In the Circle of Melissa Potter | October 26 - December 6, 2025
Circle Garden: Volvelle, 2024, handmade paper, ink, paint
In the Circle of Melissa Potter
With: Ida Bakhturidze, Jillian Bruschera, Jelena Jovčić, Hillary Johnson, Nana Magradze, Clifton Meador, Adam Pantić, Susannah Papish, Gregory Potter, Isota Potter, Maggie Puckett, Miriam Schaer, Marilyn Sward, and Loretta & Annabelle
Artist Reception: Sunday, October 26, 2025, 3:00 - 6:00 PM
Please join us afterwards for a private cocktail hour at the Quincy Street Distillery
Exhibition Dates: October 26 - December 6, 2025
Exhibition on view: Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 1:00 - 5:00 PM
Papermaking Workshop and Artist Talk: Saturday, November 22, 2025, 1:00 PM
At Melissa Potter’s studio in Riverside, Illinois.
Register by clicking here
Exhibition Catalogue: A publication in conjunction with the exhibition will be available for purchase
The Riverside Arts Center is pleased to present In the Circle of Melissa Potter, an exhibition of art by Melissa Potter and artists she has collaborated with or mentored including Ida Bakhturidze, Jillian Bruschera, Jelena Jovčić, Hillary Johnson, Nana Magradze, Clifton Meador, Adam Pantić, Susannah Papish, Gregory Potter, Isota Potter, Maggie Puckett, Miriam Schaer, Marilyn Sward, and Loretta & Annabelle, curated by Joanne Aono. Please join us for a reception with the artists on Sunday, October 26th from 3 - 6 pm. The exhibition will be on view Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays through December 6, 2025. An Artist Talk and Papermaking Workshop will be held at Melissa's studio in Riverside on Saturday, November 22nd at 1 pm.
Tusheti Rug 3, 2022, Pulped quilt, okra handmade paper, el wire, tapestry weaving, 3 x 5 feet
The object is the source
The making of the object is the center
–Marilyn Sward, co-founder of the Center for Book & Paper at Columbia College
Artists are often stereotyped as loners, creating work while isolated in their studio. Melissa Potter defies this concept with her practice of collaboration and mentorship. A descendent from a long line of feminist and educated women activists, artists, and crafters, Potter channels them to fuel her research-based and labor-driven art. Her community-driven art projects and social practices can be traced to her upbringing in a Quaker environment with its teachings of peace, equality, and stewardship.
The Riverside Arts Center's exhibition, In the Circle of Melissa Potter, features a fabric quilt and floor loom weavings made by her mother and father Isota and Gregory Potter, representing some of the handwork instilled in Melissa Potter's upbringing. Like her parents, the artist uses craft traditions in Tusheti, Rug 3 and Soumak Scrap, tapestry weavings made with handmade paper thread and repurposed handmade paper scraps. Her artworks go beyond aesthetics through her concept of planting heirloom seeds in order to propagate plants used in the hand papermaking, drop spindling and weaving, while paying homage to the histories and people she encounters in her journeys.
Potter's circle spans the globe with artists, artisans, researchers, educators, students, and acolytes. Feminist Felt is a collaboration with women felt artisans from the Republic of Georgia and activists from the Women’s Fund in Georgia. The felt protest banner, Equal Pay for Equal Work, designed with Ida Bakhturidze, Miriam Schaer, Nana Magradze and Clifton Meador, and the Jersey Devil felt mask by Melissa Potter represent items used in Georgian feminist and LGBTQIA marches and protests.
Adam Pantić, Biljana Vuković and Vlada Veljašević built a hand papermaking studio with Potter at the University of Belgrade in Serbia inspiring Potter to later erect one at the Academy of Fine Arts, Sarajevo in Bosnia. At the University of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Potter partnered with Adam Pantić in producing Pulp & Pastry. Through their participatory events, they created handmade paper and Bosnian pita from locally sourced ingredients, a poem, and a book made with Jillian Bruschera.
The exhibition wouldn't be complete without the presence of some of the hundreds of artists she has mentored. As a professor at Columbia College in Chicago, Potter teaches book and papermaking courses. Among her graduates is Maggie Puckett, whom Potter teamed up with on "Seeds InService," a multifaceted project consisting of public workshops, exhibitions, shared meals, partnerships with universities and institutions like the Jane Adams Hull House, and gardens for papermaking that address endangered seeds and feminist histories. The publication, An Illuminated Feminist Seed Bank, shares research, histories about women from around the world involving marginalized groups, labor and craft, as well as collaborative events and artworks created by "Seeds InService." Banners designed by the artists are displayed outside the arts center, depicting gardens "Seeds InService" planted such as Seeds of Resistance, inspired by the Zapatista women of Chiapas, Mexico, in addition to Women's Health Garden, reflecting plants used for reproductive rights and women's medical issues.
Potter pays tribute to her mentor, Marilyn Sward, in the short film Marilyn's Paper, dedicated to the co-founder of the Center for Book & Paper at Columbia College. With filmmaker Jelena Jovčić we learn of Potter's quest to understand the papermaker's legacy after Sward's death from cancer. Soon after finding a discarded portfolio of Sward's, Potter learned of her own cancer diagnosis. She threw herself into the healing distractions of hand papermaking and her quest to find answers to the inspirations and processes of Marilyn's paper. With a full recovery, Melissa Potter has continued her generous practice of giving and sharing her art and knowledge, promoting others, and working with underserved communities.
Her caring extends beyond human relationships to the future of the planet. The medium of plant-sourced fibers and dyes from cultivated or native vegetation and the numerous gardens Potter has collaborated with or planted herself, like the 2.5-acre garden habitat in Chicago's Millennium Park and the circle garden of native species around a tree stump at the Chicago arts venue 6018 North, are a few examples. These are represented by the artwork Circle Garden: Volvelle, made from handmade paper, which utilizes a centuries-old technique of overlapping moving circles to provide information on the garden's plant histories, needs, and climate resilience.
Other artworks on exhibit include prints by Potter and paintings by Susannah Papish on handmade paper sourced from the plant-based diets of working draft mules. Invisible Labors is a garden of prairie plants for papermaking, addressing the need for remediation and pollinators, along with the histories of the Morgan Park neighborhood of Chicago. After learning of the land's connection to stories of women and labor in the region, a limited-edition artist book Invisible Labors, was co-authored by Potter and Papish.
Melissa Potter's art is a true reflection of the artist herself. Her beliefs and actions in life and art are central to the finished product. The circle she creates through her generosity of collaboration and mentorship spreads wide amongst the artists, students, researchers, and acolytes of her papermaking projects and community involvement art. We are all made welcome into the circle of Melissa Potter.
–Joanne Aono, Curator
An Illuminated Feminist Seed Bank, Publication by Melissa Potter and Maggie Puckett
Raised among multiple generations of crafters, artists, and feminists, my interdisciplinary practice considers women’s culture through their handicrafts, social customs, and gender rituals. I believe these practices are a distinct language and history, and I often focus on traditions that are endangered, underpaid, and under-recognized due to industrialization, war, gender bias, and globalization. Through interdisciplinary collaborations with ethnographers, teachers, and artists, my multi-media projects range from felt crafts in the Tusheti region of the Republic of Georgia, to a film about the dying Montenegrian tradition in which a girl child becomes a man to preserve her family’s legacy.
For decades, hand papermaking has intrigued me as a feminist and socially engaged practice, and I work to position this marginalized form in a broader art context both nationally and internationally. My family history led me to more than two decades in the Former Yugoslavia, where I taught a generation of young artists hand papermaking and built two studios — one in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and one in Belgrade, Serbia. Recent works include Seeds InService, an ecofeminist project with Maggie Puckett propagating endangered plants for use as papermaking fiber, and Spinning Paper, a Covid project during which I spun old handmade projects into yarn and wove them into tapestries. These projects inspired my latest work called Feminist Seed Bank, cataloging and interpreting women’s craft practices endangered by climate crisis.
–Melissa Potter
Melissa H Potter is a feminist interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited in numerous venues including White Columns, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, to name a few. Her films have been screened at international film festivals, such as the Cinneffable and the Reeling International LGBT Film Festival.
Potter has been the recipient of three Fulbright Scholar grants, as well as funding from CEC ArtsLink, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and Soros Fund for Arts and Culture, all of which enabled her to build two papermaking studios at university art departments in Serbia and Bosnia & Hercegovina. In addition, she collaborated with women felt artisans and activists from Georgia through her project, “Craft Power,” with Miriam Schaer. Melissa developed research, documentary and advocacy projects with ethnographers and intangible heritage experts to protect, interpret and archive endangered women’s handicrafts and social customs. In Chicago, this work extends to the history of the Hull-House arts and crafts movement and its contemporary influence in crafts media including hand papermaking and artists’ books. Potter is a Professor at Columbia College Chicago and collaborates with artists in the medium of hand papermaking.
As a curator, Potter’s exhibitions include “Social Paper: Hand Papermaking in the Context of Socially Engaged Art” with Jessica Cochran and “Revolution at Point Zero: Feminist Social Practice” with Neysa Page Lieberman. Her curatorial and recent hand papermaking projects, including “Seeds InService” with Maggie Puckett, have been funded by the Crafts Research Fund, Clinton Hill Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation & Jane M. Saks, and the MAKER Grant. A prolific writer, her critical essays have been printed in BOMB, Art Papers, Flash Art, Metropolis M, Hand Papermaking, and AfterImage among others.