New Exhibition Series Honors Decades of Creative Exploration

ATLANTA, Georgia (August 25, 2025) -- Legacies in Paper: Nancy Cohen, Sara Garden Armstrong, & Helen Hiebert is on view at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, September 4, 2025, through January 30, 2026. The exhibit brings together the work of three artists who have incorporated hand papermaking into their artistic practices for years. Nancy Cohen, Sara Garden Armstrong, and Helen Hiebert each describe a formative period of searching for versatile materials with the ability to take on the qualities required for two and three-dimensional work; could mimic textures of nature and the body; and could facilitate installation work of various scales. Individually, each artist found that the unique medium of hand papermaking could be transformed to encompass their visions, and it quickly became integral to their artwork. 

Armstrong, Cohen, and Hiebert build on the legacy of a community of artists pushing the craft of papermaking forward into contemporary forms. They bring unique voices to the medium: Hiebert’s luminous constructions explore the interplay of light and structure; Cohen’s sculptural works reflect ecological fragility and resilience; and Armstrong’s immersive environments blur the boundaries between the organic and the engineered. Together, their works speak to the transformative potential of paper—not only as a surface for expression but as a sculptural, spatial, and conceptual force. Through their hands, paper becomes a language of memory, a vessel of emotion, and a bridge between past and present. 

Join the museum staff and featured artists for a reception, 4-7 pm, Thursday, September 4, 2025 at 500 Tenth St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30332. This event is free and open to the public.

A full listing of associated programs can be found at https://paper.gatech.edu/program-listing 

Sara Garden Armstrong received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama and a Master of Art Education from UAB. A past recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation CALL (Creating a Living Legacy) project, Armstrong’s national and international exhibition record extends over a period of more than 40 years. Her artist’s books can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. Atrium commissions have focused on scientific phenomena and their interactions with the human condition. Armstrong currently lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama. 

Nancy Cohen has an M.F.A. from Columbia University and a B.F.A from Rochester Institute of Technology. Awards include a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, The Murry Reich Distinguished Artist Award and six fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Museum collections include the Asheville Art Museum, Memphis Brooks Museum, Montclair Museum, NJ State Museum, Smith College Museum, Tang Teaching Museum, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Yale University Art Gallery and the Zimmerli Museum. Cohen has completed large scale paper installations for the Noyes Museum, the Katonah Museum, the Power Point Gallery at Duke University and New Jersey City University, The CODA Museum in the Netherlands and the NTCRI Museum of Craft Design in Taiwan. She lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Helen Hiebert is a Colorado artist who constructs installations, sculptures, films, artists’ books and works in paper using handmade paper as her primary medium. She teaches, lectures and exhibits her work internationally and online, and is the author of several how-to books about papermaking and papercrafts. Helen has an extensive network of paper colleagues around the world and her interest in how things are made (from paper) keeps her up-to-date on current paper trends, which she writes about in her weekly blog called The Sunday Paper. She interviews papermakers and paper artists on her podcast Paper Talk, and she holds an annual paper retreat and papermaking master classes in her Red Cliff studio.