Events
Upcoming
Paper Palace One Year Anniversary and Twin Cities Meet-Up & Pencil-and-Paper Game Tournament
We’re celebrating Paper Palace’s first year with a meet-up and tournament in St. Paul on Sunday, February 25 at 2:00 p.m. at BlackStack Brewing. All ages are welcome.
📅 Date: Sunday, February 25
⏰ Time: 2:00 p.m.
📍 Venue: BlackStack Brewing, 755 Prior Ave N, St. Paul, MN 55104
Participants will play one another in the three most competitive Paper Palace games: NIM, ORDER & CHAOS and RACETRACK. The winner will receive an ENGRAVED TROPHY (pictured here) and have their photograph featured in the next Paper Palace letter, clutching the trophy, or holding it aloft. I’ll even put a black box over your eyes, Dirty Deeds Done Cheap style, if you’re shy about your participation.
Please RSVP if you plan to attend, and make a note if you’d like to participate in the tournament. Guests of all ages are welcome to attend, but only subscribers are permitted to participate in the tournament.
COMPLETE RULES
- Upon entry, participants will be randomly assigned an opponent for best-2-of-3 rounds of NIM and ORDER & CHAOS, and a single round of RACETRACK.
- Players will be assigned a point for each round of ORDER & CHAOS and NIM they win, and an extra point if they win back-to-back rounds. Players will be assigned two points for winning RACETRACK (with a point for the second place winner). A flawless tournament would result in a total of 8 points (three for winning NIM in two rounds, three for ORDER & CHAOS in two rounds, two for winning RACETRACK).
- In the event of a tie in RACETRACK, no points will be awarded, and there will be a second race on a new track.
- The player with the highest points wins at the end of all matches wins.
- In the event that one or more player is tied for points, the championship will go to the winner of a multi-player round of RACETRACK, using a completely new track.
Past
The Outer Periphery book release party, October 21, 2023
When: Saturday, October 21, 4-6pm
Where: The Chapel at the Center for Performing Arts, 3754 Pleasant Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55409
Celebrate the release of Andy Sturdevant's new Birchwood Palace Industries publication The Outer Periphery: Amateur Spacecraft Designs from the U.S. Patent Office, 1960-2022. Andy will show some favorite selections from the book, along with additional commentary and conversations with special guests Navin Ramalingam, Associate Attorney in the Intellectual Property and Technology Litigation Group at Robins Kaplan LLP; Trina Fernandez of the Center for Photography for Non-Photographers, and musical guest DJ Tonedef.
Tang and astronaut ice cream will be served for refreshments. You can preview DJ Tonedef's playlist here.
About The Outer Periphery
A collection of over a dozen patent illustrations for functioning spacecraft, designed by amateurs, hobbyists, sci-fi enthusiasts, engineers, and cranks. Ranging from “somewhat plausible” to “completely off the wall,” these drawings beautifully capture the delirious optimism of the space age. In the years between Sputnik and Challenger, sitting in your garage drafting a design for, say, a rotating spacecraft that produced an electric dipole on four rotating spherical conducting domes perturbing a uniform spherical electric field seemed not just like an interesting hobby, but an obligation to the future of humankind. Black-and-white illustrations from U.S. Patent Office files. Saddle stitched, 5.5" x 8.5". Product number BP014.
Do It Yourself / Hang In There, Baby book release party, November 13, 2021
Join photographer Trina Fernandez and Birchwood Palace Industries for a release party for Trina's new photo book, Do It Yourself / Hang In There, Baby. Trina will read from the book, interview her mother in California via Zoom, and serve some of the dishes featured in the book, including SkyFlakes crackers. Copies of the book will be available for sale, along with a poster and free 1" buttons.
About Do It Yourself / Hang in There, Baby
Cleaning out her mother's house, Trina found a collaged cookbook of her mother's from the early 1980s, collecting recipes and what she calls "a blueprint for the start of her family." In Do It Yourself, using that cookbook as a starting place, Trina reassembles the improvised meals of her own adulthood, and art directs them with the same eye-watering sense of excess that one finds in the Good Housekeeping cookbooks of the late '70s. The recipes' instructions reflect the struggles and heartbreak in her own life, contrasting them with those of her mother's thirty years earlier. Both experiences are tied together with oversaturated photographic tableaus of middle-class abundance and good taste. The result is an examination of memory, loneliness, depression and family that is both very funny and deeply affecting.
About Trina Fernandez
Trina is a photographic installation artist, speaking to the human experiences we don't often talk about. With the use of popular imagery, nostalgia, and artifice, Trina recreates scenes to process her past as a way to connect to the present, creating a model of emotion for those who may still be searching for permission to feel. Truth, honesty, and vulnerability are central to the work as she concerns herself with our collective desire to have a deeper connection to one another. She is a self described "intellectual bimbo."
About Birchwood Palace Industries
Birchwood Palace Industries, L.L.C. is a publisher of artist books, zines and other small-run printed novelties. It is a project of writer and artist Andy Sturdevant, and is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.