Pati Hill facts for kids

Pati Hill (born April 3, 1921 – died September 19, 2014) was an American writer and photocopy artist. She was well-known for her writing style, which focused on observing everyday life. She also became famous for her art created using an IBM photocopier. While other artists used photocopiers, Pati Hill's work stood out. She focused on common objects, showed how easy it was to use a copier for art, and tried to mix pictures and words. She wanted them to "fuse to become something other than either."

Pati Hill's Life Story

Pati Hill was born Patricia Louise Guion Hill in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1921. When she was eight, she moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, with her mother. Later, she attended George Washington University before moving to New York. Throughout her life, she lived in both France and the United States. She finally settled in Sens, France, in the 1990s. For many years, starting in 1956, she also lived in Stonington, Connecticut.

In the late 1980s, Pati Hill owned an antique shop in Mystic, Connecticut. She was married three times in her life. In 1960, she married Paul Bianchini, a French art dealer. He helped make famous artists like Andy Warhol well-known. In 1962, Pati and Paul had a daughter named Paola. Paul Bianchini passed away in 2000. Pati Hill died at her home in Sens, France, in 2014.

Modeling Career

When Pati Hill was 19, she moved to New York City. There, she started working as a model for the John Robert Powers Agency. In the late 1940s, she moved to Paris to continue modeling. She became a top model for famous designers like Edward Molyneux. She even modeled the first collection of American clothes shown in Paris.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Pati Hill appeared in popular magazines. These included Harper's Bazaar, LIFE, and Elle. She modeled through her twenties. She also sometimes modeled for her close friend, photographer Diane Arbus. Later, she left the fashion world to live in the French countryside.

Writing Career

While living in a small house in France, Pati Hill wrote a memoir called The Pit and the Century Plant. A memoir is a book about a person's own life experiences. She also wrote her first novel, The Nine Mile Circle.

The Pit and the Century Plant described her time living in the French countryside. People praised it for its "vivid appreciation" of life among the French people. In this book, she wrote about the challenges of country living. She also shared stories about her neighbors and nature.

Her novel, The Nine Mile Circle, received mixed reviews. Some liked its "charming style," but others found its story familiar. One reviewer said reading it felt like "having witnessed so much that is private and personal." They also called her writing style "fresh and intriguing." Some reviewers even compared her deep understanding of characters to that of William Faulkner. An excerpt from the novel was published in Harper's Bazaar magazine.

In the 1940s, while modeling in New York, Pati Hill began writing for magazines. These included Mademoiselle and Seventeen. In Paris, she wrote short stories and an essay for The Paris Review. She also interviewed writer Truman Capote.

Pati Hill spent time at artist colonies like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. These places allowed her to focus on her writing in the early 1970s.

Copy Art: Art with a Photocopier

In 1962, Pati Hill started collecting interesting objects. These items later became the subjects for her first artworks made with a photocopier. She said two experiences inspired her to try using the copier for art. In one story, she accidentally copied her thumb while making copies. This showed her the copier's artistic possibilities. In another story, she was cleaning a drawer and wanted to remember its contents. She realized she could easily keep memories of objects by photocopying them.

Pati Hill had a long-standing interest in the small details of objects. She developed this interest during the Great Depression. At that time, she said, "anything anybody had was it because there wasn't going to be another." She began experimenting with the photocopier in 1973. She asked a copy shop worker to scan various items for her. Later, she spent a weekend alone in IBM's New York offices. She made many copies there, saying, "I got a lot of copies made and walked out on Monday morning when everyone came in."

In 1975, Hill published Slave Days. This book featured 29 poems paired with photocopies of small household objects. In 1976, she published another novel, Impossible Dreams. This book included photocopies of 48 photographs by artists like Robert Doisneau. Impossible Dreams was her attempt to create what she called a "stopped movie." This novel earned her a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1976. She also used the copier to create a visual story called Men and Women in Sleeping Cars in 1979.

In 1977, Pati Hill met designer Charles Eames on a flight. She showed him her copier art. He then introduced her to IBM. IBM loaned her an IBM Copier II for two and a half years. With the copier at her home, she tried new techniques. She would move objects over the copier's glass while it was scanning. She also used colorful paper and added extra toner. The IBM Copier II helped create the unique look of her art. It made rich black colors and interesting "flaws" where the toner didn't stick. Hill liked these flaws, saying, "The production of accidents is perhaps the feature of the copier which most endears it to the artist."

Pati Hill saw her prints not just as copies, but as artworks themselves. She believed a photocopy was "much more truthful to detail than a photograph." She never changed the size of the objects she copied. She thought of photocopying as a conversation with the machine. She felt the copier had its own way of seeing things. She explained:

This stocky, unrevealing box stands 3 ft. high without stockings or feet and lights up like a Xmas tree no matter what I show it.
It repeats my words perfectly as many times as I ask it to, but when I show it a hair curler it hands me back a space ship, and when I show it the inside of a straw hat it describes the eerie joys of a descent into a volcano.

Hill also used the copier to explore how words and images work together. She wanted to create art where words and pictures "fuse to become something other than either." An example is A Swan: An Opera in Nine Chapters. This book tells a story using text and photocopies of a dead swan. Her interest in words and images also led her to try creating a universal symbol language. This language was briefly taught to first-grade students in Connecticut in the 1970s.

In 1979, Hill published Letters to Jill: A catalogue and some notes on copying. This book was a simple guide to using the photocopier as an art tool. In 1980, she told The New Yorker magazine about her deep connection to photocopies. She said, "Copies are an international visual language, which talks to people in Los Angeles and people in Prague the same way. Making copies is very near to speaking."

In the 1980s, Pati Hill took on a huge project: photocopying the Palace of Versailles. She had several reasons for this. She saw Versailles as both private and public. It also connected the United States and France, and she felt like a citizen of both. She wanted to "do something big" and see what "a modern device would make of something old." She explained that Versailles was well-known through paintings and photos. This gave her a chance to show how copying was different from those art forms. She copied things like a bellpull, cobblestones, and even a pear tree with its roots and worms. This project led her to experiment with colored toner and other art techniques. Hill planned several exhibitions of her Versailles work. She always said, "I am not interested in Copy Art per se but rather in what I can do with a copier."

In 1989, Pati Hill and her husband, Paul Bianchini, opened Galerie Toner. This art gallery in Sens, France, showed art made with photocopiers. They opened a second Galerie Toner in Paris in 1992.

Notable Artworks

• Photocopied Garments, 1976. This work featured photocopies of different clothes.
• A Swan: An Opera in Nine Chapters, 1978. This combined photocopies of a dead swan with short writings.

Notable Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions

• 1975: Objets. Kornblee Gallery, New York.
• 1976: Garments. Kornblee Gallery, New York.
• 1978: A Swan, An Opera in 9 Chapters. Kornblee Gallery, New York.
• 2000: Wall Papers. Bayly Art Museum, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
• 2016: Pati Hill: Photocopier. Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, Pennsylvania.
• 2017: Pati Hill: Photocopier, A Survey of Prints and Books (1974-83). Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, Connecticut.

Group Exhibitions

• 1979: Electroworks. George Eastman House, New York.
• 1980: L'Electrographie. Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
• 1985: Electroworks. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Art Collections

Pati Hill's artworks are held in several important collections, including:

• The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York
• Bayly Art Museum, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia
• Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France
• Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York City, New York
• Musée de Sens, Sens-en-Bourgogne, France
• Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey

See also

In Spanish: Pati Hill para niños