Bandboxes were used, primarily by women, to store and transport hats, clothing, and other personal items in the 1700s and 1800s. Fashioned out of pasteboard or thin wooden boards, they were typically decorated on the outside with block-printed papers and often lined on the interior with contemporary newspapers and journals, creating three-dimensional scrapbooks that combined pattern design and current events. The group of bandboxes in Transformations are all custom made by historical stationer Benjamin Bartgis to the specifications of the individual artists using historical methods. Coordinated by Andrew Raftery, a former Maker-Creator Fellow and professor at Rhode Island School of Design, each of these artists then covered the boxes and the interiors with prints of their own design. 

The Artists

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Yoonmi Nam
Yoonmi Nam is an artist born in Seoul, South Korea, and has…

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Benjamin Bartgis
Ben Bartgis is a conservation technician and independent artist specializing in reproduction…

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Judith Solodkin
Judith Solodkin received a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University…

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Katie Commodore
Despite years of her insisting that their daughter was going to be…

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Maxime Jean Lefebvre
Maxime Jean Lefebvre is an interdisciplinary artist who works mainly with printmaking…

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Julia Samuels
Julia Samuels was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and she earned her…

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Amber Heaton
Amber Heaton creates colorful, geometric installations, mixed media works, paintings, and works…

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Andrew Raftery
Andrew Raftery is an artist specializing in fictional and autobiographical narratives of…

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