There is a particular kind of courage in the act of cutting something up. To take a printed photograph, a scrap of fabric, a sheet of newsprint, a piece of wood, and to decide that it does not belong where it was — that it belongs somewhere else, next to something it has never met — is to assert that meaning is not fixed. It can be rearranged. It can be rebuilt.
That assertion is the subject of Assembled: Collage, Assemblage and Mixed Media, an exhibition on view at Mechanical Hall on the University of Delaware campus in Newark. The show is free and open to the public, running from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and it draws on one of the university's collection strengths: works that are made not by a single continuous gesture but by accumulation, juxtaposition, and transformation.
The exhibition's framing is, in effect, a small glossary. Collage, the show notes, is an artistic composition made by affixing materials such as paper, fabric, or wood onto a surface. Assemblage is its three-dimensional cousin, an artistic composition created by combining found objects and disparate materials such as metal, paper, or stone. Mixed media is the umbrella approach, combining two or more methods — painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, photography — within a single work. Together these techniques challenge the boundaries of traditional or rigid categories of art, incorporating found objects or repurposed imagery alongside hand-applied materials. They create new compositions and new meanings, and they invite reflection on questions of authorship.
That last point is not incidental. When an artist glues a photograph into a painting, whose image is it? When a sculptor welds together a discarded gear and a length of pipe, who made the object, and who made the art? The exhibition leans into these questions rather than resolving them, presenting compositions that bring together found objects and repurposed imagery with hand-rendered marks, creating layered works that engage memory and meaning.
The roster is substantial. The installation includes works long used in teaching, among them pieces by David Driskell and Sam Gilliam, alongside works that have not been exhibited in recent years. It also introduces recent acquisitions, including collages by Phoebe Beasley.
David Driskell, who died in 2020 at 88, is the anchor of that group, and not only as a maker of images. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1931, he became one of the world's leading authorities on African-American art, a scholar and curator who helped establish the field as a distinct area of study. His 1976 exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art was a landmark. He held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, where the David C. Driskell Center for the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora is named in his honor. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2000. That a Driskell work sits in a teaching collection in Newark, Delaware — used, as the exhibition puts it, in instruction — is a quiet statement about how the field he built has been carried forward.
Sam Gilliam, who died in 2022, also at 88, took a different route to the same destabilizing instinct. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and raised in Kentucky, he spent his adult life in Washington, D.C., where he was eventually described as the dean of the city's arts community. He came up with the Washington Color School, a group that developed abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s, but he moved past the group's core aesthetic of flat fields of color in the mid-1960s by introducing both process and sculptural elements into his paintings. His draped canvases — paintings unstapled from their stretchers and hung like fabric — made the physical object of the painting itself a variable, something that could be rearranged in space. It is not collage in the literal sense of glued paper, but it is the same argument: that a work of art can be assembled rather than simply composed.
Phoebe Beasley, born in Cleveland in 1943, is a collage artist whose biography carries its own rebuke to rigid categories. A high school guidance counselor told her she should not major in art because there was, in the counselor's words, no such thing as an African-American artist. Beasley went on to become the only artist whose work has been awarded the Presidential Seal under two different U.S. presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. She was the first African-American woman to serve as president of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and she was the official artist of the 1987 and 2000 Los Angeles Marathons. Her collages in this exhibition are recent acquisitions — work the university has chosen to bring into a collection that already holds Driskell and Gilliam.
The other recent additions extend the range further. John Digby is a British-born collage artist whose work has long explored the surreal possibilities of cut paper. Theodore A. Harris is a Philadelphia-based collagist and poet whose pieces frequently incorporate news imagery and text, pressing the political into the aesthetic. Carol Cole, represented here by an assemblage, works in three dimensions, where the found object becomes structure rather than surface.
What holds the show together is not a single style but a method. Each of these artists, in different ways, refuses the premise that a work of art must be made from scratch. They begin instead with what already exists — an image, an object, a fragment of the world — and they recombine it. The exhibition's own description puts it plainly: these are visual exchanges between the handmade and the sourced, and they invite close looking and reflection on how artists construct new narratives from existing materials.
The setting suits the subject. Mechanical Hall is a historic building on the University of Delaware campus, and the exhibition is presented as part of the university's Special Collections and Museums, which merged in recent years to bring the institution's archives and its galleries under one roof. The show is intended for students, faculty, staff, and the broader public, and it supports critical inquiry while emphasizing the continued relevance of experimental practices in modern and contemporary art. That it is free, with no ticketing barrier, matters: this is a teaching exhibition in the best sense, one that assumes an audience of curious people rather than credentialed ones.
There is something fitting, too, about the timing. Collage and assemblage are often described as the quintessential modern techniques — born of the newspaper, the photograph, the manufactured object, the throwaway. They are the art of the age of mechanical reproduction, and of the age after it. In an era when images are endlessly copied, cropped, remixed, and reposted, the questions these artists raised decades ago about authorship and originality have only become more urgent. Assembled does not answer them. It puts them on the wall, in layers, and asks the viewer to look closely enough to see how the layers were made.
The exhibition runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Mechanical Hall, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware. Admission is free.