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| Njideka Akunyili Crosby and We Begin to Let Go (2013), The Museum of Modern Art, New York City |
Collage is becoming a lost art—or at least analog collage is. I do not mean that people have stopped making collages. Digital collages are everywhere. But before design programs made it possible to cut, layer, and rearrange images on a screen, collage required physical materials: magazines, scissors, paper, and glue.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, I would cut images, headlines, and intriguing scraps of language from magazines I had read. Entertainment Weekly was a particular favorite. I kept the clippings carefully, as though I were building an archive for some future version of myself who would know how they all belonged together.
There was something comforting about the ritual: the slight resistance of the paper against the scissors, the accumulation of fragments, and the freedom to remove an image from its original context and give it another life. A collage did not begin with a blank page. It began with the discarded pieces of other worlds.
So, when I look at Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s We Begin to Let Go, what strikes me first is its use of collage: fragments assembled to reveal a domestic scene.
I notice the central figure’s legs draped in blue stockings and her blue high heels. She is seductive, bare on top; the juxtaposition of skin and fabric makes her seated pose dramatic. And then I notice the chair and the floor, a pastiche of newspaper collage, ephemeral in appearance. But it is the face that cements Akunyili Crosby’s work. What collage magic is this? But, no. She is painted in acrylic—a Mona Lisa hidden among the paper, charcoal, and pastel. The mark of the artist. The mark of the pose.
She looks away from the viewer and away from the man behind her. Perhaps he is her companion, or perhaps there is something sinister about his presence. I read their relationship as transactional: he, like a modest pimp, takes care of her, while she adamantly looks away. Preserves her animus.
His garish orange trousers and patterned shirt speak out, as do his flat-soled sneakers—also blue, but not stylish like hers. Maybe he is telling her something, stooping the way he is, while she reluctantly listens but never gives him her gaze.
