The artworks in “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage” are dense, layered and intricate. But what’s immediately striking about many of the pieces is their size. This is a big show — filling galleries on three levels of the Phillips Collection — of big art.
Helina Metaferia, “Headdress 61,” 2023. Mixed-media collage
As a distinct art form, collage began in Europe a little more than a century ago. Early practitioners such as George Braque, Pablo Picasso and Kurt Schwitters usually worked on a modest scale. While adapting the techniques of those predecessors, many of “Multiplicity’s” contributors emulate the extravagant reach of the largest abstract expressionist canvases.
The title of the show’s first section, “Fragmentation and Reconstruction,” could be applied to nearly all the artworks. The process of devising new wholes from repurposed shreds is a metaphor for building individual and cultural identity. Both projects invoke Black Liberation struggles. Derrick Adams’s picture of a man in a pool, all bold blocks of paint-and-fabric color, was inspired by a photo of a lighthearted Martin Luther King, Jr. In Helina Metaferia’s mixed-media portrait of Frist curatorial fellow Chase Williamson, the subject is wearing a crown made of 1960s newspaper clippings about the civil rights movement.
