Found images, hosiery, and acrylic on canvas
16 x 20 in.
Christina M. Tapper
Christina M. Tapper’s collages live in the space between tenderness and tension, layering netting, lace, and found photographs. Handwritten fragments and soft materials hold space for memory and intimacy. Her compositions are subtle and made with care—not to revise history, but to reframe it. What emerges is a reorientation that centers Black womanhood as powerful, enduring, and enigmatic.
In the Words of the Artist
Photography by the artist, found images, and vintage postcards on archival paper
11 x 14 in.
I'm fascinated by transformation, particularly the metamorphosis between our past, present, and future selves. I create figurative collages, primarily centering Black women, that explore the beauty and complexity of becoming and belonging. My experience as a professional journalist informs my approach to the stories, inquiries, and aesthetics in my hand-cut and mixed media collages. Using vintage and contemporary images, found materials, and personal photographs, I make connections between identity and place, while examining how impermanence and choice shape our understanding of who we are.
My journalistic instincts inform my visual storytelling in the ability to assemble, construct, and edit a story, usually through questions: What’s the angle? What are the key details and the context to help tell the story? What’s the truth of it? With collage, the questions suffice. I can wrestle with an idea without the requirement of an answer, or the overwhelm of searching for finality. There’s freedom in that.
Working in podcast content production, my focus goes beyond how a story sounds. Given the intimacy of audio, I also prioritize how a podcast makes listeners feel, which is very much a part of my collage practice. I think a lot about resonance across all of my work. It’s a significant part in building connections with readers, listeners, and with folks who encounter my visual art.
Found images, handmade paper, mesh, acrylic, and steeped tea bag on canvas
12 x 24 in.
Collage is a way to honor complexity. It’s inherently imperfect, which allows the work to exhale amid the human expectations of tidy conclusions. I appreciate collage for its whim and intimacy, where stories and meaning can lie somewhere between mess and miracle. The tactility of cutting, tearing, arranging, contrasting, and pasting materials into layered compositions can signify both a reflection and a reinvention. Collage, for me, is an intuitive and fluid relationship between hand and heart, and offers a chance at renewal.
I’m currently working on an evolving body of work focused on the act of filtering, during my summer artist residency at ArtCrawl Harlem on Governors Island. I’m reflecting on how filtering, either by choice or imposition, influences how Black women move in the world, how we see ourselves, and how we are seen by others. The permeable materials I use, like mosquito net, tea bags, and hosiery, carry their own histories of protection, extraction, and respectability politics. So the work is showing me how filtering is both a tool of preservation and a site of loss. It’s an interesting tension to sit with when I think about the intricacies of identity formation and what it means to belong.
Photography by the artist, found images, vintage postcard, and handmade papers on archival paper
18 x 24 in.
Found images, vintage postcard, ogura lace paper, handmade paper, and organza ribbon on archival paper
14 x 17 in.
Hands and silhouettes often appear in my collages to reflect the making, the shaping, and the inner worlds of an evolving life. The anonymity found in much of my art is deliberate. It’s an invitation, offering Black women the room to insert themselves into the work. The absence of specific features becomes a presence that can hold multiple stories and reflections.
I work with contemporary and historic images of Black women, the natural world, and architecture, vintage postcards, handmade papers, and my own personal photographs. Most recently, I’ve been experimenting with permeable materials like tea bags, mesh, and hosiery.
My collage practice is a continuum of all the other work I do. It offers me the freedom to break free from rules and pushes me to expand my understanding of storytelling and the potential of material.
Kerry James Marshall said it best during an interview with Art21, “I do a lot of different things, but I don’t find any of them incompatible. Because they all sort of reinforce each other… Either I’m working with a set of conventions that have already been established, or I’m working against a set of conventions that have already been established.” That’s how I feel.
Found images and vintage postcards on archival paper
11 x 14 in.
Found images, gold metallic leaf flakes, and vintage postcard on archival paper
14 x 17 in.
About the Artist
Christina M. Tapper is a multidisciplinary storyteller whose work spans journalism, audio, and collage. Based in Harlem, she is an award-winning journalist, editor, podcast consultant, and producer who has held key leadership roles as Executive Producer at Spotify Studios and Head of Content at The Unbothered Network, where she led the creative production of shows like Jemele Hill is Unbothered, earning two NAACP Image Awards in 2022. She also created the network’s first original podcast, Sanctified, and helped acquire The Black Girl Bravado as a Spotify exclusive.
A former Pulitzer Prize juror for audio reporting, Christina was deputy editor at ZORA, led magazine editorial at Bleacher Report, and began her career at People magazine, with bylines in Essence, ESPN The Magazine, InStyle, and more. As an artist, she constructs hand-cut collages that center Black women and girls, exploring themes of transformation, identity, and belonging. Christina is also a founding board member of Achievers Early College Prep, a STEAM charter school committed to expanding access to careers in tech and the arts. A two-time marathoner and self-proclaimed adventurer, her comforts include Sade on vinyl, Penny Hardaway highlights, libraries, and bougainvillea sightings.
For Your Viewing Pleasure
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
baaba is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose collage practice channels memory, grief, and resistance into visual language.
NIA ANDINO is a NY-born visual artist, poet, and ancestral researcher inspired by sankofa to pay homage to the beauty and strength of her Afro-Boricua, USVI, and African American roots.
SAMUEL LEVI JONES creates minimalist abstractions—paintings, objects, and installations—from deconstructed art, law, medical, and history books. These painterly compositions on canvas are comprised of desecrated book covers sewn together into collage-like patterns, and infused with swathes of pulp, while loose threads and weathered cardboard binding reveal the process of deconstruction.
TYLER CHRISTOPHER BROWN is an artist living and working between Los Angeles and New York. He received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2022 and his BFA from Hunter College in 2019.
CLOTILDE JIMÉNEZ (born 1990) is a multi disciplinary American artist who works with ceramics, collage, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. His work's common themes include blackness, gender, masculinity, and sexuality.
Out and About
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
▼ READ
The Rose at CPW - Wallpaper*
This exhibition examines the work of over 50 artists using collage as a feminist practice. Show is up until August 31st at the Center for Photography in Kingston, New York. Featuring the work of K8 Hardy, Leslie Hewitt, Sheree Hovsepian
and Jessica Jackson Hutchins, among others.
▼ ATTEND
Contemporary Collage Magazine Live
September 19th, 2025
This two-day event celebrates collage through talks, workshops, and community gatherings. The event features a curated lineup of artists, curators, and publishers. It’s a rare chance to connect in person with the global collage community, exchange ideas, and explore the evolving language of collage.
▼ LISTEN
Morning After EP by kemt
This tightly curated suite of dusty house cuts, steeped in analog warmth, is tailored for the twilight hours. Nodding to 90s French touch and early deep house, each track loops with elegance, balancing euphoria and restraint. It’s dance music for the comedown, emotive, unhurried, and quietly hypnotic.
