ANNE Q MCKWEON
Studio in Gallery Aferro | Working in Newark Since 2013
“In the Summer of 2015 Newark Print Shop and Gallery Aferro with a Newark Arts Council Art Start Grant sponsored an event in August; Paper in the Alley. The one block long Campbell Street behind Gallery Aferro was closed one Sunday. A group of artists worked for weeks before preparing a 10’ x 5’ x 12” vat to sit in the middle of the street. 60” x 40” metal frames were covered with mesh. The covered frames were dipped one at a time into the water and pulp filled vat. They were then lied out by 8 people, coated with a full sheet of paper. The dried sheets were used by a number of the participating artists for drawings and paintings. Children and adults joined in to make smaller sheets from pulp that was beaten down into a slurry from small squares cut from blue jean cotton in the big Valley Beater in the Newark Print Shop. Everyone who made paper that day was invited to come back to pick up the dried paper. The paper making day was open to everyone in the community. Many people, artists and not, made the entire day fly by!”