Collagist

"Black Collage"

Increasing attention has been given to the category “Black Collage” since the exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage traveled to multiple locations across the United States between 2023 and 2024. The show, which started off at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, offered itself as a collection of Black art exploring the form’s ability to “render an endless range of possibilities that collectively reject ideas of monolithic blackness.” Mobilizing “collage as a tool for contention,” the dozens of artists compiled for this show worked to both “create their own cosmologies” and make “histories visible within Western art history that have systematically excluded [Black people] as creative beings.” Kerry James Marshall, Rashid Johnson, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, Wangechi Mutu, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, and Betye Saar are among the Black artists featured in the show, as well as on the popular Instagram page “@Blackcollagists” established by Teri Henderson in 2020. Scholarly writing in Multiplicity’s catalogue book identifies collage techniques as uniquely apt for contending with abstract messages about Black being and history; meaning that what can now be somewhat easily distinguished as a “Black Collage” comes from a long genealogy of diasporic and African American aesthetic, political, and social practices.