everything is collage!

what is art? what is collage?

Hi! I wrote these thoughts about collage three years ago while promoting a workshop called “Is This Art?” If that sounds familiar, it is because I am offering it again, starting tomorrow, June 9th. It is online, and recorded, in case you miss a class. $345 includes six classes, a packet of fun materials from me. Oh and there are no-fee payment plans.

I just sold out of these stickers. Maybe I should reprint them?

I had a friend in college who was finishing their degree in photography while I was starting mine in printmaking. I wanted to learn letterpress and book art techniques, but my friend was more interested in storytelling than a specific medium. For their final project, they created a quilt embellished with embroidered floor plans of every place they lived growing up. It was powerful and evocative, yet, every critique they had, one dude¹ had to ask:

“yes, but how is this photography?”

In the early days of the New Orleans Collage Collective, we would often joke "everything is collage!" A pile of scrap during a meet- up: COLLAGE! Haphazard piles of books: COLLAGE. Debris around a storm gutter: COLLAGE!²

I think of this while teaching collage. I love teaching collage because you don't need special equipment. You can start today with things from around your house: a glue stick, junk mail, maybe scissors. Collage can be exact and skilled. It can be tedious and precious. It can come from long contemplation and consideration. But I like it best when it is messy. There are many art forms that require specific steps in a certain order that you must memorize and never question³. But collage welcomes you. More than combining materials aka mixed media, collage opens its arms to you, shrugs off categorization, is happy to have you. Mixed media is a description of materials used, collage is how you got there.

Mixed media is a description of materials used, collage is how you got there.

Artists make art. There are plenty of people who stick to one medium, who are master printers or painters and never stray. I am fascinated by people so dedicated to craft, whose laser focus leads them to many wonderful places. Ceramicists who study form and chemistry. Printers who turn right angled letterpress into leaping arcs and squiggles without damaging type.

Collage is messy. It is scraps of paper saved in pockets or in piles. Even meticulous collage artists end up with a desk of scrap, because we know that cast away bits are what make the next collage complete.. Collage is nebulous. Derived from the French for "glue," collage is a verb, an action. If its history references materials and methods, its modern use is more akin to "collection" as in a collection of images, of papers, of materials. I think of Joseph Cornell's collection boxes, bringing together bits into a more meaningful whole. Or the time my friend visited my new apartment 80 miles away from New Orleans, looked at my collections of bottles and papers stored in old wood crates and said it looked very Bywater⁴.

Collage is the art for messy emotions, for doing, not for over-thinking, for experimenting. No one expects much of collage. Which is why the people who excel, who consider all the solutions to their compositional problems are appreciated for their patience and skill. College is forgiving. I love teaching it, More than drawing or printmaking or bookbinding. It allows you space to figure yourself out.

1. It was the same dude everytime. But you already knew that.

2. storm drain debris in New Orleans is pretty spectacular, often involving something glittery, something worn by someone and one mystery item.

3. lithography

4. before the Bywater became a must-see neighborhood according to your in-flight magazine.