BLACK COLLAGISTS
Practically all great artists accept the influence of others. But . . . the artist with vision sees his material, chooses, changes, and by integrating what he has learned with his own experiences, finally molds something distinctly personal.
—Romare Bearden
BLACK COLLAGISTS are stewards and storytellers. The pages of this curated portfolio—featuring work by Yannick Lowery (Philadelphia), Jessica Whittingham (Nassau, Bahamas), Isaiah Winters (New York), Anthony R. Grant (Richmond, CA), and Khaleelah I. L. Harris (Washington, DC)—offer windows into a variety of multifaceted practices, and a cross section of a vibrant and socially relevant field of artmaking. Collage is both a medium and a method, and because of its tactile nature, it engenders a sense of embodiment. Moreover, the physical and contemplative practice of selecting, cutting, rearranging, and then adhering one’s chosen material to a substrate elevates the practice to something akin to the spiritual. It might be thought of as a form of communion, like prayer, meditation, or singing, resulting in artworks full of reflective depth and communicative potential.
Black collagists create visual records of their worlds, and their world-making adds to the canon of art history, correcting the record and offsetting the active and passive erasure of Black culture. Collage is also a relatively universal and democratic medium. Almost anyone can play; barriers such as the prohibitive cost of traditional studio materials or a formal art education, for instance, are nonexistent. That said, the vision and skills brought to the process are as crucial to a successful outcome as is the case with any art form. Collaging is an act of reclamation and reinvention—disparate elements are decontextualized, recontextualized, and reconfigured into a congruent whole. In the spirit of Romare Bearden, these artists interweave their borrowed signifiers with their respective life experiences and personal truths to create images that exist as time capsules and records of Black artistic expression—depicting and articulating realms of their own creation.
