“Phases,” Troy Montes-Michie. Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery
New York-based artist and El Paso, Texas, native Troy Montes-Michie is widely celebrated for his nuanced takes on Blackness, queerness and sexuality. Two of his collage-based works are now on display as part of the groundbreaking and wide-ranging Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage at Nashville’s Frist Art Museum. The exhibit closes at the end of the year.
We recently spoke with Montes-Michie by Zoom. Below read our interview, which has been edited for length.
In this show there are 56 artists, and it’s really a spectrum of collage, with pure collage on one side — there are Lorna Simpson pieces that are made from pages in Ebony and Jet. And then on the other end, there’s a mixed-media painting by Kerry James Marshall, and there’s Arthur Jafa’s “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” which works beautifully when you look at it through the lens of collage, and I think he would probably say his binders are a form of collage as well. Your work falls somewhere in the middle — you’ve spoken about appropriating images as excavating them from their history and giving them a new life, sort of anointing them with a new way of looking. I thought that was really a great way to consider the act of collaging.
There are different forms of using collage. For me, I’ve always been interested in redaction, and in the idea of disruption. Even in a subtle shift — it doesn’t have to be a big, grand gesture. The most subtle shift can still change the initial output of material. And so I kind of gravitated to that.
It seems like one of the ways you adjust or disrupt the images is to cover them up — I’m thinking of your work with nude models that you’ve put clothes on. It seems like you’re saying, “See? This body is still beautiful even when it’s not being sexualized.”
Yeah, I wanted to give the models a type of autonomy that would go beyond their placement as this fetish object. I was interested in their story. Oftentimes the people in these magazines are nameless, and they’re being chosen for their endowment or physicality. But I found myself more interested in the backgrounds, the lighting, the question of whether they just needed money.
“This street long. It real long,” Troy Montes-Michie. The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection. courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery
You have two works hanging in Multiplicity — “Phases” from 2020 and “This street long. It real long” from 2018. I’d love to deconstruct those with you.
With “This street long,” I had been approached about doing a piece about James Baldwin for a show. I found out that James Baldwin had written a children’s book — it’s called Little Man, Little Man. And so I bought a bunch of copies of the book, and the illustrations were super beautiful — this French illustrator, Yoran Cazac, I just loved his style. I started doing sketches, trying to imitate his gestures. That eventually led to this piece. So we use the actual book pages that got cut down and gridded, and then I mixed that with my usual materials, and everything kind of gets standard afterward. I collect different images, and I had this one of James Baldwin. So it became an homage to this writer who I’ve always looked up to — I’m just in awe when he speaks. His eloquence, his mind.
I made “Phases” during the pandemic. I’m somebody who always tries to learn from one body of work, and then I think of how to expand the story. I think about the work like book chapters. I’m not sure why that is — maybe it’s because I’m really invested in literature. But through those chapters, I started to piece things together. But 2020 was hard, because how does an artist make work during a global pandemic? Everything feels uncertain. I kind of started thinking more about constellations, and the moon and phases. And during that time period, I kind of wanted to loosen up a bit. I don’t like when work becomes too formulaic. So when I’m working, if I have one large collage or a couple, I always have them nearby just to see, so I don’t repeat. Like, maybe I have this inclination to always place something on the right side or the left side. So by saying what the past was, I’m able to figure out that present work. There are probably about four or five works that I made in 2020, and a lot of them came out of that. I did my first long zipper work then.
That’s interesting — I’ve been thinking a lot about how your works are sort of like novels, because you’re braiding together multiple stories and interweaving things. It’s like visually reading a novel, or a work of hybrid fiction. So the long pieces — the zipper pieces — work like reading a panel from left to right. That gives the work an additional implied narrative structure, or maybe a linear structure.
A lot of the panels in “Phases” are like a timeline. I thought about the panels like a timeline of different collage techniques. So with Multiplicity, I’m just excited to be included. These are some of my favorite artists that I’ve always been inspired by, especially Howardena Pindell and McArthur Binion, who are finally getting their due. It feels exciting to be included. It almost feels like a portrait, this family of collage artists.
