Arts and Letters

Lucy Sante (b. 1954; Verviers, Belgium) has been making collages since her teenage years in New Jersey, a practice she has sustained alongside her prolific writing career. After moving to New York, she worked at the Strand Bookstore, where she acquired source material that would fuel her collage work for decades. In the late 1970s, she created collaged fliers for The Del-Byzanteens, a band fronted by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and other groups in downtown New York. One collage from this formative period opens the exhibition.

Sante’s dual engagement with found imagery and critical writing appears in Evidence (1992) and Folk Photography (2009), books that examine collections of vernacular photography with the same exacting attention she brings to her collages. Her own archive of American photo postcards—the subject of Folk Photography—directly informs her collage practice; several works in this exhibition incorporate printed postcards, whose damage and patina make them less desirable for traditional collectors but add value and visual interest for Sante. A series of imagined covers for science fiction books incorporates her grandparents’ lotto cards. Her broader collection of materials spans magazines and printed ephemera from the nineteenth century through the 1950s.

Informed by deep knowledge of a tradition that extends from early modernist experimenters to postwar American artists, Sante describes her collages as “tightly held knots of ambiguity, like the best poems”—works that resist easy unraveling while inviting sustained attention. This exhibition, Knots, presents collages made over the last five years, along with one early work from the late 1970s, installed in our Library alongside books by and about Arts and Letters members.

Sante’s essay, “Knots,” accompanies the exhibition.

On Saturday, April 18th, Sante invites Leor Miller to perform a concert in the Library; Sante will also read from her new book. Details and reservations here.

Knots is organized by Kristin Poor, Curator.

Major support for contemporary exhibitions at Arts and Letters is provided by Patrick Collins.

Arts and Letters exhibitions are also made possible by the Childe Hassam Fund, Eugene Speicher Fund, and Huntington Exhibition and Museum Fund, and by members of Arts and Letters.