Art on Paper, New York City’s celebrated, medium-driven fair, returns to downtown Manhattan’s Pier 36 during September 2023’s Armory Art Week with 100 galleries featuring top modern and contemporary paper-based art. The fair’s ninth edition will showcase unique and powerful projects curated by Artistic Director Nato Thompson, with a focus on can’t-miss performances highlighting the creative potential of paper.

Hand papermaker Drew Francis Cameron renders military uniforms into paper. Through workshops and events, he facilitates the pulping process, offering material and space for people to make their own sheets of paper. At Art on Paper, Cameron will be demonstrating a technique of creating a 50-inch-long scroll of handmade paper rendered from the pulp of US military uniforms. The artist will have components and materials of the hand papermaking process including the cutting apart of uniforms, a lightweight traveling hollander beater on display to beat the fiber into a pulp and finished scroll paper handmade from military uniforms which will be used in a typewriter while visitors to the event are invited to respond to various prompts and reactions to Drew’s stories and questions.

A former sergeant in the United States Army Field Artillery and an Iraq War veteran, Cameron has traveled with his unusual studio and technique for seventeen years; teaching and working in creative spaces from coast to coast as the principal artist of Combat Paper. Throughout the years of the most recent American wars, Cameron and his cohort have developed a modality for artistic response through paper, print and book, often creating works from within the ranks of those actively and formerly in the US military. Cameron’s work has been exhibited internationally. His books and print editions are in numerous public collections and libraries throughout the country including the Library of Congress. Cameron maintains his paper studio and resides in Iowa City, Iowa, a UNESCO city of literature.