Birmingham Museum of Art’s New Site-Specific Commissions Launch with Bethany Collins
In her new mixed-media installation 'The Problem We All Live With' at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins brings attention to the absence of local media coverage during some of the most brutal episodes of The Civil Rights Movement. [http://engine.nectarads.com/p/eyJhdi
In her new mixed-media installation The Problem We All Live With at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins brings attention to the absence of local media coverage during some of the most brutal episodes of The Civil Rights Movement. Collins is the inaugural artist for lobby projects, a new initiative by the Birmingham Museum of Art that invites contemporary artists to create site-specific commissions in the Museum’s main entrance.
Using archives of The Birmingham News from the spring of 1963, Collins recreated 12 prints of the newspaper’s covers to examine the intersection of race, language, and violence. “I selected only those pages where a violent story in relationship to the Civil Rights Movement was actively not covered or buried within the paper,” says Collins. “I engraved the pages backwards into acrylic plates for a blind-embossing process resulting in text which protrudes from the surface of the page, akin to braille — the raise of the text, the white of the page, and shadows are all that makes the work.” In its absence, Collins draws attention to the story, relying on the viewer to question what is missing.
Adjacent to the 12 prints, Collins presents “American Heritage Dictionary, 1982,” a large-scale wall piece depicting illustrative sentences for definitions of words that involve violence, denoting the preoccupation with right and wrong in violence.
The Problem We All Live With by Bethany Collins will be on display at the Birmingham until August 6. Admission is free and open to the public.
