Lynn Sures is a Washington, DC-based artist. In 2017 she was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, working with Richard Potts and Kay Behrensmeyer in Olorgesailie and Nairobi, Kenya. Her project, “The Nexus of Being and Place: Interpreting Human Origins,” was designed to study the points of convergence of our early ancestors’ traits and the characteristics of their habitat. This took place as a new body of artwork, for which she drew early hominin fossils in Washington, DC, and Nairobi, and excavation sites at Olorgesailie. She continues work on this topic in the Human Origins Lab and in her own studio. Sures’s bas-relief “pulp painting” technique merges the collagraph, used in printmaking, with freehand drawing and painting to arrive at simultaneously embossed and painterly handmade paper works. Her colored pencil drawings are done on her own handmade papers, which are made from fibers which relate to the subject matter materially or through color. Her recent exhibition, “Topographies of Life: Rogers, Sures, Watkin” at the American University Museum, Washington, DC was the first show of work from this SARF fellowship project. A conversation between Sures and Potts was published by Hand Papermaking magazine. An interview with Sures in India’s InterActions features her work regarding the topic of evolution.

Sures is the 2018-2020 President of North American Hand Papermakers, and Founding Director of the National Collegiate Handmade Paper Triennial exhibition. Sures and Potts collaborated on the artist’s book VARIATIONS on the Dialectic Between Mingus and Pithecanthropus erectus in 2005. She was guest editor of the 2016 Winter issue of Hand Papermaking magazine on the papermaking of Italy. She was in residence at the Museo della Carta e della Filigrana in Fabriano, Italy with Tom Leech, collaborating on their book project revisiting Bruno Caruso’s La Mano dell’Uomo, published at the Press at the Palace of the Governors Santa Fe, NM in summer, 2021. She has also had recent artist residencies at the Museu Molì Paperer de Capellades, Spain and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In Sri Lanka, Sures was a U.S. State Department American Artist Abroad. Her works appear in collections including the United States Department of State, the US Library of Congress, Yale University, New York Public Library’s Schomburg Collection, the Fabriano Museo della Carta e della Filigrana, and the R.C. Williams Museum of Papermaking. Sures has been a Visiting Artist at universities and museums such as SMFA/Tufts University in Boston; Washington University at St. Louis, MO; Kyoto Institute of Technology, JAPAN; Universitat de Barcelona, Spain; IMOGA Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; and UNAM University, Mexico City, Mexico. She is Professor Emerita of Fine Arts at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, now located at George Washington University.