The Miami-based community printshop and book arts studio IS Projects, established by Ingrid Schindall, just celebrated its 10-year anniversary. As part of that celebration, they officially announced a name change and several exciting new facets that are ushering in the next era. Now known as the Miami Paper & Printing Museum, the studio will continue to offer many of the fantastic opportunities and amenities it has been providing to the thriving South Florida art community for the last decade. These include workshops, print club meetings, studio rentals, artist residencies, events, and more. But now the Museum also includes dedicated galleries for the museum’s permanent collection and contemporary exhibitions, as well as a store to purchase supplies, tools, artist books, prints, and many other incredible goodies.
Contemporary wing of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Ingrid Schindall.
The store inside the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Ingrid Schindall.
In a state where the accessibility of information has seen more and more restrictions recently, IS Projects becoming the Miami Paper & Printing Museum feels like a deliberate assertion of the important role that history, information, and art all play in creating an open, inclusive, and kind world. As part of the transformation, I curated an exhibition in the newly christened Permanent Collection Gallery: the bathroom. My goal for this exhibition was to provide viewers with an engaging and informative overview of the history of papermaking and printing. In organizing and installing this exhibition, I continuously came back to thinking about how much information is edited, culled, manipulated, erased, rewritten, and re-presented in our contemporary lives. Information is purposefully erased or made harder to access with things like the book bans in Florida and the Anti-DEI Senate Bill 129 in Alabama, but in addition to these targeted acts of erasure, information can often be erased to make it more comprehensible, to create more streamlined narratives, or to fit into the spatial limitations of museum galleries.
Inside the Permanent Collection gallery of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Beth Sheehan.
The information that is included in exhibitions and publications by prestigious institutions routinely perpetuates biased and selective information about art, participating in echo chambers honoring the knowledge of the critic or scholar, rather than the knowledge and experience of the maker or non-academic. Work is being done to consciously and ethically undo some of the harm caused by that process as people fight to decolonize museums. But plenty of important information will still inevitably be left out of museums in favor of trying to make the information understandable to audiences that may not have specialized knowledge in the given topic, and in favor of fitting the “most important” information into the space the museum has available.In its new incarnation, the Miami Paper & Printing Museum is trying something different.
Inside the Permanent Collection gallery of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Beth Sheehan.
It might seem humorous to house a museum (at least partially) in a bathroom, and it is, but when Schindall approached me about curating the show in the bathroom, I was immediately overjoyed by the idea because it seemed to be such a wonderful way to make information accessible. Museums have been contentious places in regards to accessibility; ideally they are places that provide everyone equal access to knowledge and culture, but when collections do not include diverse artists, entrance fees bar people from entering, and people feel that contemporary art is too hard to understand without didactic information, art museums stop being places that people feel welcome. So, by placing the MPPM permanent collection exhibition (one that includes diverse artists) in the bathroom (no entrance fee), anyone can close the door (for a… “private viewing”) and spend any amount of time that they want (or need) looking at the exhibition. My hope for the space is that it will make going to museums less intimidating and that it will prompt people to think about alternative ways history, knowledge, culture, and art can be shared. If you were to make a museum that showed people how impactful and empowering your artistic medium can be, what would you include? How would you make that space more accessible? More engaging? More inclusive?
The Tactile Wall of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Beth Sheehan.
Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harlan and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.
