The Paper Sculpture Show invites you to create three-dimensional paper projects designed by twenty-nine artists. They created them, but you will build them. The exhibition consists only of sculptures assembled by the audience-collaborators—multiple copies of each artist’s idea, each unique in that it was fabricated by an individual visitor. In blurring the distinction between you and the artists, this exhibition poses a number of questions. At what point is a work of art complete? Who is the author of an object imagined by one person and completed by another? What is the relationship between two-dimensional image and three-dimensional object, instruction and inspiration, originality and repetition, mass production and the handmade? And, where do we locate failure or success in a project like this?

The open-ended nature of these questions and the answers they provoke have resulted in the staggeringly wide range of art projects included in the exhibition. Folded, cut, crumpled, and even burned, paper here proves itself to be a generous host capable of accommodating sculptures inspired by cultural examples as diverse as paper-doll books, Mad magazine “fold-ins,” and exploded schematic diagrams. Using only this humble material, which is ubiquitous to the point of invisibility in everyday life, the artists in The Paper Sculpture Show offer a visually stunning, conceptually rich, and playfully hands-on exploration of artistic practice today.

The Paper Sculpture Show is organized by Cabinet magazine, Independent Curators International (ICI), and Sculpture Center. It is curated by Mary Ceruti, Matt Freedman, and Sina Najafi, and accompanied by The Paper Sculpture Book, which contains the entire exhibition in unassembled, take-home form. The traveling exhibition is organized and circulated by Independent Curators International. The exhibition and its accompanying publication are made possible, in part, by support from the Peter Norton Family Foundation.

Artists

The Art Guys, Janine Antoni, David Brody, Luca Buvoli, Francis Cape, Seong Chun, Minerva Cuevas, E.V. Day, Nicole Eisenman, Spencer Finch, Michael Galbreth, Charles Goldman, Rachel Harrison, Stephen Hendee, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Patrick Killoran, Glenn Ligon, Jack Massing, Cildo Meireles, Helen Mirra, Aric Obrossey, Ester Partegs, Liza Phillips, Akiko Sakaizumi, David Shrigley, Eve Sussman, Sarah Sze, Fred Tomaselli, Pablo Vargas-Lugo, Chris Ware, Olav Westphalen, Allan Wexler

Curated by

Mary Ceruti, Matt Freedman and Sina Najafi