Nov 2, 2024

Fragmentary Forms

A New History of Collage

Freya Gowrley

Hosted by Kendall Dinniene

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Summary

Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage (Princeton UP, 2024) is a beautifully illustrated global history of collage from the origins of paper to today.

While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Subsequent forms occurred in twelfth-century Japan with illuminated manuscripts that combined calligraphic poetry with torn colored papers. In early modern Europe, collage was used to document and organize herbaria, plant specimens, and other systems of knowledge. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collage became firmly associated with the expression of intimate relations and familial affections. Fragmentary Forms offers a new, global perspective on one of the world's oldest and most enduring means of cultural expression, tracing the rich history of collage from its ancient origins to its uses today as a powerful tool for storytelling and explorations of identity.

Presenting an expansive approach to collage and the history of art, Freya Gowrley explores what happens when overlapping fragmentary forms are in conversation with one another. She looks at everything from volumes of pilgrims' religious relics and Victorian seaweed albums to modernist papiers collés by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and quilts by Faith Ringgold exploring African-American identity. Gowrley examines the work of anonymous and unknown artists whose names have been lost to history, either by accident or through exclusion. Featuring hundreds of beautiful images, Fragmentary Forms demonstrates how the use of found objects is an important characteristic of this unique art form and shows how collage is an inclusive medium that has given voice to marginalized communities and artists across centuries and cultures.

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Kendall Dinniene

Kendall Dinniene is a PhD candidate in English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their dissertation excavates how American cultural production complicates and transforms dominant notions of fatness, revealing how these notions are intertwined with and produce ideas about race as well as gender, sexuality, health, and national identity. Their work relies upon queer theory, Black feminist theory, and fat studies scholarship alongside literary criticism to argue that how we understand fatness is crucial to the way we understand (and make) our world. Kendall's scholarship has appeared in Fat Studies: A Journal of Body Weight and Society and is forthcoming in Ethnic Studies Review.

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