Summer Residency Program

The Center for Book & Paper Arts (CBPA) at Columbia College Chicago offers a two week residency each summer. Information about the 2010 Summer Residency will be available in January 2010.

                      
                                     

Ben Durham has been selected as the 2009 Summer Resident Artist here at the Center for Book & Paper Arts. His project, an expansion of his current text/portrait drawings, will incorporate pulp painting on handmade paper.

Artist's Statement

Since 2002 I have been making paper and using it almost exclusively as the working surface for my large-scale drawings.

My work is based primarily on mug-shot images of childhood friends, classmates, and co-workers (taken from the Lexington, KY online public records database). In the time since I knew them, their lives have become marked my crime, addiction, and violence. Struggling to remember and preserve my experiences, following backward into the past from the found mug-shot, begins a process of storytelling that is written into the piece itself.

My work is composed entirely of handwritten text. Written out and layered letter by letter in graphite, the memories and stories build the tonal features of the face onto the textured surface of the handmade paper.

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Center Contact Information
Book and Paper Office: 312-369-6630, book&paper@colum.edu
Gina Ordaz, Administrative Assistant, 312-369-6631
1104 S. Wabash, 2nd Fl
Chicago, IL 60605