Daniel Heyman (D ’85) makes paintings, prints, and drawings and works directly with paper fiber to create paper pulp paintings. His work addresses a variety of subjects, including the landscape, human rights, and the coming climate change crisis. Heyman, (Dartmouth AB 1985; UPenn MFA 1991), is a recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship (2010) and Pew Fellowships in the Arts (2009). He has been artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College; MacDowell; Yaddo; Fine Arts Work Center; and at the Awagami Paper Factory in Japan, where he works on pulp paintings using kozo, gampi, and mitsumata fibers.

His work is in placed in many public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Yale University Art Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, St. Louis Art Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Getty Research Institute. Heyman has taught at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) since 2004 and Princeton University since 2010. He was Department Head of Printmaking at RISD in 2021-22. Recent solo exhibitions include “Flight/Air/Fire” at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, in 2023, and “Adrift” at the Tremaine Gallery, The Hotchkiss School, in 2025.

Daniel Heyman was born in New York and lives with his husband in Rhode Island.

Artist’s Statement:

“My images come from an alchemy of reflection, where images culled from many years of looking mix in new ways with many years of making. Many colors many ways to make images; many fibers many ways to make paper; many thoughts many ways to suggest meaning.”

On a brisk day in November 2002, in the tiny village of Nagasawa on Awaji Island, in a communal garage temporarily fitted for paper making, with my feet slightly spread apart and hands tensely clasped on a paper-making suketa, I looked into a metal vat filled with clear, cold water mixed with slimy hibiscus root secretions called “neri” and pulped mulberry bark fibers — warm and glowing—which gently swirled but never settled. I dipped the suketa, as I had been shown, brought it up, filled with fiber, and then watched as the fiber did exactly what it was not meant to do—slither here and there, form ripples, and slide off. Again and again, I tried and tried, and after an hour I finally produced a single sheet of adequate paper. Several years passed before I learned to form a sheet of paper correctly in the Japanese nigashi-zuki method, but the love of “making” was immediate that first afternoon. The trick, it turns out, is to relax and flow with the water and the fiber in harmony.

The materials for making a sheet of Japanese mulberry paper, known as “kozo,” could not be more elemental: cool fresh water, tree bark fiber, root secretions, a bamboo pole for stirring water in a wooden vat and suspending the suketa—a flat scoop made of slivers of bamboo woven with silk thread. To these items the experienced papermaker adds a little dance, a swaying of the shoulders, and the hips and the knees, holding the elbows just so, adding a dip here and a lift there, catching fibers evenly and draining off water so gently that it leaves a smooth, even sheet of paper ready to stack, press, and dry.

The raw material needed to make sheets of lustrous kozo paper is found within feet of most Japanese villages—a stand of mulberry trees, hibiscus, bamboo, a running stream—all common and unpretentious. Paper, too, for most of the world goes unnoticed—easily crumpled and thrown out to be replaced by sheet after sheet from an endless supply. What I discovered working closely with traditional papermakers in Japan is that good paper, beautiful fresh paper, is at once humble and stunning—like a snowflake or a bird’s nest. When done poorly, paper making can be frustrating. But when done well, before the back starts to ache, causing the fiber to misbehave—when you get into that groove and there is a harmony of movement, material, sound, and even smell—I am always transported outwardly towards nature, to the sun hitting a field, to the melting of snow, and to the simplicity of a splash of water catching the afternoon light.

Pulp paintings are not separate from papermaking—just the opposite: The image and the paper are the same thing. Often called paper pulp painting because the spreading and organizing of separately dyed bits of fiber that create an image is similar to the smearing of paint that makes a painting, pulp painting requires an artist to work fast before the pulp dries or goes moldy. I like to use the long strands of mulberry fiber as a drawing medium, dyeing strands into a wide-ranging colorful palette. Some I beat into a pulp. The long strings give me the ability to make lines or dashes of varying thicknesses; the pulp materials can be laid on in thin layers creating atmosphere and depth, much like watercolors.