I’ve been making handmade collages for over 30 years.

I began by collaging mail-art-style postcards and sending them to friends back in the late 80s. For the last dozen or so years, I have been creating similar postcard collages for a book-arts project, The Life & Times of American Crow.

In the end, I've created 200+ collages in the persona of Linus Grey (aka American Crow). It wasn’t until I curated a show of Ray Johnson’s early collages for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center that I began to study the form’s history more thoroughly. Gradually, my work began to transform—getting bigger, becoming more abstract, and utilizing different materials. 

The thirteen pieces in this virtual gallery were all made in the last four or five years.

The abstract pieces were done as a series simultaneously as the “damsels in distress” series. Two of the abstract pieces work in figures and symbols and approach tentatively the themes of racism and white privilege.

The “Damsels” series explores the male gaze and attempts to push into the stereotypes so often placed onto women by men like me. My hope here is to exaggerate and distort these prescribed roles in such a way as to render them ridiculous. 

“Extinction” is the largest work I’ve made to date—roughly 4 feet long by 2 feet tall. It uses a Beehive Collective poster as a base and borrows from an old 60s-era science book on extinct animals, as well as images from old art books, LIFE magazines, and dime-store postcards. I also used colored paper, white-out, black magic marker, and onion-skin typing paper.

If you’d like to find out more about my pieces: