Bethany Collins

"Don't You Think That's a Little Elitist?" 2010
48" x 72" x 2" - Chalk & Charcoal on Chalkboard

This month, Wednesday October 26, Bethany Collins, gave a lecture at University Galleries in Normal, Illinois. Collins began her lecture with a summary of her journey and uprising as a young biracial artist. Collins went to Georgia State University where she began her first attempt at language in 2010 with her piece "Don't You Think That's a Little Elitist?" in her white noise series. Collins described her situation in school as her being the only black graduate student. Collins described her work as art that represents racial issues and language structure and how those ingredients  compliment each other. Collins stated that most people have a solid outline around themselves and that she was one of a few that has a dotted line and she wanted to escape the outline. Collins explained that critiques were awkward because of her minority status in class. Collins work in school emulated colorism connected to black history and her desire to create beauty in all of the discrimination. Her White Noise series gained snarky and disrespectful remarks which she then used for the titles. 

Collins' Erased series is still in the works and has become a vigorous procedure because of the continuous writing and erasing which causes stress on her body and mind emotionally, and physically. It's amazing because Collins does all of this to support herself and answer the questions she has for herself and society. Collins explained during the lecture that she is obsessed with her work and how “language shifts as we do”. 

Collins discussed the term dual binary and how society and herself are "double-edged". Collins' technique of repeatedly drawing, writing and erasing enabled her to discover things about her general questions in life. Collin refers to Chicago as "home" but she is primitively from Montgomery, Alabama, she has also lived in New York but still finds Chicago home. Even though Collins represents herself as a Chicagoan, she accepts that her southern roots influence her work in a very significant way. Collins may be from the south but she does not accept the southern correlation  to define her as a person. She joked her time living in New York and constantly being asked what it was like to be a southerner in such a big city. Collins’s series, "Southern Review", was her closest related series to her Alabama home. Collins took  the Southern Review, an actual magazine started in 1935, and blacked out certain sections from each page to make the viewer only read in the order she wanted people to read. The one piece from her Southern Review series that stood out was her was "Southern Review, 1985 (special edition)" which exclusively used black authors and she joked about how it was a apology from the publishers for never having a black author featured in the magazine until then. What made this piece stand out was that she said herself that she couldn't follow her own rules from the series because it was such a monumental edition she felt as if she couldn't black any of it out. 

Southern Review 1985 (special edition)
57 1/2" x 104" - Charcoal on paper

Collins art revolves around her obsession with language, she said something that resonated with me, “language is a kind of form, language, and prism”.  What I took out of it is that just like society changes, language changes with it. Collins created the series she named Book Works in 2015 where she made two works known as "Colorblind" and "Black and Blue". The series was based around Collins erasing, with saliva, the word color in "Colorblind" and the words black and blue in in "Black and Blue". 

Colorblind Dictionary 2015
Webster Dictionary with all color terms erased
8 1/4" x 10" x 2 1/4"

The heart of Bethany Collins’s work is language. Collins shows that with the help of language she can show the connection between race and language. Collins' lecture was thoroughly enjoyable and I really enjoyed her work.