Lucy Sante has been making collages for nearly sixty years. What began in adolescence—with scissors, Elmer’s glue, and stacks of magazines—became a lifelong, parallel practice: what she calls her violon d’Ingres, an outlet that answered a permanent need to make images when drawing could not.

After relocating to New York and working at the Strand Bookstore, Sante found herself immersed in a flood of discarded printed matter—paperbacks, maps, technical manuals, propaganda, and magazines—much of which she preserved and continues to use decades later. In the late 1970s she created collaged gig flyers for downtown bands, wheat-pasting them across the city. Though the practice paused for years, she never relinquished the materials. In recent years she has returned to collage with renewed focus, drawing from an archive that spans the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, favoring matte surfaces marked by foxing, fading, stains, and tears.