Beverly Plummer Papers

Beverly Plummer was born on December 6, 1918 in Chicago, Illinois. When Beverly was an infant, the family moved to Gary, Indiana. Plummer attended Lew Wallace High School in Gary where she met her husband, John Plummer. She attended college at Indiana University and graduate school at Ball State University. After Plummer spent some time being a housewife and raising her children, she turned to free-lance writing. In her twenty years as a writer, she wrote three craft books and a folk and art column.

At age sixty, she grew weary of writing and turned her attention to the art of papermaking. Plummer attended the first handmade paper conference in 1975, and started experimenting with various plant fibers, such as bean, pea, and gourd vines, onion skins, cabbages, artichokes, wasp nests, cornstalks, nettles, and hibiscus to use in her papermaking. She incorporated new techniques to create paper that reflected her artistic and innovative approach to papermaking. Her book art includes a collaboration with composer John Cage in a new interpretation of the ancient Chinese book of changes, the I Ching. Plummer became a resource for newcomers to the papermaking field and taught numerous workshops on creative papermaking. In her later years, Plummer worked with Hatch Show Print and was an active member in the Friends of Dard Hunter Organization.