This publication accompanies a traveling exhibition that reintroduces the singular practice of Pati Hill (1921–2014). Untrained as an artist, Hill was a published novelist and poet before she began experimenting with the photocopier as an artist’s tool in the early 1970s. She was not alone in recognizing the creative possibilities of what she called “a found instrument, a saxophone without directions”; however, her literal approach to the medium—“having come to copying from writing”—coupled with her lucid texts about it, have proved prescient, especially regarding xerography’s potential for self-publishing and image-sharing that we take for granted today. Unlike many who experimented with this instant-duplication process—a technology whose convenience, affordability, and use of plain paper made it revolutionary—Hill sustained her commitment to xerography for 40 years.

This generously illustrated, 200-page publication contains essays by 14 contributors. These include five by those who knew Hill directly—curator Marilyn McCray; novelist Thomas McGonigle; Hill’s former assistant, Fouzia Chakour; Marie Cecile Meissner (curator emeritus, the Bibliotheque national de France) and Arcadia Exhibitions Director Richard Torchia. The remaining texts were contributed by writers responding to Hill’s work for the first time: Michelle Cotton, curator of “Xerography” (2013) at First Site, UK; Philadelphia-based poet Thomas Devaney; Arcadia associate professors Sue Pierce and Matthew Rigliano; Arcadia student Zachary See; and University of Pennsylvania art history graduate students Francesca Ferrari, Zachary Fruit, and Jessica Hough. In 2019, Laurie Churchman received an award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts for the book’s design.

In Pati Hill: Photocopier, most of the included works are notably being reproduced for the first time. Additionally, the images, whenever possible, remain faithful to the original dimensions of Hill’s copier prints, a condition facilitated by the oversize format of the volume. Hill understood that the presence—or what she called the “actuality”—of her copier prints was the result of their verisimilitude of scale, the automatic 1:1 ratio established between the original objects she scanned and the resulting copier prints.