Awagami Paper Award
Terry Schupbach-Gordon (born 1952, Verdun, France; lives Tobaccoville, NC) is a storyteller, puppeteer, co-director of Catbird Press and an advocate for disability issues. She received a BFA in 1974 and an MFA in 1979 from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work has been exhibited for over four decades at numerous venues including Ann Arbor Art Center and Kreft Center for the Arts, both Ann Arbor, MI; Asheville Museum of Art, NC; Buckham Gallery, Flint, MI; Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, MA; Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago, IL; Lincoln Center Gallery, Ft. Collins, CO; Foothills Art Center, Golden, CO; Bradbury Art Museum, Jonesboro, AK; Mclean Project for the Arts, VA; Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Rosalux Gallery and WARM Gallery, all Minneapolis, MN; Spring Creek Art Gallery, Plano, TX; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY; San Diego Art Institute, CA; Alice Sabatini Gallery, Topeka, KS; and Diggs Gallery at Winston-Salem State University and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, both Winston-Salem, NC; as well as internationally in Brazil; South Korea; and the UAE. Schupbach-Gordon’s work is held in the collections of Boston Athenaeum, MA; Lafayette College, Easton, PA; Kenyon College, Gambier, OH; Duke University, Durham, NC; Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY; University of Connecticut, Mansfield; Messiah College, Mechanicsburg, PA; Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; Yale University, New Haven, CT; New York Public Library; Oberlin College Library, OH; Brown University, Providence, RI; Bucknell College, Union County, PA; and Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem; as well as Toronto Public Library, Canada. Over the last four decades, she has had numerous artist residencies around the country. Schupbach-Gordon taught printmaking and book arts at Kenyon College from 1979 – 1983, and then taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, MN from 1983 – 1988. In 1988, she opened Catbird (on-the-Yadkin) Press with Toby Gordon, where they continue to live and work today.
Statement from the Artist:
My work addresses the effort to live gracefully within a body increasingly defined by disability. The lens of disability requires me to reject traditional notions of beauty, strength, independence and fragility. I make prints that are intentionally beautiful and affirmative in their craft, and odd or atypical in their concept of beauty. My works are an attempt to re-imagine fragility and re-embrace a kind of strength that includes that fragility. I find beauty not in what our bodies determine and display, but rather in what we are able to hear when our bodies speak to us. We are fragile and mended and still we have strength. During COVID, I began cutting and piecing together older works as a familiar way to describe my body, always changing, always unfinished, always fragile, and always beautiful.