Screen Print with on Paper with Unique Collage
30 × 22 in.
Zoë Charlton
For Black creatives, collage is a shared language, connecting us across space and time to one another and to our ancestors—a sentiment Zoë Charlton and I both share. Charlton, a Baltimore-based artist, examines cultural narratives through everyday and symbolic objects. While her studio practice is rooted in figure drawing, it expands into collage, animation, sculpture, and installation. I've had the privilege of seeing her work in various settings, and each time, I'm struck by a deep familiarity. The story of the stickers in her work is particularly compelling: initially, unintentional placeholders, they became a recurring motif, a testament to the improvisational nature of collage and its ability to surprise and transform.
– Guest Curator Teri Henderson
In the Words of the Artist
Collage on Paper
My work centers the body—its posture, containment, and gesture—as a site where memory and cultural narratives accumulate. Collage is integral to my drawing process, not only as a method for idea generation or compositional sketching, but as a structural and conceptual device within larger works in drawing and installation. I’m drawn to visual languages that carry personal and cultural associations, pressing them together to explore how the figure bears the weight of what is inherited. Across all media, my practice returns to the complexity of how identity is assembled, embodied, and seen.
Collage is both a form and a way of thinking. Collage is also a way of thinking through the body and the way it’s perceived, and framed. It lets me press together visual languages that are deeply familiar, often drawing from mass-produced stickers and crafting imagery that many people recognize, even if they can’t name it. That familiarity is important; it opens a door for viewers to enter the work with their own associations and memories. This blending creates friction and resonance, which helps me reveal what’s hidden in plain sight. Collage operates as a poetics of assembly—a way to build form while questioning how that form came to be.
Collage on Paper
53 × 60 in.
What sets collage apart is its willingness to show its seams. It’s not about illusion—it’s about presence. That’s especially important in my figurative work, where the layering of materials becomes part of how the body is read. Collage lets me complicate surface, shape, and scale in ways that drawing alone doesn’t always allow. It holds contradiction: fragmentation and cohesion, familiarity and estrangement.
The figure is the constant—everything else moves around it. My work asks how bodies carry inheritance, how memory lives not just in the mind but in form. Themes like lineage, cultural compression, and domestic architecture reappear in different ways. Landscape has entered my work over the last eight years, not as territory or landownership, but as a space the figure moves through, is shaped by, or resists.
Collage allows me to construct the figure out of multiple times and textures. The layering of commercial imagery with personal archives, or of ornament with anatomy, makes visible the complex nature of identity. I’m interested in what happens when the figure is surrounded by pieces that shouldn’t fit together, but create something that looks cohesive. That dissonance feels honest to how we experience memory and inheritance.
Graphite and Collage on Paper, 30 x 22 in.
Collage on Paper, 20 x 11 in.
Collage has long been a critical tool for Black artists—a way to construct presence out of what’s been excluded or erased. I see myself in that lineage, especially in how I use collage to both build and add complexity in what surrounds the figure. Artists like Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and Lorna Simpson showed how fragments can hold authority, ambiguity, and play. Today, many contemporary Black artists are expanding collage beyond material technique—turning it into a language of cultural assembly. That’s where I locate myself: in a tradition that honors fragmentation as a source of depth.
Graphite, Gouache, and Collage on Paper
90 × 44 in.
The past is something embedded in the figure itself. Through collage, I work with personal references, historical reproductions, and anonymous images, repositioning them to reframe what we think we know. I’m not illustrating history—I’m testing how it lives in posture, repetition, and fragmentation. The past, in my work, is not fixed; it’s active, assembled, and always under revision and interpretation.
My process is anchored in drawing and built through accumulation. I often begin with sketches of the figure, then test different materials and textures against those forms. I move pieces around, letting proximity and dissonance guide the structure. Collage helps me disrupt the figure just enough to suggest that identity is never static.
I select materials for their associations with personal memories and cultural familiarity—things like mass-produced crafting stickers, wallpaper, or posters. I often draw the figure first, then build collage elements around or within it, using them to reconfigure scale, gesture, or implied space. I’ve learned to trust the moments of tension where the materials don’t behave.
Collage on Paper
About the Artist
Zoë Charlton is a Baltimore-based artist whose work examines the cultural narratives embedded in everyday and symbolic objects. Her studio practice—rooted in figure drawing and extending into collage, animation, sculpture, and installation.
Charlton earned her BFA and MFA from Florida State University and completed her MFA at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Delaware Contemporary, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Harvey B. Gantt Center, the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Poland, and Haas & Fischer Gallery in Switzerland. She has participated in residencies at Artpace, the Skowhegan School of Painting, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Ucross Foundation, and the Creative Alliance.
Charlton’s interest in collective and interdisciplinary research led her to co-found two initiatives: ‘sindikit (2016–2022), a collaborative art project that supported dialogues across gender, sexuality, race, and economies; and Kindred Creative Residence + Agro-ForesT (CRAFT; 2022–2023), a BIPOC LGBTQIA+-led collective integrating creative practice, farming, and activism in rural Vermont. She also co-edited Out of Place: Artists, Pedagogy, and Purpose (Punctum Books, 2021), a collection of essays reflecting on how artists connect their practices to teaching.
Guest Curator
Collage has been at the forefront of my world since 2020, when I started an Instagram account, Black Collagists. This account has expanded into an international platform for highlighting the work of Black diasporic artists who incorporate collage aesthetics into their artmaking practice, thereby contributing to the global recognition of Black collage art.
As a curator, a writer, and a lover of art, it is my sincere hope that because of this work, future generations Black collage artists of the past and present will all receive due recognition for their generous, genius, and expansive creative practices. I believe that black collage is a shared visual language, a global network – a collage – of black diasporic creators in community. It is the embodiment of black creative expression, and I am privileged to witness it.
Through my work, I aim to ensure that the future of Black collagists and Black collage-making is canonized and historicized through dynamic curatorial projects, reaching and inspiring a global audience.
I posit that Black collage is the most representative genre of 21st-century Black cultural production. My work is an attempt to document that for future generations and offer a resource for anyone who wants to learn more about the contemporary realm, the visual continuum of Black collage art.
– Teri Henderson
Teri Henderson is a Baltimore-based independent curator and the Arts and Culture Editor of Baltimore Beat. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications. Henderson's previous roles include staff writer for BmoreArt, gallery coordinator for Connect + Collect, and board member of Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for The Arts.
Henderson was a 2020 Momus Emerging Critics Resident, a 2024 Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellow, and a 2024 Maynard Institute for Journalism Education Fellow. In 2024, Baltimore Magazine named her a GameChanger for her role as a leading voice in Baltimore’s creative community.
For Your Viewing Pleasure
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
SHEFON N. TAYLOR (b.1988) is a multidisciplinary artist, archivist, and collagist whose work explores the notions of re-memory, the shaping of Black interiority, and her own intimate pursuit of belonging. She is an artist in residence at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.
RASHID JOHNSON (b.1977) is a contemporary artist whose work spans media and explores themes of art history, collective memory and identity, personal native, literature, belonging, materiality, and Black popular culture.
DERRICK ADAMS (b. 1970) celebrates and expands the dialogue around contemporary Black life and culture through scenes of normalcy and perseverance. Adams has developed an iconography of joy, leisure, and the pursuit of happiness with a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses paintings, sculptures, collages, performances, videos, and public projects.
SHAN WALLACE (b. 1991) is a nomadic award-winning interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and image-maker, from Baltimore, MD. Wallace utilizes a range of mediums to weave narratives and imagine new stories. Rooted in image-making techniques such as photography, film, and collage, as well as in situ installations, these mediums serve as the foundation of her artistic practice.
JESSICA WHITTINGHAM is a multidisciplinary artist who creates analog collages emphasizing Black beauty. She aims to show the beauty of Black people by using whimsical scenes, nature, gold accents, vibrant colors and patterns, and contrasting black-and-white photos. Her work seeks to highlight old Bahamas in a way that differs from colonialism and shines a light on the people who are the foundation of modern Bahamas.
HELINA METAFERIA is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, sculpture, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work incorporates archival research, embodied practices, and dialogical studies, supporting overlooked narratives of intersectional identities.
TODD GRAY (b. 1954) works in photography, performance and sculpture. Gray works between Los Angeles and Ghana, where he explores the diasporic dislocations and cultural connections which link Western hegemony with West Africa.
Out and About
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
▼ READ
Louie Edison – It's Nice That
The artist’s collages have a raw and gritty energy, but on closer inspection, they are delicate and tactile – revealing a meditation on time, history, and the character behind material objects.
▼ READ
Black Collagists: The Book by Teri Henderson
A landmark publication celebrating the work of over 50 contemporary Black collage artists from around the world. This powerful survey highlights artists who cut and paste to explore identity, memory, resistance, and Black futures—charting a dynamic visual lineage that has long been overlooked.
▼ LISTEN
Bread by The Alchemist
This album feels like eating a croissant in a funeral home. It’s rich, weirdly delicate, and kind of haunted in a beautiful way. The beats are musty and cinematic, like they were pulled from the floor of a thrift store VHS bin.
