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ANATOMY OF DESIGN
Elaborate paper cutouts have a long history, if not in the highest echelons of art
then in the quotidian province of folk art. In colonial America, paper silhouettes
were a common portrait medium; throughout Mexico, fanciful cutout scenes are
ubiquitously hung during Day of the Dead celebrations; and in the People's
Republic of China, didactic tableaux were used as political propaganda during the
Cultural Revolution. Before the computer, these shadow pictures were laboriously
hand-rendered, usually by skilled craftpersons, for mass consumption (and also
served as découpage scrap for erstwhile amateurs); today they are far more
easily, ...