Paper Money

Cut currency, graphite, bronze, and hand-pulled editions

A solo exhibition of Chicago artist and master printmaker Curtis William Readel, whose work has used United States currency as material and subject since 2007.

2026-10-11 — 2026-11-29 · 300 10th Ave S., Nashville, TN 37203

Featured Works

Debt Remains

Genius Saeculi (Decayed)

Dead Andy

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United States currency has been Curtis William Readel's material and his subject since 2007: cut, shredded, reassembled, and reprinted into images of value, empire, and decline.

In 2007 he made works from actual shredded dollar bills; the Unus Multorum series, including Ascension, was included in the Tallinn Print Triennial. By his 2008–2009 MFA thesis the project had grown into a broader critique of American empire, using the architecture printed on the backs of U.S. bills as destroyed monuments and drawing a comparison between American power, Rome, and the idea of the New Atlantis. A 2010 printmaking record documents a 30 × 60 inch woodcut titled US Treasury In Ruins.

The 2026 US In Ruins editions return to that subject almost twenty years later. They are not a new stylistic experiment.

The works span unique cut currency collage, graphite drawing on Mylar, bronze, and hand-pulled screen print editions made at POP!NK Editions, the Chicago studio Readel co-founded in 2014.

About the Artist

Curtis William Readel

American b. 1981

Curtis William Readel (American, b. 1981) is a Chicago-based artist and master printmaker whose work examines money, power, institutional authority, and the symbols embedded in American visual culture. He received a BFA from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Printmaking from Northern Illinois University. United States currency has been a recurring material and subject in his work since at least 2007, when he made pieces from shredded dollar bills. His MFA thesis turned the monuments printed on American currency into images of a collapsing empire, with presidential portraits deteriorating into skull-like forms. Readel is a co-founder of the Chicago print studio POP!NK Editions, established in 2014, where he has helped produce hand-pulled editions with artists including Hebru Brantley, Ryan Travis Christian, Carlos Rolon, Karl Wirsum, FUTURA, Swoon, and Ben Frost.

From BMAG

"Readel treats currency as a preexisting visual language for examining value, national identity, political power, excess, and decline. That is a natural subject for a museum of Bitcoin art: the same bill, read by an artist who has spent twenty years taking it apart."

Collection