Frist Art Museum Presents MULTIPLICITY: BLACKNESS IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN COLLAGE

The Frist Art Museum presents Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, the first major museum exhibition devoted to the rich yet understudied subject. Featuring approximately 80 collage and collage-informed works, Multiplicity explores the breadth and complexity of Black identity and experiences in the United States. Conceived and organized by Frist Art Museum senior curator Katie Delmez, the exhibition will be on view in the museum's Ingram Gallery from September 15 through December 31, 2023, before traveling to two additional venues to be announced.

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 emerging and midcareer 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.

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. “Although it is a nearly ubiquitous art form used by elementary school students to the biggest names in modern art history—Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Hannah Höch, Max Ernst, and Robert Rauschenberg—twenty-first century collage is an arguably understudied and undervalued medium, especially in museum exhibitions,” notes Delmez in her exhibition catalogue introduction. “Multiplicity is an opportunity to spotlight the formal complexity and vibrancy of the technique and to assert its contributions to the field through the lens of some of today's leading artists.”

Like the exhibition itself, the broader project layers together many different participants. Contributors to the accompanying publication range from senior scholars to honors students at Fisk University. Collaborators such as Tennessee State University, Fisk University, William Edmondson Park in Historic Edgehill Neighborhood, and Artville in Wedgewood-Houston are featuring reproductions of work by exhibited artists outside the museum walls. Related exhibitions will be held across Nashville at places like Fisk's Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery, Tinney Contemporary, and Julia Martin Gallery. “This project takes a different tack, having been deliberately structured less like a traditional exhibition and more like a collage itself,” writes Seth Feman, PhD, Frist Art Museum executive director and CEO, in the exhibition catalogue's foreword. “At every turn, new ideas and forms emerge and old ones are newly inflected and reshaped, building into a varied and unique chorus.”  

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