During the fall semester of 2019, first- and second-year graduate students enrolled in the visual art program at the University of Kansas participated in Tuttlebusters—a one-time art school debate team event. Students were split randomly between an affirmative team and a negative team. The resolution: Richard Tuttle is a terrible artist. Outcome: the affirmative team won by a landslide, as judged by a panel of three third-year graduate students in the same program using a standardized score card.
Many of the participants dressed for formal debate, passions were ignited, arguments were made, and the student raised funds for the newly-formed Graduate Art Organization’s future field trips via sales of brooches fashioned as miniature Tuttle works of art.
For the final assignment of the semester, students in my graduate seminar course made an exhibition modeled after an exhibition curated by Matthew Higgs, which was a restating of a work made by conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. Kosuth’s 1967 version included books contributed by Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Sol Lewitt, Robert Smithson, among others, and was presented as an artwork at Lannis Gallery in New York. Higg’s exhibition featured books chosen by Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, and Anne Collier, among others. This iteration, displayed in Chalmers Hall at the University of Kansas features books chosen and presented by Dora Agbas, Giovanni DeFendis, Mark “Fitz” Fitzsimmons, Sadie Goll, Allison Ice, Hannah Lindo, Tristan Lindo, Sarah Pickett, Jacob Powell, Dani Ramirez, Rin Visaney Scholtens, James Welch, Jenny Welden, Tina Wilson, and Nicole Rene Woodard.
I began the first day of teaching the fall semester of 2017 with a total eclipse of the sun. The entire fiber department gathered in the morning for reading aloud in the dark: Total Eclipse by Annie Dillard and The Eclipse as Dark Omen by Ross Anderson. We travelled together to Kaw Point in Kansas City to share a picnic that included very sunny home-grown lemon cucumbers. As the moon began to eclipse the sun, we found pinhole cameras in the trees, made our own from sheets of paper, and created shadow play made strange by the eerie light. It was an auspicious beginning to the academic year.
For a number of years I ran a paper studio in my backyard workshop in St. Louis, where I made handmade paper from plant materials like cotton, abaca, flax, linen, and rosemary, among other fibers. Beating pulp by hand or in a cast-iron hollander beater, I created pulp that I pulled into sheets of paper using a mould and deckle, pressed sheets using the weight of my Mazda 3, and hung them on a clothesline to dry or cast three-dimensional sculptures with the wet sheets. I often hosted apprenticeships in the studio, and I produced handmade paper projects for poets CA Conrad and Philip Matthews, as well as facilitated a series of handmade paper works by the artist Buzz Spector, one of which was published on the cover of Threads Talks by Granary Press. When I moved to Kansas City I sold the studio to Intersect Arts Center to use for a community paper studio.
