Institution of the Year!

On Friday, February 7, the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking received Institution of the Year from the Georgia Association of Museums. 

For 85 years, the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking has provided access to tools and paper examples from around the world. This significant collection is a valuable resource for understanding a historic tradition, but also provides opportunities to learn and practice hands-on skills in a digital world. Since 1989, the Paper Museum has called Atlanta home, and been part of Georgia Tech since 2013. Despite a small staff and budget, the Paper Museum is actively involved with museums, art education, and craft institutions at the local, state, national, and international levels. Partnerships and knowledge-sharing across disciplines are qualities staff embrace, since this encourages a love of life-long learning. 

A “hidden gem” on Georgia Tech’s campus, the museum is a significant resource in the global papermaking community. The range and age of artifacts in the collection represents global papermaking traditions, and the museum continues to grow the collection to reflect new information and research of historic and contemporary practices. Scholars are able to refer to and research specific objects in the collection, and museum staff have been working to make the collection more accessible for online research. In addition to objects like paper samples and molds, the museum has a significant collection of fibers used in papermaking. This collection is continuing to grow through strategic donations, enabling future researchers to have access to rare materials. 

Museum staff are actively involved in numerous organizations to promote informal educational experiences. The reasoning for this is two-fold: first, it allows the museum to increase its reach to a variety of communities, despite having a very small staff. Secondly, as a museum in a university setting, there is institutional support to encourage professional development and collaboration. Staff members actively participate in GAM, SEMC, the Movable Book Society, North American Hand Papermakers, GAEA, and AAMG. These organizations provide another venue for the museum to support the museum community. RCWMP collaborates with museums large and small- from the High Museum to Scull Shoals Historic Site. Collaborations also include non-museum venues, such as leading workshops at public libraries or working closely with academic professionals to augment the classroom experiences of their students.  In addition, the museum developed an exhibit for the Atlanta airport in the early 2000s, which was viewed by over a million people during its duration.

The Paper Museum offers a variety of educational programs for audiences from Kindergarten through older adults. During the pandemic, museum experiences expanded to include virtual talks and workshops, and participants were global: tuning in from Australia, British Columbia, Indonesia, Scotland, and more. Exhibitions are thoughtfully curated, reflecting a mixture of in-house developed content and co-curation with nationally recognized artists. Themes reflect the complexity of paper from historic, artistic, and scientific perspectives. 

The Paper Museum is small, but mighty. It meets its mission to collect, preserve, and share about the history of paper, but it also creates community, develops museum supporters, and strives to make the museum a place of welcome to all, even if they don’t think they like paper!

The museum is open Monday – Friday from 9-5, and is free to visit. Come see for yourself what paper is all about!