A Pattern or Practice, the most comprehensive presentation of artist Bethany Collins’ work to date, presents thirty pieces created from 2012 to 2019. In her drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and artist’s books, Collins incorporates fractured or illegible phrases, either punishingly erased or arduously rendered. As Holland Cotter recently wrote in The New York Times , “language itself, viewed as intrinsically racialized, is Bethany Collins’ primary material.” The artist elaborates, “I adore language because of its potential capacity, but if language is biased and not representative of us, it’s bound to fail.” Collins has explored personal, bureaucratic, and lyrical language. The earliest work in the exhibition is “Do People Ever Think You’re White?” III (2012), one of Collins’ White Noise drawings, which consist of writing in white chalk on a black chalkboard. The series began in 2010 when the artist was in graduate school in Atlanta, Georgia, and the panels are filled with nearly indecipherable clusters of letters that erratically spell out racially charged critiques of her work. Collins repeatedly wrote each phrase as a means of distancing herself from it and disrupting its systemic power. She moved from personal to more authoritative language for her later Dictionaries series. For Colorblind Dictionary (2013-2014), she methodically erased all references to color in a Webster’s New World Dictionary , while for Black and Blue Dictionary (2014), she erased all terms related to the colors black and blue in a New American Dictionary . The exhibition’s title is quoted from A Pattern or Practice (2015), Collins’ installation of 91 blind embossed prints featuring text from the U.S. Department of Justice report on the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department following the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer. The embossed white Somerset paper requires an intimate proximity to read the protruding letters of the report, which is entirely present except its conclusion. Collins has recently been researching historical songs and anthems. Her America: A Hymnal is a 2017 hardcover book containing 100 laser-cut and burned versions of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” The artist points out that each re-writing supports causes “from temperance and suffrage to abolition and even the Confederacy,” and each “represents a proposition of what it means to be American.” Editor:Kendra PaitzAuthor: Grace Deveney Publisher: University Galleries of Illinois State UniversityPublication date: January 10, 2023 Hardcover | 111 pages | 8 x 10 inches
