Fall 2024 Craft in Schools Recap: Puzzling Paper / Paper Cut Perspectives with Lorraine Bubar

Fall 2024 Field Trips: Puzzling Paper / Paper Cut Perspectives with Lorraine Bubar

This Fall our K-12 Los Angeles Craft in Schools program collaborated with our featured exhibiting papercut artist, Lorraine Bubar. Bubar’s art teacher background, and dynamic artist’s journey through animation, painting and paper-cut art worlds piqued many students’ curiosities. She shared about her artist’s journey, from animation and illustration commercial work, towards art-teaching LA high schoolers, airbrush painting, and now focusing on handmade-paper collage and papercutting techniques.

This quarter we focused on the history of papermaking traditions, dating back from 2900 BC Egyptian papyrus records, throughout centuries of Chinese and Japanese cultural papermaking traditions. Bubar herself spoke about her passion and practices around working with handmade paper, often sourced from artisans she’s met from her travels in Southeast Asia. With a strong eye towards design, and influenced heavily by Japanese woodblock printing composition, Bubar spoke of her “painting with paper” techniques to students. 

We were pleased to welcome a high school math class, our neighborhood 2nd and 4th grade classrooms at Rosewood Elementary, and several middle and high school art classes for Craft Center field trips. We also hosted Lorraine in several middle school art classes for hands-on papercut workshops. In total, we reached over 180 students this quarter via Japanese Notan (papercutting) art workshops. Our students and Lorraine were both delighted by creating symbolic and more complex versions of their own Notan-inspired papel picados, papercut designs and imagery. We thank all of our school partners, creative and curious students, and Lorraine Bubar herself as our esteemed teaching artist this quarter!