dry, the marbled imagery became part of the structure of the paper itself, not just on the surface as with traditional marbling. Also featured are works created with the “blowout” technique, a method that uses sprayed water to draw, erase, and remove wet pulp when composing an image. Blowout examples on view include Diana Al-Hadid’s Babble On (2025), inspired by the Tower of Babel, and Michele Oka Doner’s artist book What is White (2010), made using wax stencils with white and off-white pulp on translucent sheets.

The collage section of the exhibition showcases how multiple sheets of wet paper can be layered on top of one another to enclose collaged composition or create random visual field effects. Highlights on view include Do Ho Suh’s Going Home (2013), with colorful embroidered thread drawings that reveal his characteristic themes of identity, memory, and sense of home; and Howardena Pindell’s Untitled #114 (2023), composed of very small circles of handmade paper with meticulously handwritten, etched, or letterpress-printed numbers and symbols inspired by her father’s mathematical notebooks.

To make three-dimensional paper art, sheets of wet paper are laminated onto an armature, or paper pulp can be cast and manipulated to make sculpture. Lynda Benglis’ undulating Lunar Hornet (2023) was made by sandwiching wire armatures between two wet sheets of brightly colored and stenciled paper, which shrunk, dried, and twisted into free-form shapes. Pulp can also be pressed into molds to cast multiples, such as Jonathan Seliger’s hyper-realistic ice cream cones Triple Scoop: Pistachio, Raspberry, Fudge Brownie (2004), or one-of-a-kind sculptures, such as Mark Bradford’s Life Size (2019), a replica of a Los Angeles Police Department body camera.

A related publication, Dieu Donné: Paper Making Art by Susan Gosin (Chronicle Books, $65 hardcover, ISBN 9781797244327), is available for preorder and at associated Grolier Club and Dieu Donné events. Dieu Donné, a New York City non-profit studio based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, pioneered the grassroots hand papermaking movement that emerged in the 1970s as part of the arts and crafts revival. For the past five decades, Dieu Donné has led the revolution in hand papermaking by reinventing it as an art medium through collaborations with important contemporary artists. Written by Susan Gosin, this is the first book to detail hand papermaking as an art form at Dieu Donné. The book features more than 450 vibrant images including reproductions of handmade work by artists like Glenn Ligon, William Kentridge, Michele Oka Doner, Nari Ward, and more. Also included are photos of the studio and of artists at work, essays about the art of hand papermaking by contemporary artists and researchers, and more.