Many teachers at SCH had interesting pasts before SCH, but Paper Buck, SCH’s new woodworking, painting, and drawing teacher, is on a journey through social justice and art like no other. Paper, a transgender man, is moving from a life as an independent artist specializing in printmaking to managing an international artist residency program and teaching high school.
Paper’s project in 2023, Windmill Island (Paper Courtesy of Paper Buck)
Paper has a great deal of knowledge about social justice, printmaking, and woodworking from his years at Carnegie Mellon and his real-world practices. Paper’s social justice projects intertwined with the arts have made big impacts in all of the places he has lived and moved communities. Now, as Paper becomes a member of the SCH community, he hopes to greatly impact the art program, specifically the painting and woodworking programs.
Loading the Legacy Load
Oil on Canvas, Digital Print on Gampi Paper (Paper Buck)
Paper grew up in New England and New York, and both of his parents were artists, so an artistic flame constantly surrounded him. Paper said, “I definitely grew up in a family where, if you were making art, then you were doing pretty well.” After being involved in art through high school, Paper went to Macalester College in Minneapolis, studying women’s and gender and sexuality, American Studies, critical race theory, and studio art.
After college, Paper was motivated to make a social impact, progressing his community’s minds forward in areas considering LGTQ issues and stopping racism. Paper reflected on his time right after college and said, “I was very invested in social movement organizing at the time, anti-racist social movements and LGBTQ justice projects, and that work took me out to the Bay Area.”
Taking the step into the world of social justice movements motivated Paper to become an educator in the social justice world, moving him to do anti-racist political education with an organization called the Catalyst Project.
Home, Sweet, Institution (Paper Buck)
“Home, Sweet, Institution” reflects on the artist’s experience of privilege within a classist and racist educational system. The far left corner references the romantic painter Thomas Cole’s “The Oxbow,” 1836. The central sea of people is based on AP wire photographs of thousands waiting outside the Super Dome in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina.
When asked how, for him, art and social activism are connected, he said, “They’re totally interconnected.” In graduate school, he asked himself “how do I bridge the art worlds … and the activist worlds, … in a lot of ways they’re very, very distinct worlds with different values and different goals … I kind of figured out ways … that I could bring the interest that I had in looking at social histories and how they impact the physical landscape as well as the temporary social landscape, into my art practice.”
Now, as an SCH teacher, Paper is looking to become more in tune with the students and get comfortable in his classes. A sophomore student in Papers Woodworking class, Lev Eskin, commented on Paper as a teacherL “He has a very positive attitude at all times. And he’s also … always willing to help multiple people at once.”
Paper’s two worlds of social activism movements and art combine to create a powerful impact on whatever community Paper is involved with. Paper added that now “I do a lot of like archival research, and in general, my art practice is interested in looking at how social histories are sort of embedded in the ecology of our world, and how you can sort of look to ecology to find traces of social histories that we’re still, you know, sort of working to resolve…”
