In 2006, undergraduate art students Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker started the “Sketchbook Project”. Over the next 17 years, the initiative grew into a collection of over 50,000 works by over 30,000 artists. Their contributions ranged from love letters and diary entries to graphic novels and intricately detailed masterpieces, all inside the pages of five-by-seven-inch paper-bound books.

After 17 years, the sketchbook project was shut down earlier this month, following a catastrophic fire that destroyed nearly half of the sketchbooks. Now the remaining 35,000 are on their way to four small institutions spread across the United States and Canada.

Steven Peterman was a 20-year-old student on the Atlanta campus of the Savannah School of Design when he started the project with Zucker.

“Initially, we really wanted to pay rent and have a cool art space,” Peterman said. Hyperallergic. “Like every 20-year-old wants to do.” The two students skimmed through a few ideas before striking gold: they would send artists sketchbooks filled with drawings, then store them in their space, at the time called “ArtHouse Coop”. Creators would pay $15 for a sketchbook, shipping, and a place on a shelf, and library visitors could browse and view the works.

With growing interest and a trickle of money coming in, Peterman hired the Sketchbook Project’s first employees in 2008 and moved the initiative to New York a year later, opening a physical library in Red Hook, Brooklyn. And that’s when the project “exploded”.

“We didn’t know there was this crazy world of people who love sketchbooks,” said Peterman, who studied printmaking and has since focused on photography. “It just exploded and became what we did.”

The co-founders named the storefront “The Brooklyn Art Library”. In 2010, they moved to Williamsburg and began offering artists the ability to digitize their books for the fledgling organization’s website. The sketchbook project online library now contains 25,019 works. Zucker organized them into quirky searchable categories, such as “superheroes in everyday clothes” and “from a worm’s perspective.”

In 2016, the Brooklyn Art Library and its growing collection of sketchbooks moved again to another location in Williamsburg, where it remained until 2022. The space was open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and anyone could come in and take a sketchbook. .

The project attracted sketchbooks from around the world. Sharmay Mitchell, who has since self-published an illustrated book of poetry, recalls how thrilling it was knowing her work was on a library shelf for all to see. Mitchell also praised the project’s complete lack of curation, saying that more typical artistic endeavors are decided by a select few — a system that excludes “a whole bunch of people who might have something really beautiful and important to share.” She called the Sketchbook project “a lesson in the beauty of rebellious inclusion.”

Bay Area artist Juliet Mevi echoed Mitchell’s thoughts, calling the sketchbook project “the democracy of art.”

“Some were just beautiful – kudos to very talented and creative artists. I was looking at them and just wish I could draw as well or paint as cleanly,” Mevi said, recounting browsing through the digitized works on the project’s website. “Others were more personal and less polite.”

Many artists have talked about the emotional aspect of working on a sketchbook and then returning it. Mural artist Sarah Harris spent eight months on her first sketchbook in 2011: “I poured a lot of very personal and emotional stuff into it, not really expecting to ever see the book again. In that sense, it was rather therapeutic. She remembers visiting the library in 2019 on a trip to New York after a long year of cancer treatment.

“It was quite emotional,” she said. “I forgot everything I wrote in there.” Now a full-time mural painter, Harris credits the Sketchbook Project with giving him the “boost” to pursue a career as an artist.

Retired artist and museum director and professor Charles Steiner created his sketchbook in airports while traveling back and forth to visit his dying mother. “It was a great end to a tough time in my personal and professional life,” Steiner said.

As more artists submitted work during the Brooklyn years, Peterman took the project on the road. He built a “bookmobile” and transported the sketchbooks to libraries, art spaces and schools across the country. Students and community members submitted work during these trips, adding to the rapidly growing collection. But the model wasn’t sustainable, Peterman said: Williamsburg’s rents were steadily rising.

Then COVID hit and closed the library. The organization ran out of money soon after. Peterman’s own life was also changing. His wife Sara was pregnant and the young family decided to move to St. Petersburg, Florida. They packed up the books and drove south. In Baltimore, Maryland, the trailer caught fire. The fire destroyed 25,000 books.

The Sketchbook Project raised approximately $60,000 in donations. Peterman found a new library in St. Petersburg and hired an employee to identify sketchbooks that had been destroyed and make the information searchable online. The process took the better half of a year. Peterman told artists they could request the return of their books; 2,000 artists accepted. The fire revealed that the project lacked the resources and manpower to properly maintain its collection.

“Now that I’m running a small business, I see how much we’ve struggled over the years and how things weren’t as they should have been,” said Peterman, who now owns two bagel stores and has a second child. “But we were just kids and we didn’t expect this. It got so big.

Peterman found four small institutions to take the remaining 35,000 sketchbooks. The Stove Works art space and residency program in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will take the books from the Southeast. New York City’s Children’s Museum of the Arts will host works by creators under the age of 18. The Wonder’neath Art Society of Nova Scotia will use Canadian sketchbooks and recreate the library system. The Taube Museum of Art in Minot, North Dakota will take up the rest by displaying them in a rotating permanent exhibit where visitors can sit and leaf through them.

“We’re thrilled to see them experience this in the world, it’s what I always wanted to happen,” Peterman said. “It was really a fluke. I think a lot of art history is a fluke – just in the right place at the right time.