The Phillips Collection Looks at Blackness in Contemporary American Collage

Collage as a fine art medium has come of age during an opportune period—when our diverse field of input has grown exponentially and mainstream monoculture has, fortunately, collapsed. In some ways, the nature of collage is to disrupt and subsume other media and messages. Collage can challenge dominant narratives or offer fresh identities, formal feasts and dynamic stories. Of course, it can do many other things, as found in “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage,” now on view at The Phillips Collection. But where did collage emerge, and what is it doing in the studio practice of Black artists in the U.S. today?

While perhaps a millennium or more old, collage as an art form has been in the regular service of makers since the rise of the offset printing press and newspaper reproduction in the early twentieth century—then reinvigorated by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Hannah Höch in Europe and later by American artists such as Romare Bearden and Nancy Spero. Inherent in the medium’s power are the rich real-world histories of the materials and source imagery employed by artists. “I like finding materials that have a history—materials that people may discard—and creating a new life out of these old things,” artist Lanecia A. Rouse says. Often the first steps in creating a collage are to isolate and remove such materials from their original contexts before giving them what Rouse calls a “new life” and, effectively, a new history. In Black American experiences, defined as much by struggle, search and suffering as by creativity, prosperity and freedom, an important effort to assess and shift the many representations of those experiences sometimes requires unearthing old history and transforming it into a living record—or even forecasting an unknown future. Whether anchored in narrative or ruptured by abstraction, this is, in some remarkable ways, what a number of the artists participating in “Multiplicity” have done.

In this comprehensive ten-gallery exhibition, the medium of collage comes in practically every format, dimension and expression. Some pieces, like Lauren Halsey’s betta daze (loda land), 2020, are classic vision board–style works. Hers features tangible, thrilling, L.A.-centric pop culture highlights—from images of leaping lowrider vintage cars to Afro-wearing nude sex symbols. But there are also those that seem metaphysical, like M. Florine Démosthène’s The Healing: Untitled 3, 2022, which features seafoam green and bronze splatter-painted cutouts of otherworldly bodies rapturously emerging from one another in an existential moment. Then there’s the sense-altering, medium-bending installation by Kahlil Robert Irving, MaxedMEDIAplayer(Dreamtower)REadTHEprintedTEXT from 2021. This entire digital print wall comprises screen grabs, Zoom frames, news items and social media posts on adhesive fabric. Like his adjoining lightbox work, Mixed Messages (Streets & Screens) AOL + Lottery, 2020, it addresses the virtual online “too-muchness of contemporary experience,” as the artist recently explained. These are just a few of the sixty works by almost fifty contemporary artists in this extraordinary show.

One of my favorite pieces in the exhibition is Family Freedom, 2021, by the artist and jazz musician Rod McGaha, from his Regeneration series. In the collage, a nearly silhouetted group of trimmed tree trunks fills the foreground of the frame, set against blurry, brightly hued, blooming spring flowers. Upon closer inspection, I see Black, nymph-like human figures atop the limbs, connecting to one another by fingertip touch. These delightful, dancing figures seem to find joy in their bodies and contact with each other. But when looking at the piece more, I also think about the graven American history of race hatred and Black lynchings from long-limbed trees. Perhaps McGaha has removed some of the branches to eradicate the darker possibility of the tree’s storied use, giving us instead a sprouting, living family tree full of supportive, networked hope and promise.

A few participants in the exhibition who now practice in major U.S. urban hubs come from as far as Haiti and Nigeria, bringing that history and experience with them in their work. One artist, Joiri Minaya, while born in New York City, was raised in the Dominican Republic—later returning to the U.S., where she now lives and works. Her sumptuous print on paper, Woman-landscape (On Opacity) #4, from 2020, exudes a retro island vacation poster vibe. This photo collage consists of illustrations and images that add up to a fantasy figure stereotype—the fashion model smile, the rippling bounty of hair, the bikini-cradled bosom. But she is noticeably eyeless and has merged with the landscape. It’s as if we have no choice but to check out her sensuous form and the exoticized lands nearby instead of getting to know her as a person, let alone understand her rich identity as an islander. I can imagine the central figure letting those who ogle her know that “my eyes are up here” even in their absence.

The Black struggle in America is as long in lineage as it is deep in damages. Kara Walker’s Divining Rod, 2007, addresses and interprets this complex struggle. The work features her signature silhouettes of Black figures over a background of pages torn from Kyle Onstott’s 1962 Drum, an exploitative and sadistic Civil War–era plantation life novel spun off the equally cheap and titillating bestseller Mandingo. In the foreground of Walker’s piece, one silhouetted woman reaches out—perhaps seeking help or intending to warn another. She floats above the red silhouette of a Black man raising a fist. Next to him, another Black woman in red holds a tree branch divining rod up to the sky. What is it she seeks? Discovery of and deliverance to God above, an escape from her immediate abuses or a break from greater victimization? It’s hard to know. Walker has famously said, “I’m fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There’s something interesting, funny and perverse about the way fairy tales sometimes pass for history, for truth.” Maybe the gesticulating female figures represent the many of us who are sick of the uneven trade between the historical truth and the tawdry fiction that often supplants it—and want to take action. In this work, Walker shows us the true power of collage, transforming the genteel 19th-century silhouette technique to undermine the very privileged world that it represents, as she does by using the shredded pages of the racist novel, undercutting its power to convince us of maligning and ostentatious tales.

If the premise of “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage” is to topple assumptions about the homogeneity of Black American experiences, it has succeeded. Americans—while comprised of the varied and vast but ruled by the few—are often galvanized by the weary, who want greater change or, at least, new perspectives. Luckily, many of the artists in this exhibition—focused on heady subjects like domestic history, international cultures, gender inequality or that fundamental state of freedom—have done just that while retooling the medium, which is inherently collective and collaborative instead of exclusive and inert.

“Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage” is on view at The Phillips Collection in D.C. through September 22.