Experiment · shipped

Broadway wrapping papers

Two original wrapping papers built from a lifetime of Broadway loyalties

An overhead view on a dark wood table: a sheet of coral wrapping paper rolled out across the right two-thirds of the frame, printed in cream with a dense typographic pattern of letters and Broadway show titles. A black tape dispenser, gold-handled fabric scissors, and a Sharpie sit at the edge of the sheet, ready to wrap something.

Two wrapping papers, both Broadway. The first is a dense alphabet — letters A through Z scaled up and tossed against a coral kraft ground, with the show titles, songwriters, performers, and venue names that hold the whole century of musical theatre tucked between them. The second is a portrait grid — a hundred caricatures of the people who matter, painted in saturated mid-century palettes.

The papers are real, printed in volume on rolls, used to wrap actual presents on actual birthdays. The point isn't a finished product. The point is that the things you love show up in the things you make. A wrapping paper is a small object, and the small objects are where the shape of a person leaks through.

Paper one

The alphabet, Broadway-tuned.

The first paper runs the alphabet at scale across a coral kraft ground. The letters get dropped between the show titles — Hello Dolly!, Brigadoon, Oklahoma!, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying — and the people who wrote, performed, and ran them. Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone share the page with Sondheim, Kander, Herman, Hamlisch. Walter Kerr and Studio 54 sit beside the shows that played in them. The composition is a flat database printed sideways — the more you stare at it, the more names pop into focus.

A close-up of the alphabet wrapping paper layered as multiple sheets: cream show titles like Fiorello!, Oklahoma!, High Button Shoes, My Fair Lady, Hot Mikado, Mata Hari, and Captain set in mixed display caps, italics, and scripts at multiple sizes against the coral kraft ground.

An overhead detail of the alphabet paper with a small wrapped gift box sitting on top of the sheet — the same Hello Dolly!, Brigadoon, Guys & Dolls, Oklahoma!, A Funny Thing, On the Town, Captains, Mata Hari pattern wrapping the box, and the rest of the sheet pattern visible as the ground around it.

A second sheet of the alphabet paper layered over the first at an angle: oversized letter forms — D, J, U, X, Y, Z — anchor the foreground, and the cream type of show titles and performer names disappears into the depth of the layered fold.

An intimate close-up of the alphabet paper held in soft directional light: oversized letters BCJK, NOP, HI, AB visible in the foreground, and the smaller display type of Sondheim, Audra McDonald, Hamilton, Patti LuPone, Stephen, Lincoln Center reading underneath in cream.

Paper two

The portraits, Broadway-tuned.

The second paper trades the type-only ground for a portrait grid. Stylized caricatures — saturated, painterly, in the warm palette of a vintage matchbook — tile across the sheet. Lin-Manuel, Liza, Bette, Idina, Audra, Patti, Carol, Whoopi, Cher, Joel Grey, Andrew Rannells. The grid never repeats. Every face is an old friend; recognition is the gift before the gift.

A flat overhead view of a sheet of the portrait wrapping paper: a dense ten-by-fifteen grid of stylized caricature portraits in saturated warm color blocks — orange, yellow, raspberry, gold, teal — each face cropped to the shoulders against its own background panel.

A perspective view of the portrait paper laid across a wood floor: the grid of caricatures — Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bernadette Peters, Idina Menzel, Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler, Carol Burnett, Audra McDonald, Whoopi Goldberg, and others — recedes into the depth of the frame, the tile rhythm carrying every direction.

A small gift box wrapped in the portrait paper, photographed from above sitting on a tile floor: nine portraits visible across the front of the box, the wrapping crease catching directional sunlight.

The portrait paper as a roll lying alongside a wrapped box on a wooden floor: roll on the right with portraits visible spiraling around it, wrapped box on the left with the grid wrapping cleanly around the top corner.

A flatter overhead view of both objects together: a wrapped present on the left, a partially unrolled tube of the portrait paper on the right, and the wood grain of the floor between them, with the patterns of the paper carrying enough strength to read at the small box scale and the long roll scale alike.

A wrapping paper is the gift before the gift. If I'm going to print a roll, the print may as well be the names and faces I'd say first if you asked me what I love.

Closing