Earlier this winter I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to see the excellent “Monuments” exhibition, which pairs decommissioned Confederate monuments with contemporary artworks. One of the standout newer pieces in the show was Love is dangerous, a sculptural work by the Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins composed of tiny rose petals made from the granite base of an old Stonewall Jackson statue. The pink petals looked soft and delicate, like little cupped hands, and knowing they came from something so physically and symbolically opposite drew me in.
A bit too close, apparently. When we spoke a few weeks later, I was somewhat embarrassed to tell Collins that I had been reprimanded by a museum guard. Turns out, it happened to her too. “They put the tough security guards in there,” she says. “I was like, ‘Good job, you are doing what you’re supposed to.’”
It’s perhaps not surprising that Collins’s piece requires heightened supervision: Her conceptual work has long demanded close looking, followed by deep contemplation. Using paper, ink, graphite, musical scores, stone, performance, and other mediums, Collins examines the relationship between language and race, whether by blind embossing newspaper clippings from the Civil Rights Movement, selectively erasing passages of Antigone or the Odyssey, comparing versions of the national anthem, or forging new sculptures from the detritus of a monument to a Confederate general. It’s an art of deconstruction, excavating the muddy histories that presage our current moment.
“I’m always trying to make sense of the present, and the way I know how to do that is to look backwards for echoes in time,” Collins says. The work may seem quiet, but it is heady and full of bold visions for the future.
Clearly her message is resonating. In the last two years alone she’s had presentations at the Prospect 6 Triennial in New Orleans, the Seattle Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, Patron gallery in Chicago, and LA’s MOCA. Just last week her work was at Frieze LA in a booth from Alexander Gray Associates, her New York gallery.
Now she adds another institution to her list: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver opens “Bethany Collins: The Deluge” on Thursday. The show contains several bodies of work, each pointing to waves of resistance found in historic struggles, be they from literary history or our own here in the United States.