HOUSTON, TX.- The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is showing the exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage since February 18 to May 12, 2024. Organized by the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, Multiplicity is the first major museum exhibition devoted to this rich yet understudied subject. Featuring some 80 collage and collage-informed works, the exhibition explores the breadth and complexity of Black identity and experiences in the United States.

With an intergenerational group of 52 living artists, Multiplicity examines how concepts such as cultural hybridity, notions of beauty, gender fluidity, and historical memory are expressed in the practice of collage. By assembling pieces of paper, fabric, and other often- salvaged or repurposed materials, the artists in this exhibition create unified compositions that express the endless possibilities of Black-constructed narratives despite our fragmented society. The artists range from established luminaries to early- and mid-career figures, including Mark Bradford, Lauren Halsey, Rashid Johnson, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Deborah Roberts, Tschabalala Self, Lorna Simpson, Devan Shimoyama, and Mickalene Thomas.

“We are pleased to present this groundbreaking exhibition, drawing attention to the richness of collage as an art form and its role in expressing Black identity over multiple generations of artists,” said Gary Tinterow, Director, the Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “It is also especially significant for Houston audiences that Multiplicity features the work of a number of notable artists who are so closely identified with this city, including Tay Butler, Jamal Cyrus, Rick Lowe, and Lovie Olivia.”

Multiplicity is structured broadly around seven themes that foreground personal and collective history, regional or national heritage, and gender and sexual orientation, in addition to racial constructs. The artists featured build upon the rich legacy of African American artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Sam Middleton, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, as well as Romare Bearden, who received considerable critical attention as he experimented with collage in the 1960s to inspire collaboration and community. Drawing upon the work of these foundational figures, contemporary artists are making collages in an array of different ways, from traditional cutting and pasting to complexly layering materials, to creating works digitally. For some, collage is their principal strategy; for others, it represents a branch or chapter in their wider practice.

In the opening section of the exhibition, titled “Fragmentation and Reconstruction,” guests are introduced to a range of materials and techniques used in collage today. Many artists gather existing materials—magazines, photographs, books, newspapers, and maps—to form their compositions. Other artists use “new” paper, as is the case with Nina Chanel Abney; Yashua Klos, who makes his own woodblock prints; and YoYo Lander, who stains and washes watercolor paper to create her portraits.

The following section, “Excavating History and Memory,” examines the ways artists like Radcliffe Bailey, Jamal Cyrus, and Tomashi Jackson use historic photographs and publication clippings to highlight overlooked or lost narratives and link them to the present. Derek Fordjour, an alumnus of Morehouse College, celebrates the tradition and vitality of the HBCU marching band experience through his multilayered works.

The “Cultural Hybridity” section includes works by artists including Nigerian-born Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jamaican-born Ebony G. Patterson, and first-generation American Helina Metaferia that address the challenges of navigating life in a new country while maintaining close connections to ancestral homelands.

In the section “Notions of Beauty and Power,” Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Tschabalala Self, Mickalene Thomas, and others challenge White ideals of feminine beauty historically espoused in popular culture and art history by inserting bold Black women into their compositions. Queer artists including Rashaad Newsome and Devan Shimoyama express the fluid nature of gender in an increasingly nonbinary world, while Lovie Olivia and Wardell Milan remind us of the value of safe havens for LGBTQIA+ people, from Harlem Renaissance house party venues to gay dance clubs, in the section “Gender Fluidity and Queer Spaces.”

Although most of the work in Multiplicity is representational, artists in the section
“Toward Abstraction” create layered and often deeply personal abstractions with various materials. McArthur Binion, for example, uses fragments of his Mississippi birth certificate in his DNA series. Fiber and collage artist Brittney Boyd Bullock makes order from disorder by combining various elements into unified abstractions, often exploring the relationship between lightness and darkness.

The exhibition concludes by expanding the definition of collage beyond analog practices to include digital stitches—a seemingly inevitable evolution in today’s digitally saturated environment. For his large-scale wallpaper installations, Kahlil Robert Irving pieces together hundreds of digital images to evoke the continual feed of smartphones and laptops. Taking digital collage a step further, Arthur Jafa gathers the highs and lows of Black experiences in the U.S. into his poignant video montage Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death.