Bethany Collins

Bethany Collins (born 1984 Montgomery, Alabama) is an American artist. She received her Bachelor of the Arts degree from the University of Alabama in 2007, and her Master of Fine Arts degree from Georgia State University in 2012. Her work primarily engages the relationship between race and language, as her main medium include dictionaries, journals, encyclopedias, newspapers, etc.

In her thesis, Collins explains how growing up biracial in the south sparked her initial desire to work with definitions and old texts, in order to discover their underlying meanings. She recounts people always assuming that she and her family were unrelated, and how that lead to the pressure to define her own racial identity, because others couldn't easily fit her into the racial binary. She describes her work as "yet another attempt to navigate the black/white paradigm of race in the American South".

Collins also grew up in a Presbyterian church which would later have great influence over her work. Her church would hold 72 hour bible readings, where the children would sign up for a time slot and continue reading until the next reader showed up to relieve them. The beauty of this to her, was that often no one was in the church to hear them read, "a sacred text was still worthy of being read back into the world, even when no one was listening". That idea carried into her current performance art style.

Career and exhibitions Collins established and became well known for the purpose of her work fairly early on, every article featuring her essentially describes her as "a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptually driven work is fueled by a critical exploration of how race and language interact." She is known for how physically involved her creative process in, working until it hurts too much to continue going. Her style is unique, and she has received significant recognition and acknowledgement for it.

She was included in the 2019 traveling exhibition Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art. She contributed an installation America: A Hymnal to the 2021 exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.

Collins work, The Aeneid 1876 /1990 (2022), was include in the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) 60th anniversary Art Show in the fall of 2022.

In late 2022 through early 2023, Collins's work was included in a group exhibit at The Print Center of New York, "Visual Record: The Materiality of Sound in Print," curated by Elleree Erdos.

Her work is in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem where she was the Artist-in-Residence from 2013 through 2014.

Works

White Noise (2010) Series Including the works: "Don't You Think That's a Little Elitist?", 2010, "Maybe You Should Make It Into a Slaveship", 2010, "Do People Ever Think You're White?" III, 2011, "It Was So Much More Intellectual Before You Told Me That", 2011, "(Unrelated)", 2012, "I Wish I Was Black", 2012, and "(Unrelated)", 2012 This series consists of differing translations of Odyssey, erased to only leave one sentence legible in each, all presented side by side. In this body of work, Collins erased each line by hand using her own saliva. Each phrase comes from the moment in the epic when Odysseus finds himself abandoned onshore but is unable to recognize his homeland. The Star Spangled Banner: A Hymnal (2020) This series consists of three charcoal and acrylic paintings, each featuring lyrics from different versions of The Star-Spangled Banner. This series seeks to bring to light the various forgotten lyrics of past versions of the national anthem. Collins researched 100 different versions of the national anthem, binding each anthem variation into a single book, and used a laser to cut out each musical note. The work itself is a retelling of American history, from varying perspectives, each trying to define its own version of what it means to be American. Collins includes versions that have been used to support different political causes, including the Confederacy, all the way up to the Women's Suffrage movement. In an article from The Art Newspaper, Collins describes this series as something that "challenges the notion of a cohesive American Identity". In an article from Patron gallery, these works are analyzed as "a speculative narrative arc analogous to our national political climate, one that denotes a people lost at sea."