Artist Bethany Collins is fascinated with language as a malleable subject, sculpting words as other artists might shape clay into a sculpture.  

“I love language,” Collins says. “The faith that I can claim is a kind of faith in language for its capacity to connect us. At its best, if we can find just the right words, there is nothing that we cannot feel connected about, understand, have some sort of resolve towards.” 

Collins spoke with Janet Dees, The Block Museum’s Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, on February 3, 2024 at the inaugural Auburn Forum for Southern Art and Culture, a half-day symposium hosted by Auburn University’s Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art that featured exhibiting artists in one-on-one conversations with researchers.  

In a conversation now available on YouTube, the artist spoke with Dees about a number of works featured in The Jule’s new exhibition Bethany Collins: Accord. 

In The Southern Review series, Collins reworks historical documents taken from the 1985 editions of the quarterly literary journal by applying a soft charcoal to the text.  

In doing so, she established for herself a set of guiding principles: footnotes, titles, author bylines, and captions remained untouched – only body text was to be worked with. For The Southern Review 1985 (Special Edition), based on a special issue featuring exclusively African American writers, Collins broke this rule, letting more of the text by these admired Black authors remain visible on the page. This special edition represented the Review’s first attempt to highlight the work of Black authors, which it acknowledged had been excluded from previous volumes of the journal.

“In this series, there’s this poetic dance between obscuring things and simultaneously revealing things,” Dees notes.  

Other works by the artist similarly reimagine historical documents to reveal truth by obscuring text.

In Collins’ Birmingham News series – one of which is in The Block’s collection – she works with news coverage during the Civil Rights movement – front page stories run by the Birmingham News paper that omit mention of activism and racial violence. Collins inklessly embossed these front page stories into malleable paper to create “ghost prints.” 

“It’s ghostly and haunting,” she says. “It bounces off your eyes.” 

Collins and Dees also discussed forthcoming works from the artist. 

Collins is currently working with the base of the (former) Charlottesville, VA, Stonewall Jackson Monument, which will be recarved. The project is part of an initiative to create work from or in response to decommissioned confederate statues through the Los Angeles-based visual arts space LAXART.

In the process of doing so, the artist is harvesting dust cast off in the carving process. Some of that dust has bee mixed into handmade paper works on view at the Jule that pay tribute to carvings at Old Ship A.M.E. Zion Church, the oldest Black church in the artist’s hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.

On working with the familiarity of paper and the newness of stone, she remarks, “there’s something about that confluence. I think it’s the contradiction of paper and stone having to abide one another in the same body forever.”