An editor in the United Kingdom had contacted him to talk about paper. Specifically, she wanted to know how to fold paper into chess pieces. The editor, Black learned, intended to publish a book, titled “Paper Chess,” which would allow readers to punch out perforated shapes and fold and glue them into chess pieces.

The APSU professor’s name came up as a possible designer for the project because Black is one of the pre-eminent paper engineers in the country. Creating realistic sculptures out of paper is something he’s been doing since he was in kindergarten.

Kell Black, APSU professor of art, looks over a copy of his new book, “Paper Chess.” In front of him are a few chess pieces he designed for the book. (Photo By Rollow Welch/APSU Public Relations and Marketing)

“When I was 5 years old, my dad had worked at the New York World’s Fair, and he had gone to the Dutch Pavilion and he bought this kit – make your own medieval village,” Black said. “One night after supper, we cleared the dining room table and cut everything out and glued everything together. It was like magic. I thought, ‘wow, I want to do that.’”

The 5-year-old was hooked. Everything he saw, even the Volkswagen bus in the driveway, he deconstructed with his mind, figuring out how to unfold it to make a blueprint of its shape on a piece of construction paper.

Black went on to excel in school in subjects such as drafting and geometry, and in his career as an artist, he’s produced hyper-realistic paper sculptures of everything from a rotary telephone to an elaborate German coo coo clock.

A paper chess set was just up his alley. Black agreed to design the pieces, and earlier this month, the book went on sale. It features instructions and enough “punch-out” pieces to make two complete paper chess sets. But for someone accustomed to making complex and ornate works of art, engineering something the average person can do proved to be a little more difficult.

“Any designer, any artist, any musician will tell you it’s always easy to add stuff,” he said. “What’s really hard is to take away, to make it as simple as possible. That’s the challenge and that’s what made it so fun.”

The fun, however, was tempered by the fact that Black had short deadlines looming before him. The publisher wanted the sets only a few weeks after he signed the contract. So Black went to work, designing, building, rethinking and building again numerous paper chess pieces.

“We had dozens of these around the house,” he said, holding up a paper knight piece. “You have to take a deep breath and dive in. I just worked 10, 12, 14 hours a day to get it done.”

Black is in contact with other paper engineers across the globe, and he sent them his designs to get feedback on how difficult the pieces were to assemble. Finally, a few weeks early, he sent off the finished designs.

The book is now out and for sale at Amazon.com for $19.95. It opens with a history of the game of chess, but the majority of the book consists of instructions and the unassembled pieces. The book’s back cover provides a chess board that all the pieces were designed to fit.

Black has a copy of “Paper Chess” on his office desk, but his thoughts are already on future titles. He’s currently working on a “Paper New York” book. The boy who built that medieval village is now tackling an entire city, designing 20 of the metropolis’ iconic buildings and a hot dog cart.

“My dad picked up that first kit at the New York World’s Fair,” he said. “There is some poetry to it.”

Black and Jones work in digital media editing, splicing and adding new and old video and audio segments together to create something new and original.

While in residency, the duo began two new bodies of work, titled “2001 Retold” and “Ursonata – Remix.” The duo also created a third work, a documentary piece for Weir Farm.

“2001 Retold” is a re-edited version of the movie, “2001 A Space Odyssey.” The work combines excerpts from the movie with new narration provided by people who were asked to respond to what they saw after watching parts of the movie. Although still in development, this project has already won the Art House Film and Video Festival’s award for best national selection.

“Ursonata – Remix” conjoins excerpts of Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters’ “Die Sonata in Urlauten,” with various videos, sounds and music to create an abstract visual/audio experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Weir Farm in the Fog which they created during their residency at the Weir Farm National Historic Site near Ridgefield, CT in March 2009.

Click here to view the embedded video.

About Weir Farm

The Weir Farm Art Center is part of the Weir Farm National Historic Site located in Wilton, Conn. The location was home to 19th-century impressionist painter, Julian Alder Weir, and is the only national park in Connecticut. It is also the only national park dedicated to American painting. Of the more than 300 historic parks in the U.S., 50 of them have artist residencies in place.

About the artists

Black holds a Bachelor of Arts in music and German from the State University of New York College at Fredonia and studied harpsichord and Baroque performance practice at the Wiener Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, Austria. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and drawing from the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

The work of Black has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Switzerland. His work was recently featured in a group exhibition at the Frist Center in Nashville.

Jones earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography at APSU and his Master in Fine Arts in three-dimensional studies at the University of South Carolina.

Jones’ work has been exhibited at SPACElab in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, Va. His international showings include Istanbul, Turkey, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Madrid, Spain. His work was recently featured at the Brooks Museum in Memphis. Additionally, he has two digital works in the permanent art base collection of the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s new media branch, Rhizome.

Their web site is at www.blackandjones.com

Kell Black,Drawing for Boys (Crash), ca. 2002, Charcoal, graphite, and olive oil on paper, 8 ¼ x 10 3/4 [Courtesy of the artist}

The work was conceived to counter the exhibition, “Color as Field: American Painting 1950-75,” in which form and content are unified through the broad application of brightly colored areas of paint. Artwork in “Shades of Gray” includes gray, white and black, with the picture plane suggesting spatial ambiguity, mystery and personal and social narratives.

In creating his aviation-themed drawings, Kell Black (whose work was first seen at the Frist Center in the Art of Tennessee exhibition in 2003) employs unconventional techniques to reproduce the sensation of natural forces such as clouds, smoke, sunlight and shadow.

At left, Kell Black, Drawing for Boys (Dog Fight), ca. 2002, Charcoal, graphite, and olive oil on paper, 10 ¾ x 8 ¼ [Courtesy of the artist]

The surfaces of the larger works are animated by loosely applied charcoal, ghostly erasures, areas darkened by acetone and even holes in the paper where Black placed the works on a pebble driveway and ran an electric sander over them. Once he has established the atmosphere of these drawings, Black often evokes a sense of impending threat or loss by rendering zeppelins or airplanes as if suspended in their stormy surroundings. In the smaller works, Black combines charcoal with olive oil to evoke the fading photographs of early aviation history, while also suggesting the way forms emerge out of, and melt back into, the fog of memory.

On Friday, August 22, at 7 p.m., Black will lead an informal conversation (included with gallery admission) about some of his work presented in the exhibition Shades of Gray: Four Artists of the Southeast. Visitors may also enjoy music in the Grand Lobby, martinis, wine and other beverages at the cash bar and visiting with friends.

In addition to Black, the other three artists in the exhibition are Sue Mulcahy from Volunteer State Community College, Gallatin; Jane Allen Nodine, University of South Carolina Upstate, Spartanburg, S.C.; and Carol Prusa, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Fla.

To Sue Mulcahy, the materialism of contemporary culture limits the individual’s capacity to fully enter the natural flow of life. Emphasizing the value of intangible experiences, her abstract charcoal drawings are, in her words, “spontaneous reflections exploring the spirit of nature; listening to nature in an attempt to tease out her textures, moods, rhythms and compositions.”

Mulcahy begins each work by loosely applying charcoal to the paper with no pre-established image in mind. Using her fingers and various drawing tools, she then manipulates the charcoal, adding dark gestures, patterns or shapes to some areas, and in others removing the charcoal (often with a vacuum cleaner) to suggest the play of light over mysterious patches of shadow. Throughout this process, Mulcahy remains alert to visual surprises that might unexpectedly take her drawings in new and interesting directions. In her finished works, forms that appear to be only partially coalesced emphasize the importance for Mulcahy of becoming rather than being, transition over resolution.

The primary medium in Carol Prusa’s drawings is silverpoint—the same drawing tool used by old masters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer—which produces a line of great subtlety and luminosity. Her works evoke other art historical aspects as well, from botanical, anatomical and cosmological diagrams to Baroque furniture design and Celtic knots. Prusa’s frequent use of a circular or hemispheric format emphasizes the integration of the microcosm and macrocosm. This relates them to the tradition of the mandala, which in Hinduism and Buddhism is a circular diagramming of the cosmos and all that it contains.

Prusa’s repetitive sequences of organic patterns allude to mathematics, a field of study she views as the best means of exploring and articulating the universe’s ultimate adherence to definable principles. Yet Prusa does not necessarily deduce an ordered human destiny that abides by the rules of logic. She recognizes that beyond the bounds of reason lies mystery. With their sense of fading and distressed surfaces, her drawings are elegies of vulnerability and loss.

As icons of domesticity and commerce, Jane Allen Nodine’s tightly cropped images of men’s shirts evoke both the people who wear them and those who manufacture, sell, clean and fold them. As expressions of her wish to project transcendent meaning onto everyday ritual, she writes that her works “evoke memories associated with specific activities or events related to such items of apparel. The ephemeral qualities of fabric, such as staining, tearing and wrinkling, must constantly be managed through washing, cleaning, ironing and folding. The cycle of attempted control over the fabric, garment shapes and wear-ability … serve[s] as a metaphor for daily struggles that seem repetitive and cyclical.”

The ghostly human presence implied by Nodine’s shirts has precedents in Dadaism and Pop art, in which everyday objects are used or reproduced to stand in for the person who would use the object. In the Vesture series, the subtle accumulation of densely layered marks suggests a reflective relationship between the artist and the person for whom the shirt functions as a surrogate. In contrast, in the Camice series, the marks are graffiti-like and free form, independent of the restrictive geometry of the shirts’ folds, collars and borders.

All four artists are members of the Southeastern College Art Conference, an organization of art faculty who promote the importance of art in higher education and in the community.

At the Frist Center, Sunday, August 17 is Family Day, with free admission from 1-5:30 p.m. Family and friends will enjoy a fun-filled day of excitement of special art making activities, live music and dance performances. Check out the large, breathtaking canvases of the Color As Field: American Painting, 1950–1975 exhibition and the black, white and gray drawings featured in Shades of Gray: Four Artists of the Southeast. Head upstairs to experience the exquisite display of many of the lamps and stained glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany in the exhibition Tiffany By Design.

The Frist Center for Visual Arts is accredited by the American Association of Museums. The Frist Centeri s located at 919 Broadway in downtown Nashville, The Frist Center’s Martin ArtQuest Gallery features more than 30 interactive stations relating to Frist Center exhibitions. Gallery admission to the Frist Center is free for visitors 18 and younger and to Frist Center members. Frist Center admission is $8.50 for adults, $7.50 for seniors and military and $6.50 for college students with ID. Thursday evenings, 5–9 p.m., admission is free for college students with a valid college ID. Discounts are offered for groups of 10 or more with advance reservation by calling 615.744.3246. The Frist Center is open seven days a week: Mondays through Wednesdays, and Saturdays, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 10 a.m.–9 p.m. and Sundays, 1–5:30 p.m., with the Frist Center Café opening at noon. Additional information is available by calling 615.244.3340 or by visiting our Web site at www.fristcenter.org.