your wall your paper

"It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper—the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."

-Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

For some interesting information about the history of wallpaper you may want to look at wallpaperinstaller.com where among other interesting stuff you will learn that "the oldest existing example of flocked wallpaper comes from Worcester and was created in approximately 1680."

Wallpaper has been used by many contemporary artists as either part of an installation or as the art itself. Here are some examples of contemporary wallpaper:

John Baldessari, Mike Bidlo, Adam Cvijanovic, Drew Dominick, Nicole Eisenman, Viola Frey, General Idea, Robert Gober, Lonnie Graham, Rodney Graham, Richard Haas, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jenny Holzer, Jim Isermann, Peter Kogler, Roy Lichtenstein, Virgil Marti, Jane Masters, Michael Mercil, Takashi Murakami, Paul Noble, Jorge Pardo, Francesco Simeti, Kiki Smith, Will Stokes, Do-Ho Suh, Rosemarie Trockel, Andy Warhol, and William Wegman

And this is just from the RISD and the Fabric Workshop companion exhibitions in 2003 on Artists' Wallpaper you can read about them here and here. In my next post I will include links to images and the proper description for the project.