Sometimes collage gets defined by one job: cutting, pasting, gluing. Monica Church and Andrea Burgay built a symposium against that narrowness. Making Meaning brings historians, curators, publishers, and makers into the same room, arguing that all of them are doing something collage-shaped, whether or not paper is involved.
Monica Church and Andrea Burgay organized Making Meaning at the Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts, running alongside a linked exhibition series, Transforming Collage: Hudson Valley, across ten venues. Andrea’s no stranger to TWS readers. We featured her curatorial work on Breakdown before. This time the program is wider by design, built around the idea that people who write about collage, show it, print it, and make it belong on the same panels.
The lineup makes the point on its own. Freya Gowrley traces collage back centuries before Picasso and Braque. Todd Bartel — already familiar to TWS readers — presents his concept of Uncollage. Teri Henderson’s research on Black collagists and Rowan Buffington’s work on collage and queer philosophy share a curatorial session, while Mario Zoots and allison anne make the case for publishing itself as a collage practice.
“The symposium functions as a kind of temporary infrastructure for the field.”
Todd Bartel is one of the voices Church and Burgay brought into Making Meaning. We’ve quoted him before: his claim that everything since the Big Bang is collage anchored our own New Wave of Collage manifesto last November. In this 2020 interview, he lays out the thinking behind that claim, and the term he coined to describe collage without paper or glue: uncollage.
“Ever since the Big Bang, it’s all collage.”
Last week we opened a call for volunteers to help build the next stage of TWS, across six roles: social media, newsletters, memberships, gallery support, content, and partnerships. So many of you applied. A platform doesn’t run fifteen years on one person’s work, and that response proves the point. We’re reading through every application now and reaching out with next steps soon. Thank you all of you very much!
Membership is another way to build TWS: it funds the printing, the production, and the hours that go into new publications, exhibitions, and research — the same commitment the volunteers just made, in a different form.
Stay Weird
Fifteen years in, and historians, volunteers, and whoever picks up the scissors next keep rewriting the story.
— The Weird Show
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