Jaz Graf

West Bay View Fellowship recipient, Jaz Graf joined us at Dieu Donné in Mid-September 2022. Jaz’s fellowship provided her access to our studios, a stipend, and close guidance from our artistic directors to push her understanding of collaboration and her own artistic practice. The artist shares their fellowship experience through a short Q & A detailed below.

What were you doing before your fellowship?

Ever since my first papermaking experience at the Womens’ Studio Workshop in 2010, handmade paper has been integral in my art practice. In 2019, I earned my MFA from the University of Iowa, after having studied Asian/Islamic papermaking with Timothy Barrett at the Center for the Book. Following graduate studies, I taught art and design classes at SUNY Purchase and Caldwell University. I maintain an active and disciplined studio practice. Right before my fellowship, I had just wrapped up making a limited edition of 60 handbound artist books in collaboration with artists and poets.

What drew you to this fellowship?

Before I started working in papermaking, I had been following Dieu Donné for several years. I was volunteering at various DD events and attending exhibitions, completely enamored and inspired by the innovative artists’ works in paper. My appreciation of the world of paper was, and still is, consistently expanding and being challenged. If I could pinpoint where/when the enchantment began, I would say it was between E.V. Day’s pigmented netting and Do Ho Suh’s thread drawings.

What artists did you work with during your fellowship? Tell us about your experience.

I had the opportunity to work with Howardena Pindell, Tammy Nguyen, Tricia Wright, Nazanin Noroozi, Samuel Levi Jones, and Diana Al-Hadid.

One of my first days working at Dieu Donné, I was running etching plates through the press for Pindell’s numbers and arrows pieces. My head was down, I was vigorously rubbing ink off the plate, when an air of calm took over. I remember breathing deeply and being grateful for the peaceful energy in the room. It was then, that I was introduced to Howardena Pindell. Over the course of 6 months, I enjoyed the meditative quality of placing individual dots of handmade paper, sharing this time with others in the studio, to help produce some of Pindell’s large scale works.

In the studio with Samuel Levi Jones, I learned about using rubber moulds and working more sculpturally. Through pulping encyclopedias and rebuilding their forms, many thought provoking conversations were had. Jones and I both incorporate objects in our practice that transform and reclaim the material conceptually and literally. In my work of pulping worn Buddhist monastic robes, I felt parallels in the thought process and approach to addressing systems of power and representation.

Each artist worked so distinctly in their own way. It was an honor and a pleasure to work with every single one. My understanding of artistic collaboration has stretched substantially through this process.

What studio projects did you find most exciting?

I really enjoyed making 700+ paper hearts as part of the Love Positive Women global project in partnership with Visual Aids. Dieu Donné hosted papermaking workshops and I loved working with all the people involved in this initiative. It is such a meaningful and powerful project and touched my heart deeply. Through the hundreds of pieces I learned the importance of quality within quantity. Through repetition, there was renewal and refinement. I experimented with pigmenting, lusters, pulp painting and stenciling in a way that was quite liberating.

Additionally, I felt so lucky to be able to work with one of my favorite artists, Diana Al-Hadid. We used laser-cut elements and her original drawings to generate a unique translation of Al-Hadid’s style into paper. So exciting to be present when artists conjure their magic. Her pieces were multi-panel 40”x60” sheets which required lots of hands on deck. Working with a group of amazing people AND combining different techniques is as good as it gets.

What papermaking techniques are most exciting to you, either in your own work, or used at DD during your fellowship?

I’m obsessed with inclusions - simple, symbolic, nearly invisible, bold or unpredictable… Adding materials into the pulp is the way that stories get inscribed into the paper. It is better than reading the news. In the last few months of my fellowship, I played with ways of embedding hand pulled prints, photos and textiles into translucent sheets of abaca. I delighted in making veils of Thai mulberry.

What did you explore during your fellowship? 

The materiality of impermanence.
What/how things will last, or are not meant to?
How are systems of value calibrated to ephemerality?
What are the embodied and metaphorical characteristics of the sacred?
Methods of entropic grandeur.

I don’t mean to sound obscure. Lilts of poetic succinctness help me place it into words.

These themes manifested into different series involving the transmutation of source materials, screened pulp prints, non-codex forms of bookmaking and unconventional drying techniques that looked more like chakra cleansing.

Favorite Pigment? 

Guerra Fluorescent Pink mixed with Florurescent Orange aqueous pigment charms me.

How has the fellowship given you other opportunities? 

I stepped so far out of my “comfort zone” in order to learn new languages of paper at the DD studio.

Personally, it gave me many opportunities to fail and make mistakes. This is a luxury and I’m profoundly grateful for the lessons.

Professionally, the increased visibility of my work has resulted in more galleries, curators and collectors requesting my work. I’ve had exposure through the Open House event and there is more on the way for my upcoming exhibition!

About the Artist

Jaz Graf delves through the meaning of familial roots by intersecting paper, print, and book arts. Her works ruminate on our connection to place, the location of identity, and the paradox of presence. Pairing freshwater research with ancestral approaches to watersheds, Graf explores themes on the cyclical complexion of life/death, growth/decay, and transformation/stasis.

Her art was recently exhibited at The Newark Museum of Art, and has been featured in AM New York News, The Jersey Journal and on NJ PBS television network. She is former Vice President of Manhattan Graphics Center in New York, Board Member of ProArts Hudson County and Exhibitions Committee member of North American Hand Papermakers. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Studio Art Printmaking from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Fine Arts in Print from the University of Iowa.

Graf works with NGOs and city officials to coordinate public initiatives which raise awareness on issues of natural resources and endangered practices, and advocates for inclusivity by engaging the arts as a catalyst for social responsibility. Graf’s recent collaborative projects include art activism with HIV+, neurodivergent, BIPOC, and Veteran communities, increasing visibility of transboundary rivers through conservation photography and contemporizing cross-cultural narratives through Southeast Asian traditions.

For more information, please visit: www.jazgraf.com and follow her on Instagram @jazgraf