Foreman anchored the exhibit with works by Suzi Gablik and Karl Mann that Foreman said he had in mind including from the earliest stage of his thinking about the show. Gablik, a collagist and painter who now lives and teaches in Blacksburg, Va., is probably more widely known for her work as an art critic. She attended North Carolina’s Black Mountain College in the 1950s and has long been associated with prominent visual artists identified with abstract expressionism and subsequent art movements.

Mann, a self-taught collagist and assemblage artist from New York, is of the same earlier generation as Gablik and has been active as an artist for half his life. Foreman said that he sees their works in the exhibit as a kind of bridge between the modernist works shown in “The Omnipotent Dream” and the postmodern sensibility reflected in “Sum of the Parts.” Mann is represented in the show by recent assemblages, while Gablik’s collages date from the 1970s.

Also dating from the 1970s are the exhibit’s works by the late Rick Horton (1954-1990) of Concord – intimately scaled collages composed entirely of typographic fragments. Foreman said that he learned of Horton’s work in the process of seeking out a North Carolina artist who had been engaged in collage or assemblage during the 1970s and 80s. Foreman said that he also liked the idea of including Horton’s collages because of their relationship to those of pioneer collagist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948).

Another aim that Foreman said he had in organizing the show was to draw a connection between collage and quiltmaking, a local and regional tradition that also has a basis in pulling things together from different sources. With this connection in mind, he included tow of Emily Richardson’s quilted abstract fabric pieces and tow of Joan Schulze’s “collage quilts”, in which fragments of popular photographic imagery and texts are attached to scraps of cloth sewn together in loose patchwork grids.

Foreman said that he also decided early on to exhibit collages or assemblages by artists from all regions of the United States and at least one artist from outside the country. The latter bill is filled by Dale Copeland, who lives in Puniho, New Zealand – a country in which foreman said he was surprised to find a hotbed of contemporary assemblage artists, many of whom, like Copeland, draw inspiration from the work of American assemblage pioneer, Joseph Cornell (1903-1972).

“The very act of living today is often dynamic and continuously evolutionary,” Foreman said. “Collage and assemblage can speak to this state of affairs by either deconstructing and rearranging things in a way that expresses an overwhelming diversity, or by reconstructing things into new narratives.”

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