Marilyn Sward

“Marilyn Sward loved paper,” Audrey Niffenegger writes in her introduction to the Chicago artist’s first retrospective. “She wanted you to love it too.”

Sward, who died at 67 in 2008, cofounded the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College. “Speaking in Paper” spans 40 years of her career, from the paintings and drawings she made as an undergrad at the University of Illinois to the amazing aerial photos she created toward the end of her life. In between are decades of paper collages and sculptures. More handmade paper peeks out of travel journals displayed in vitrines—books the artist bound with sticks, bark and other organic materials and stuffed with photos, drawings and found objects from places such as Bali and Australia.

Sward’s travel journals are so intriguing it’s a shame they’re too fragile to flip through by hand. All of her work begs to be touched, its handmade paper elements yielding colors and remarkable textures missing from more conventional media. The strangeness of its messy aesthetic makes us wish “Speaking in Paper” put more of this work in context. Niffenegger’s text explains that papermaking had been “in abeyance” for decades when Sward discovered it, but only a brief 1986 video about the artist’s nonprofit studio Paper Press addresses her attraction to paper and reveals what papermaking entails.

Sward’s collaborative nature infuses Treewhispers, a project she developed with artist Pamela Paulsrud, who cocurated “Speaking in Paper” with Niffenegger and Stephen DeSantis. Visitors may add their own illustrated stories about trees to the hundreds hanging in the installation—a cheerful coda to a rich, productive life.

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