Paper collage of a seated figure and a simple room, assembled from torn paper and fabric pieces at mismatched scales.
Black collage art builds images from cut and reassembled fragments, photographs, fabric, painted paper, rather than one continuous surface, and Black artists have used it since Romare Bearden's 1964 Projections to reconstruct history from pieces.
That word, reconstruct, is doing real work in that sentence. Painting from scratch assumes you get to invent the whole picture. Collage assumes the picture already exists somewhere, scattered, and your job is to find the pieces and put them in an order that finally makes sense.
For Black American artists working with a past that white institutions recorded selectively, badly, or not at all, that second assumption fits better than the first. This piece traces the technique from Bearden's breakthrough through the artists who picked it up after him, and tries to explain why cutting things apart became such a durable way of putting a history back together.
What is collage, and why did Romare Bearden turn to it in 1964?
Collage is the technique of building an image from separate pieces, cut paper, photographs, fabric, rather than painting or drawing a continuous surface from nothing. Bearden had painted for decades before he became known for it.
He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1911, and his family joined the Great Migration north to Harlem when he was a toddler. His mother was a journalist and political organizer, and the Bearden household became a gathering place for Harlem Renaissance figures while he was growing up. He trained at New York University, graduated in 1935, and spent over three decades working as a caseworker for the New York City Department of Social Services while he painted on the side.
The turn to collage came out of a specific argument, not a private studio decision. In the summer of 1963, as civil rights leaders organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Bearden helped found Spiral, a discussion group of Black artists that also included Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff. The group met weekly to argue about what Black artists owed the movement and each other. Bearden proposed they make a collaborative collage together. The group didn't take him up on it. So he built the collages himself, working from cut fragments of magazine photography, and then had them photographically enlarged into black and white photostats. He showed twenty four of them at the Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery in New York in 1964, calling the series Projections.
What do Bearden's Projections actually show?
Rural baptisms. A burial. Sharecroppers at work. Jazz musicians. Harlem street corners along Lenox Avenue. The Projections series pulled directly from Bearden's own childhood memory of the South and his adult life in Harlem, and stitched them into a single visual record of Black communal life at mid-century.
The Museum of Modern Art holds and exhibits Bearden's work from this period, including pieces like The Conjur Woman and Prevalence of Ritual, Conjur Woman, both from 1964. The Whitney Museum of American Art, at its Philip Morris branch, later organized an exhibition reconstructing the original show, titled Romare Bearden in Black-and-White: Photomontage Projections, 1964, with catalog contributions from curator Thelma Golden and writer Albert Murray. Marking Bearden's return to figurative work after a period of abstraction, Projections set the template nearly every Black collage artist after him would work from in some form: fragments of real, documentary imagery reassembled into a scene that never actually existed as a single photograph.
Why is collage suited to a history that survives only in fragments?
Because the history itself arrived in fragments. Plantation records, government surveys, studio photography commissioned by white sitters, family snapshots that survived only by luck. No single archive holds the whole picture of Black life in America, and no single photograph ever could have.
Collage doesn't pretend otherwise. It takes the incompleteness as the starting condition and builds from there, which is a more honest position than painting a seamless historical scene as if the full record actually exists to paint from. It also lets an artist take an image that was made about Black people, a mugshot, an ad, an anthropological photograph, and cut it loose from its original, often degrading purpose. The fragment gets to mean something else once it's reassembled inside someone else's composition. That reclaiming move, taking imagery that was made to define Black people from the outside and repurposing it from the inside, runs through nearly every artist below.
There's a second reason the technique fits, and it has nothing to do with archives. A painted scene asks a viewer to accept a single vantage point as the truth of a moment. A collage doesn't ask that. The seams stay visible, on purpose, so the viewer can see exactly which pieces came from where and judge the reconstruction for themselves. For artists rebuilding a history that was often mediated by people who had no reason to record it accurately, that visible seam is closer to an honest citation than a smoothed-over illustration would be.
The 2023 exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, organized by the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, put the argument in plain language: the show describes artists assembling paper, photographs, fabric, and salvaged materials into unified compositions that express the possibilities of Black constructed narrative despite a fragmented historical record. Fifty two artists were in that show. A handful of them show what the technique can do.
How does Wangechi Mutu use collage to rebuild the body?
Wangechi Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1972, and now splits her time between Nairobi and Brooklyn, where she's lived and worked for more than two decades. She builds large-scale collages from fashion magazines, medical illustrations, and pornography, cutting and recombining them into hybrid female figures set in fantastical, damaged landscapes.
The bodies are never whole. Machine parts fuse with limbs, animal features fuse with faces, and the effect is unsettling on purpose. Mutu is working directly against a visual history that fetishized, medicalized, and exoticized Black women's bodies, and she's using the same kind of source material, old magazines, old textbooks, to do it. Her first American survey, A Fantastic Journey, was organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and traveled to the Brooklyn Museum from October 2013 to March 2014, showing more than fifty works including large-scale collage, sculpture, and video.
How does Mickalene Thomas use collage inside painting?
Thomas builds her paintings the way a set designer builds a stage. She constructs studio installations with patterned textiles and furniture, poses and photographs models inside them, turns the photographs into collages, and then reworks the collage into a large acrylic panel finished with rhinestones and enamel.
The collage step doesn't disappear once the paint goes on. You can still see it, in the way pattern collides with pattern and a single figure is built from visibly separate decorative fields rather than one smooth surface. Her best known body of work, Origin of the Universe, takes its title from Gustave Courbet's 1866 painting of the same name and reworks its subject, a reclining female nude, through Black women photographed in domestic interiors full of 1970s pattern and color. The show opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2012 and traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, where it ran through January 2013.
We've written a fuller look at Mickalene Thomas's patterned portraits if you want to go deeper on her process.
How does Deborah Roberts use collage to picture Black childhood?
Roberts combines cut photographic fragments, often pulled from magazines and the internet, with hand painted passages to build figures of Black children. The faces and bodies are visibly assembled rather than seamless, sometimes mixing a child's proportions with adult facial features clipped from somewhere else entirely.
That construction isn't a stylistic quirk. It's the argument. Roberts is working against what researchers call adultification bias, the well documented pattern of Black children being perceived as older, more culpable, and less innocent than they actually are. Building a child's image out of mismatched fragments, some clearly childlike, some borrowed from adult sources, makes that outside projection visible instead of invisible. Her piece Let them be children (2018) appeared in Multiplicity at the Frist Art Museum in 2023 alongside fifty one other artists working in the medium.
How does Lorna Simpson use collage to reclaim old advertising images?
Lorna Simpson was born in Brooklyn in 1960 and came up first as a photographer, earning a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1983 and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1985. Her photo-text works of the 1980s and 1990s paired studio portraits, often of Black women with faces hidden or turned away, with brief blocks of text that complicated whatever the image seemed to say on its own.
Collage has anchored her practice for roughly the last fifteen years. Simpson draws on a personal archive of vintage advertising, much of it wig ads clipped from magazines like Ebony and Jet, and reworks the source images into screen printed collages layered with ink and acrylic. In one recurring series, spiky formations of ice replace the hair in old wig advertisements, a literal fracturing of a commercial image that was never meant to be looked at this closely or this critically. Source Notes, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2025 exhibition, was the first survey to consider her painting and collage practice as a whole, presenting more than thirty works.
What does this lineage actually argue?
That a history recorded in pieces should be rebuilt in pieces, in public, rather than smoothed into something falsely whole.
Bearden cut up magazine photography to reassemble a South and a Harlem that no single photographer had ever captured whole. Mutu cuts up medical illustration and pornography to take back a body that other people's images had already claimed to define. Thomas cuts up her own studio photography to rebuild a domestic interior with a Black woman placed where European painting insisted a white woman belonged. Roberts cuts up magazine faces to expose how a Black child's image gets aged up before anyone even asks. Simpson cuts up an old ad and lets the fracture show.
None of that is decoration, and none of it is nostalgia. It's closer to evidence, assembled from whatever survived.
Noirci Studio works in a different medium, oil and watercolor on archival giclee canvas rather than cut paper, but the underlying instinct, building a complete and dignified image of Black life out of a material history that never handed itself over easily, runs through both. If the collage argument above interests you as a way of thinking about Black portraiture more broadly, our Black figurative art collection and our profile of Romare Bearden's collage of Black Southern life are both worth a closer look, and the African American art for sale in our own catalog carries the throughline into painting.
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Written by Robert Lawrence, painter and founder of Noirci Studio. Raised in Atlanta and trained at Clark Atlanta University, he has painted Black life from memory since 2006. He founded Noirci Studio, establishes its curatorial standards, and continues to make art. Every article is reviewed under our editorial guidelines.