Melissa Potter & Maggie Puckett

Melissa Potter is a multi-media artist, writer, and curator who exhibits internationally. She has been funded by organizations such as Fulbright, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, and the Crafts Research Fund for her art and curatorial projects including the exhibition, Social Paper: Hand Papermaking in the Context of Socially Engaged Art. She is an Associate Professor in the Art & Art History Program teaching in the MFA in Book & Paper Program at Columbia College Chicago. Her critical essays on art have been printed in magazines including BOMB, Art Papers, and Flash Art.

Maggie Puckett’s work is interdisciplinary, combining art and science to explore the complicated history and future of anthropogenic effects on the Earth’s systems. Through handmade paper, artist’s books, and environmental works her practice navigates our planet from atmosphere to core, examining ecological history and visualizing predictions of future global change. The work has engaged audiences at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, and galleries nationwide in a traveling exhibition, Pulped Under Pressure.

Seeds InService: A Papermaking Institute (SIS) is an ecofeminist, socially-engaged art practice by Melissa Potter and Maggie Puckett that supports self-determining communities through heirloom seed management, thematic gardening, and hand papermaking arts activism. Through collaborative and community art projects that range from propagating rare seeds in partnership with national heirloom banks, to public events featuring the untold narratives of women in agriculture, we make visible, and propose solutions to, the modes of production that exploit the labors of women and nature.