Collage Culture by Monique Meloche Gallery

Collage Culture

Front cover: (top) Kathia St. Hilaire, Mer Twa, 2024 (detail) (bottom) Lavar Munroe, So Silent Your Whisper, 2024 (detail)

Back cover: Yashua Klos, The Wildflowers Dance For You, 2023 (detail)

Collage Culture

Monique Meloche Gallery

June 7 - July 27, 2024

Essay by Lisa Wainwright Edited by Staci Boris Photographed by Bob.

This catalogue was published on the occasion of Collage Culture, a group exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago

moniquemeloche is pleased to present Collage Culture, a group exhibition that delves into the multifaceted realm of collage as a hybrid process, presenting a selection of artists whose practices traverse diverse visual languages. The works on view contribute to a rich tapestry of hybridity, weaving together narratives of personal histories, cultural identities, and societal critiques. Like the title suggests, Collage Culture embodies the myriad ways the artists incorporate process and material to explore the transformative power of collage and boundless possibilities it offers in reimagining the complexities of contemporary existence.

Featuring:

Sanford Biggers

Antonius-Tín Bui

Genevieve Gaignard

Sheree Hovsepian

Yashua Klos

Helina Metaferia

Lavar Munroe

Ebony G. Patterson

Monika Plioplyte

Wendy Red Star

David Shrobe

Nyugen E. Smith

Shinique Smith

Kathia St. Hilaire

Mickalene Thomas

The Affordances of Collage

By Lisa Wainwright

Contemporary iterations of Collage Intelligence or CI (not to be confused with the recent clamor over AI) reveal a way of making and thinking that foregrounds hybridity, relativity, and speculative world-building.1 Collage Intelligence relies on the capacity to imagine how disparate materials when joined together, create new content rich in conveying the multifariousness of human experience. It is the materials’ evident cuts, tears, and ruptures, and the often unexpected juxtapositions that are the true affordances of collage. Collage Intelligence or CI means showcasing forms clearly mined from radically contrasting sources, where varied parts now in concert as a whole, metaphorically allude to the possibility of harmony within an otherwise socially and psychically complex moment.

The medium of collage is capacious enough to include a range of formal moves and diverse content such that the 15 artists in Monique Meloche Gallery’s Collage Culture offer an array of thought experiments rendered through the concentrated labor of craft that is collage’s métier. Most of the artists here are trafficking in ideas of identity politics—the playbook that has vivified art of the last several years. A number deploy a feminist, queer, indigenous, or diasporic lens, and still others look to deconstruct historic canons of representation. If AI creates from an algorithmic sorting of available banks of images, CI does one better, by arraying the plethora of visual and material culture through the temperament, vision, and ethos of enormously creative artists.

We are all aware of the origin story of collage in western art history that begins with the forays of Picasso and Braque in the early 20th century.2 With their papier collé (glued paper), mined from the printed detritus of the rapidly developing urban industries around them, these artists forever turned aesthetics on its head. Art and anti-art materials, high and low subject matter, and the profound and the prosaic were now all in a duet—one that has astonishingly maintained its verve and relevance.

This frisson that emerges from eliding mundanely familiar materials within the otherwise rarefied domain of so-called high art inspires many of the artists here. Genevieve Gaignard’s symmetrical arrangement of three coiffed women cut from old Jet and Ebony magazines, below an antique lamp, and against a tondo of vintage wallpaper with flowers, doilies, and snakes embellishing its outer edge—like some wildly idiosyncratic mandala—speaks to Gaignard’s ongoing interest in unpacking the entwined issues of race, class, and femininity. Sheree Hovsepian’s elegant arrangement of an African mask donning a long macrame beard juxtaposed with a similarly scaled symbol of woman alludes to a hermeneutics of art drawn from the correlation of signs. And while the possibilities of what ends up in collage today has surpassed even Picasso’s wildest dreams, capitalist consumerism is still the driving engine for producing the materials of this practice, an idea not to be lost when beholding collage. Kathia St. Hilaire collages her printed images onto the packaging of beauty products and Haitian bank notes;

Genevieve Gaignard, I Wish you Roses, 2024 (detail)

in the lush patterns that make up Antonius-Tín Bui’s characters are a kind of popular currency (Joss papers which are spirit money) as well as contemporary and vintage porn magazines; and in Lavar Monroe’s work, a cacophony of newspaper clippings about police violence, the newsprint lavishly fringed, constitutes his figures’ garments. With many of the artists in Collage Culture, there is direct resonance between their formal materials and the reality they seek to address.

Following Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubism, the Dadaists and Surrealists were next to run with the potential of CI. But their commitment to chance methods—the Comte de Lautréamont’s famous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine verse3—has given way to deliberate placements of motifs and materials; arrangements that carry specific narratives and affects. It is not serendipity, for instance, when Helina Metaferia mines specific archives to find images of the Black Panthers for her intricately pieced ornamental headgear. Instead, this is a powerful statement issued through the comingling of a reference to Nefertiti’s headdress and sourced material from progressive Black jour-

Antonius-Tín Bui, But then, how else would we have found each other?, 2024 (detail)

3 Comte de Lautréamont, The Songs of Maldoror, Canto VI, Verse E.

nal headlines. Romare Bearden, not a Surrealist per se, but a key artist in the history of collage who utilized Surrealist photomontage in his depictions of Black life in America, hovers in the background of some of the work. Like Bearden’s use of cropped images of African masks in his many composites of Black figures, David Shrobe’s beautiful mélange of materials sourced from the detritus of his Harlem neighborhood, yields a similar genre scene of a BBQ, with two African objects, as signs of ancestral legacy, anchoring the picture. Mickalene Thomas’s series of col-

laged nudes culled from Jet and NUS Exotiques magazines’ history of offering up Black female beauty as a counter to the dominance of white cultural standards are Beardenesque in their composite structures, but with the further fem adornment of sparkling rhinestones. Thomas seeks to redo another genre, that of the reclining nude, through the eyes of a queer Black woman. Collage, in allowing her to seemingly take bodies apart and put them back together, teases out the idea of what we now understand as gender’s social construction. Yashua Klos does a related thing as he fits together pieces of woodblock prints into marvelous Black faces; their clear fragmentation again serving as a metaphor of the struggle for identity. The gorgeous sum of the parts, speaks to a reclamation of selfhood that attempts to transcend the historic invisibility of the Black figure itself.

Finally, in the middle of the 20th century, when Robert Rauschenberg pushed what constitutes collage by including an absurd range of stuff including a taxidermied goat and the quilt off his bed, he shifted the terms again. Rauschenberg’s promiscuous use of materiality is at the heart of Collage Culture whose works continue to extend techniques of collage. The many textiles that appear in Rauschenberg’s early

Helina Metaferia, Headdress 8, 2020

combines of the 1950s, including Bed (1955, MoMA), for instance, are now de rigeur in contemporary art and skillfully utilized here. Textiles, like collage, have finally found their proper place in an art world that had, in the 20th century, shunned the medium as mere domestic craft. In Collage Culture, Shinique Smith and Sanford Biggers upcycle fabrics in the manner of the bricoleur who transforms discarded scraps into useful things. Both draw on their deep inventory of textiles—some personal, some historic, and some bought—and with their clearly worn quality, the cloth fragments conjure the bodies that once donned or stitched these articles. Wendy Red Star uses fabric mixed with archival pigment prints in compositions that conjure the traditions of the ornamental regalia and quilting of her native Crow people. Hers is a reclamation of the vast archive of her tribe’s material culture that lies “inert,” as she puts it, in so many institutional collections. And Ebony G. Patterson’s and Monika Plioplyte’s woven structures, while not fabric, are visually dense works made from carefully intertwined tendrils of paper. To peer more closely at the Plioplyte is to find repetitive nude bodies locked into geometric schemas, like an erotic textile prism. And, in the Patterson, diligent looking reveals foul plastic scorpions, cockroaches, and tarantulas embedded in the otherwise lyrical arabesques of her paper weavings of plants and flowers and snakes. All is not right in her garden.

Many of the artists’ inclusion of actual objects onto their collages furthers a bridging of reality and fantasy, that extraordinary capacity of art to blur the two. For found objects are uncanny in that they are both familiar (selected from everyday life) and unfamiliar (recontextualized as art). Nyugen E. Smith sees his assemblage of found materials—plastic, rope, cowbell, bottlecap, cork, beeswax, diaspora soil, fabric, sequins, beads, nails, leather, ball, and nails—as talismans transporting the energies of a spiritual world through the play of everyday materials. Smith’s work belongs to a long transcultural practice of imbuing matter with power from the Christian eucharist to African minkisi. The wood table top in the Shrobe collage, the wallpaper in the Gaignard, the scraps of Japanese kimonos in the Biggers, and the silk flower at the center of the Monroe are all synecdoches linking reality with the symbolic imaginary. To behold familiar items shapeshifted into art is to encounter things anew, a means of shaking up what we think we know or understand. Collage reminds us that we can continuously reinvent ourselves and our conditions of being in the world.

Collage Culture demonstrates how the medium of collage best supports ideas of cultural hybridity, the primary content of these artists’ works. Reconstructing selfhood out of social conditions that have been systematically broken down—through colonization, enslavement, diasporic migration, prejudice, and discrimination—is a mighty pursuit. And it is one that requires constant tending. Donald Kuspit wrote that collage with its “fusion of the many into the one” is “never finished, however much there may be the illusion of completeness. This is the poetry of becoming—the poetry of relativity….”4 Kuspit’s intonement to value relativity, a kind of adaptation to a fluid state of being, is everywhere in evidence in this show.

It’s time to talk about CI, rather than obsessing over AI. It’s time to recognize CI as a positive way through this moment of divisive tribal politics and the simplistic binary of oppressors and oppressed. Utilizing Collage Intelligence is to open up a paradigm that takes difference as a value and acknowledges world-building as a creolization of the many. The works displayed in Collage Culture, with their ebullient patterns, ornate motifs, and vivid color look to aesthetics to center the conversation. These artists have lured us in with their funky play of found materials, detritus we delightfully recognize from our own lives, but now transformed into incandescent objects of wonder. Evidence of the value of CI here abounds, we might be wise to deploy this soft power elsewhere.

Monika Plioplyte, Untitled (Paper Textile Nr. 6), 2021 (detail)

4 Donald Kuspit, “Collage: The Organizing Principle of Art,” The New Subjectivism. Art in the 1980s (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), p. 506.

Installation Views

Artworks

Antonius-Tín Bui

But then, how else would we have found each other?, 2024

Joss paper (ancestral burning paper), vintage and contemporary porn magazines, gold leaf, hand-cut paper, candle wax, evidence of burning, marker

67 x 46 in / 170.2 x 116.8 cm

Hovsepian Night Shade, 2017

archival dye transfer print, photogram, gelatin silver print, found wood mask, string, brass nails, graphite, oil pastel and acrylic

51 1/4 x 18 1/4 in / 130.2 x 46.4 cm

Sheree

Thomas NUS Exotiques #1, 2022

color photograph, mixed media paper, and rhinestones on hot press paper mounted on dibond

44 3/8 x 44 3/4 x 2 3/4 in / 112.7 x 113.7 x 7 cm

Mickalene

Helina Metaferia

Headdress 67, 2024 hand-cut and assembled collage 96 x 48 in / 243.8 x 121.9 cm

David Shrobe

Repot, 2023

oil, acrylic, charcoal, canvas, flocking, silk, leather, suede, faux leaves, linen photo print, and laminate on wood table top

44 x 44 in / 111.8 x 111.8 cm

x 54 1/2 in / 170.2 x 138.4 cm

Kathia St. Hilaire

Mer Twa, 2024

oil based relief collage with paper and steel

Kathia St. Hilaire

Boula Six, 2024

oil based relief on canvas collage with skin lightening cream, steel, aluminum, banknotes, banana stickers, silkscreen, price tags, paper, foam, nails, and tires collaged onto foam

25 x 9 1/2 x 9 1/2 in / 63.5 x 24.1 x 24.1 cm

x 14 x 3 in / 71.1 x 35.6 x 7.6 cm

Shinique Smith

Juba, 2024

acrylic, ink and collage

Ebony G. Patterson

…kiss goodbye … goodbye kiss…, 2022

digital print on archival watercolor paper, construction paper, and wallpaper with plastic flies, and roaches

60 1/2 x 82 1/2 x 13 1/2 in / 153.7 x 209.6 x 34.3 cm (total)

Study for Sun Queen, 2024

acrylic, ink, fabric and collage on paper

7 1/2 x 5 in / 19.1 x 12.7 cm

Shinique Smith

Four Moons for Alice, 2024

acrylic, ink, fabric and collage on paper

12 x 10 3/4 in / 30.5 x 27.3 cm

Shinique Smith

Study for Remembering the Way, 2024

acrylic, ink graphite, fabric and collage on paper

11 3/4 x 12 in / 29.8 x 30.5 cm

Shinique Smith

A map to one of my loves, 2024 acrylic, ink graphite, fabric and collage on paper

8 1/2 x 6 3/4 in / 21.6 x 17.1 cm

Shinique Smith

The Wildflowers Dance For You, 2023

woodblock prints on archival paper, Japanese rice paper, muslin, acrylic, spray paint, and wood on canvas

80 x 63 inches / 203.2 x 160 cm

Yashua Klos

Genevieve Gaignard

I Wish you Roses, 2024 vintage wallpaper, found images sourced from vintage magazines and books, vintage doilies, Swarovski crystals, and pearl ornaments on wood panel 36 x 36 in / 91.4 x 91.4 cm

fabric and archival pigment prints mounted on gatorboard

44 x 44 in / 111.8 x 111.8 cm

Wendy Red Star Spring Beauty, 2024

Thomas NUS Exotiques #4, 2022

color photograph, mixed media paper, and rhinestones on hot press paper mounted on dibond

44 5/8 x 43 5/8 x 2 3/4 in / 113.3 x 110.8 x 7 cm

Mickalene

Sheree Hovsepian

Stylite, 2023

silver gelatin prints, ceramic, nails, and velvet in walnut artist’s frame

25 1/2 x 21 1/2 x 3 1/2 in / 64.8 x 54.6 x 8.9 cm

Lavar Munroe

So Silent Your Whisper, 2024 fringed newspaper, acrylic, spray paint, airbrush, oil pastel, hair braid, shoe lace with beads, glitter, staples, thumb tacks, collage, silk flower, and plastic insects on canvas

70 x 60 in / 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Promiscuous Platform, 2023

assorted textiles, mixed media, archival paper mounted on felt

31 1/2 x 30 1/4 x 1 1/2 in / 80 x 76.8 x 3.8 cm

Sanford Biggers

Nyugen E. Smith

Bundlehouse: Migrant Magic, 2023

wood, canvas, watercolor, acrylic, oil pastel, graphite, colored pencil, metal, twine, paper, plastic, rope, cowbell, bottlecap, cork, beeswax, diaspora soil, fabric, sequins, beads, nails, leather, ball, and nails

64 x 58 x 12 in / 162.6 x 147.3 x 30.5 cm

Nyugen E. Smith

Bundlehouse: FS Mini No. 12 (Garvey Aight), 2024

wood, rubber tire, inner tube, oil paste, graphite, bottle cap, canvas, yacht sail fragment, acrylic, colored pencil, sequins, fabric, tarp, mini megaphones, wire, bungee cord, wood stain, plastic, collage, thread, bells, beads, feather, and rope 60 x 25 x 20 in / 152.4 x 63.5 x 50.8 cm

Plioplyte

Untitled (Paper Textile Nr. 6), 2021

multi-color risograph prints, india ink, collage 73 x 60 in / 185.4 x 152.4 cm

Monika

Lisa Wainwright is a distinguished art historian and professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With over 15 years of dedicated service in major leadership roles, she has significantly contributed to the institution’s academic and administrative landscape. Her tenure includes serving as the Dean of Faculty and Vice President of Academic Affairs, as well as Dean of the Graduate Program.

Wainwright’s academic research centers on 19th and 20th century art, with a particular focus on the works of Robert Rauschenberg. Her doctoral dissertation, “Reading Junk: Thematic Imagery in the Art of Robert Rauschenberg from 1954 to 1964,” is a notable reference in the field, cited in significant projects and publications such as the Rauschenberg Research Project at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Hiroko Ikegami’s book, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art.

Wainwright has authored numerous articles in esteemed books and international professional journals and has an extensive portfolio of exhibition catalogues. Her expertise has led her to lecture on a wide range of topics, from the history of the found object in art to the contemporary neo-decadent movement. She has also curated multiple exhibitions including Women on the Verge, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL (2023); Ah...Decadence, The Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2008); From Steel to Flesh, IUN Gallery for Contemporary Art, Indiana University Northwest, Gary, IN (2001); 2001 Spaced Oddities, Gallery 2, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2001); At Home in the Museum, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL (1998); Pink, Jean Albano Gallery, Chicago, IL (1997); and 1968, Betty Rymer Gallery, Chicago, IL (1968).

Lisa Wainwright earned her Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, from Vanderbilt University in 1982, and both her Master’s and Ph.D. in the history of 19th and 20th century art from the University of Illinois, completed in 1986 and 1993 respectively. She also studied at the Goethe-Institut in Blaubeuren, Germany.

Sanford Biggers’ (b.1970, Los Angeles, CA) work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings, while also examining the contexts that bore them. Working with antique quilts that echo rumors of their use as signposts on the Underground Railroad, he deconstructs the quilts and rebuilds them into 2D quilt constructions referencing urban culture, the body, sacred geometry, and American symbolism.

Antonius-Tín Bui’s (b.1992, Bronx, NY) work traverses the realms of hand-cut paper, community engagement, performance, and soft sculpture to visualize hybrid identities or histories that confront the unsettling present. Bui’s hybridized identity as a queer, genderfluid, and Vietnamese American informs the way they employ beauty as a refuge for fellow marginalized communities. Their collages blend ancestral burning paper, vintage porn magazines, marbled paper, and gold leaf, exploring the intersections of spirituality and sexuality.

Genevieve Gaignard (b.1981, Orange, MA) uses self-portraiture, collage, sculpture, and installation to investigate personal histories, popular culture, and racial currents through her lens as a biracial woman navigating unsettling American realities. Her collage works incorporate vintage wallpaper and photography with xeroxed historical news media, magazine clippings, and portraiture to create visual renderings that affirm Black livelihood, provoking reflections on the often-hostile realities of the outside world.

Sheree Hovsepian (b.1974, Isfahan, Iran) Foregrounding the materiality of photography in a digital age, Hovsepian works with film-based cameras, light-sensitive paper, various objects, and her own body to produce cerebral and sensual photographs in which she deconstructs her medium. Her assemblage works incorporate found materials from her studio arranged into constellations that hover above a photographic ground. Operating as an object and an archive, Hovsepian’s works mimic the photograph’s physical and temporal duality.

Yashua Klos’ (b.1977, Chicago, IL) practice maintains a nuanced, and at times deeply personal, engagement with themes of identity, the human form, and the built environment. His collages, portraiture, and sculptures reflect strategies of fragmentation and adaption, and their influence upon ideas of Blackness and Black existence, employing a unique reinterpretation of traditional methods of woodblock printing from a vast collection of textures and imagery.

Helina Metaferia’s (b.1983, Washington, D.C.) diverse process incorporates collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work integrates archives, somatic studies, and dialogical practices, supporting often overlooked narratives that amplify BIPOC/femme bodies. Through collage, Metaferia literally weaves together women of color across time to create an intergenerational exchange of care and activist labor.

Lavar Munroe (b.1982, Nassau, Bahamas) is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in mixed media and painting, often incorporating sentimental objects collected and gifted from his family and objects found during his travels. His work examines themes present in folklore, fables, and historic films–drawing comparison between his upbringing in the Bahamas and travels to various countries in Africa.

Ebony G. Patterson’s (b.1981, Kingston, Jamaica) expansive practice addresses visibility and invisibility through explorations of class, race, gender, youth culture, pageantry, and acts of violence in the context of “postcolonial” spaces. Working across multiple media including tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and installation, each work is intricately embellished and densely layered in order to draw the viewer closer and to question how we engage in the act of looking.

Monika Plioplyte (b.1989, Kaunas, Lithuania) weaves printed and cut paper, photographs, and other materials into narrative structures that connect Baltic folklore, gender identity, and her Lithuanian immigrant experience. In work that combines printmaking, sculpture, performance, and photography, Plioplyte often uses her body as subject or object. Her storytelling is animated by Baltic Pagan symbolism, female archetypes, personal rituals, and the uncanny.

Wendy Red Star (b.1981, Billings, MT) is an enrolled member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe who works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Drawing on pop culture, conceptual art strategies, and the Crow traditions within which she was raised, Red Star pushes the conversation surrounding Native American perspectives in new directions.

David Shrobe (b.1974, New York, NY) creates multi-layered portraits and assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies. He disassembles furniture, especially from his familial home in Harlem, separating wood from fabric and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. Through these various modes of production, his work brings notions of identity, history, and memory into question while challenging conventions of classical portraiture.

Nyugen E. Smith’s (b.1976, Jersey City, NJ) practice revolves around the construction of narrative through the prism of Black cultural identity, responding to the legacy of European colonial rule in African history. His sculptural collages bundle various found materials together representing found-object shelters, bringing an intentional artistic voice and awareness to the trauma, resilience, spirit, violence, and memory of both ancestral and living people in the Black African diaspora.

Shinique Smith (b.1971, Baltimore, MD) is known for her striking creations of fabric, calligraphy, and collage which contain vibrant and carefully collected mementos from her life. Inspired by the vast nature of the things that we as a culture create, consume, and discard, her works operate at the convergence of consumption and spiritual sanctuary, balancing forces and revealing connections across space, time, race, gender, and place to suggest the possibility of new worlds.

Kathia St. Hilaire’s (b.1995, Palm Beach, FL) distinctive technique combines printmaking, painting, collage, and weaving. Informed by her experience growing up in Caribbean and African American neighborhoods in South Florida, her work draws inspiration from Haitian Vodun flags, which are used to tell the country’s history and honor ancestral spirits. Using nontraditional materials such as beauty products, industrial metal, fabric or tires, she creates ornate tapestries that seek to preserve Haitian history.

Mickalene Thomas’ (b.1971, Camden, NJ) portraits critically deconstruct accepted definitions of beauty, race, and gender, specifically in relation to Black women. Her mixed media photo collages, often rhinestone-encrusted, incorporate aesthetics of Western painting and the heavily sexualized blaxploitation films of the 1970s to addresses issues of femininity, race, and beauty alongside personal histories and childhood memories.

Exhibition Checklist

Antonius-Tín Bui

But then, how else would we have found each other?, 2024

Joss paper (ancestral burning paper), vintage and contemporary porn magazines, gold leaf, hand-cut paper, candle wax, evidence of burning, marker

67 x 46 in / 170.2 x 116.8 cm

Sheree Hovsepian

Night Shade, 2017

archival dye transfer print, photogram, gelatin silver print, found wood mask, string, brass nails, graphite, oil pastel and acrylic

51 1/4 x 18 1/4 in / 130.2 x 46.4 cm

Mickalene Thomas

NUS Exotiques #1, 2022

color photograph, mixed media paper, and rhinestones on hot press paper mounted on dibond

44 3/8 x 44 3/4 x 2 3/4 in / 112.7 x 113.7 x 7 cm

Helina Metaferia

Headdress 67, 2024 hand-cut and assembled collage

96 x 48 in / 243.8 x 121.9 cm

David Shrobe

Repot, 2023

oil, acrylic, charcoal, canvas, flocking, silk, leather, suede, faux leaves, linen photo print, and laminate on wood tabletop

44 x 44 in / 111.8 x 111.8 cm

Kathia St. Hilaire

Mer Twa, 2024

oil based relief collage with paper and steel

67 x 54 1/2 in / 170.2 x 138.4 cm

Kathia St. Hilaire

Boula Six, 2024

oil based relief on canvas collage with skin lightening cream, steel, aluminum, banknotes, banana stickers, silkscreen, price tags, paper, foam, nails, and tires collaged onto foam

25 x 9 1/2 x 9 1/2 in / 63.5 x 24.1 x 24.1 cm

Shinique Smith

Juba, 2024

acrylic, ink and collage

28 x 14 x 3 in / 71.1 x 35.6 x 7.6 cm

Ebony G. Patterson

…kiss goodbye … goodbye kiss…, 2022 digital print on archival watercolor paper, construction paper, and wallpaper with plastic flies, and roaches

60 1/2 x 82 1/2 x 13 1/2 in / 153.7 x 209.6 x 34.3 cm (total)

Shinique Smith

Study for Sun Queen, 2024 acrylic, ink, fabric and collage on paper

7 1/2 x 5 in / 19.1 x 12.7 cm

Shinique Smith

Four Moons for Alice, 2024 acrylic, ink, fabric and collage on paper

12 x 10 3/4 in / 30.5 x 27.3 cm

Shinique Smith

Study for Remembering the Way, 2024 acrylic, ink graphite, fabric and collage on paper

11 3/4 x 12 in / 29.8 x 30.5 cm

Shinique Smith

A map to one of my loves, 2024 acrylic, ink graphite, fabric and collage on paper

8 1/2 x 6 3/4 in / 21.6 x 17.1 cm

Yashua Klos

The Wildflowers Dance For You, 2023

woodblock prints on archival paper, Japanese rice paper, muslin, acrylic, spray paint, and wood on canvas

80 x 63 inches / 203.2 x 160 cm

Genevieve Gaignard

I Wish you Roses, 2024 vintage wallpaper, found images sourced from vintage magazines and books, vintage doilies, Swarovski crystals, and pearl ornaments on wood panel

36 x 36 in / 91.4 x 91.4 cm

Wendy Red Star Spring Beauty, 2024 fabric and archival pigment prints mounted on gatorboard

45 1/2 x 45 3/4 in / 111.8 x 111.8 cm

Mickalene Thomas

NUS Exotiques #4, 2022

color photograph, mixed media paper, and rhinestones on hot press paper mounted on dibond

44 5/8 x 43 5/8 x 2 3/4 in / 113.3 x 110.8 x 7 cm

Sheree Hovsepian

Stylite, 2023

silver gelatin prints, ceramic, nails, and velvet in walnut artist’s frame

25 1/2 x 21 1/2 x 3 1/2 in / 64.8 x 54.6 x 8.9 cm

Lavar Munroe

So Silent Your Whisper, 2024

fringed newspaper, acrylic, spray paint, airbrush, oil pastel, hair braid, shoe lace with beads, glitter, staples, thumb tacks, collage, silk flower, and plastic insects on canvas

70 x 60 in / 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Sanford Biggers

Promiscuous Platform, 2023

assorted textiles, mixed media, archival paper mounted on felt

31 1/2 x 30 1/4 x 1 1/2 in / 80 x 76.8 x 3.8 cm

Nyugen E. Smith

Bundlehouse: Migrant Magic, 2023

64 x 58 x 12 in / 162.6 x 147.3 x 30.5 cm

Nyugen E. Smith

Bundlehouse: FS Mini No. 12 (Garvey Aight), 2024

60 x 25 x 20 in / 152.4 x 63.5 x 50.8 cm

Monika Plioplyte

Untitled (Paper Textile Nr. 6), 2021 multi-color risograph prints, india ink, collage

73 x 60 in / 185.4 x 152.4 cm

Image Credits:

Unless otherwise noted, all images are by Bob.

Additional Image Credits:

pg.19 Courtesy of Helina Metaferia

pgs.90-91 Courtesy of Nyugen E. Smith pg.96 Courtesy of Lisa Wainwright

Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622 For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com