Join us at Wave Pool, in partnership with the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, for a hands-on papermaking workshop exploring how history is recorded, preserved, and reclaimed through everyday materials.

This workshop is inspired by the Freedom Center’s recent acquisition of the personal memoir of Elleanor Eldridge, pictured below. Elleanor Eldridge was a free Black woman and nineteenth-century businesswoman and landowner. Her memoir inspired this community-centered workshop to invite participants to reflect on the power of individuals to document their own lives. Trudy Gaba, Social Justice Curator at the Freedom Center, will provide historical context on Elleanor Eldridge’s life and legacy, grounding the workshop in the importance of personal narratives during times of erasure and revisionism.

Participants will be guided through the fundamentals of handmade papermaking, including pulping, forming, and pressing paper, working collaboratively in a studio setting. Participants will leave with unique, handmade sheets to use in future workshops or personal projects.

Trudy Gaba walks through multiple worlds. She is a practicing visual artist who also works as a curator and historian, weaving together all of these identities into her praxis. Her artistic pursuits are driven by her research investigations into the archives and collections of Black history. She presently works as the Social Justice Curator at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, where she tells stories about the profound ways people flourish in and fight back against oppressive and extractive systems that were never designed to see them succeed.

Trudy holds a master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh, where her research focused on the courtly arts of India— with a particular focus on illuminated manuscript painting from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before joining the Freedom Center in 2023, she served as the Curatorial Assistant of South Asian Art, Islamic Art and Antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum for five years. There, she assisted the department in the acquisition, research and display of the museum's collections from South Asia, the Islamic World, the ancient Middle East and the ancient Mediterranean.

Wave Pool is a socially-engaged art center that acts as a conduit for community change through artist opportunities and support. Pairing communities’ knowledge of their needs with artists’ sense of possibility, Wave Pool provides a structure whereby contemporary art and artists can be integral contributors to the fabric and success of our city, country, and beyond, by helping us build relationships and collective knowledge around complex issues, centering the insights and experience of those most intimately affected.