Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents Bethany Collins: Years, an exhibition of recent work by the artist that maps the interconnection between loss and identity. Building on Collins’s first exhibition with the Gallery in 2023, this focused presentation foregrounds her Years series—black, blind embossed prints of public notices placed by formerly enslaved individuals seeking loved ones.  

The black paper used in these works obfuscates the notices’ text, and, by extension, the missing family they describe. In this way, the dark, textured surfaces of prints like Years, 1865 (The Black Republican) (2023) force viewers to grapple with illegibility and the unknown—that which remains lost. Imbuing words with absence, Collins’s Years transforms the act of reading into endless searching—a metamorphosis that echoes the subtext of the notices, themselves, as well as the actions of the men and women who first placed them.



Literalizing the connection between language and loss, the 2023 artist book The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Hymnal physically excises paper from its binding until all that remains is, in the artist’s words, “the dust of language.” The book collates one hundred different versions of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a patriotic Union song written in the midst of the American Civil War, lasering out the shared score and leaving a charred corpus to past (in)cohesion. “[Erasure] makes me feel I can control a text that feels out of my hands,” Collins explains. “I feel a physical mastering of language. By deciding what’s legible, I’m dragging out the meaning already there.” As such, Collins’s Southern Review turns to erasure as a method for revealing meaning. Using charcoal to obscure the text of the venerable literary journal, the artist translates the language of redaction into a formalist play of black and white—a gesture that makes visible the ways in which race is embedded in its pages.

Collins ultimately uses language—and its absence—as a charged lens through which to critically examine history, uncovering hidden structures and identities. Her works collapse past and present, fracturing texts to rewrite American narratives. Collins concludes, “… struggling with the duality of language—its potential and inevitable failure to make sense of the world—remains the basis for my making.”