Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our first solo exhibition with Krista Franklin, any bright spark. Using handmade paper, found ledgers, text, collaged images from vintage magazines, and pulped album covers (among other materials) as a form of visual poetry – she is also a well-regarded published poet – Franklin’s work takes a haptic approach to archiving and inventorying personal and universal joy, beauty, pain, and transformation. Says Franklin: “Collage is an act of resistance. It is not only a thing to be made, but a way of making anything.” The show will open with a public reception on Friday, June 7, from 5 to 8pm, and will run through August 17, 2024. Western Exhibitions is located at 1709 W Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

The exhibition includes a salon-style wall of unframed collages, some of which riff on Franklin’s love of the biosphere, the amorphous, the natural world, and an enduring love of the Marvelous. Themes, ideas, visuals include: dreamscapes and landscapes; “the supernatural”; the natural world in its most exaggerated or fantastic forms; hybridity; journal pages, cut-ups, writing as submerged and subtext; layers; the legible and illegible. This wall is an unadulterated introduction to Franklin’s hands-on, textural approach to thinking and making.

Franklin is an image hunter. Drawing from personal and public archives and collected printed matter – most specifically vintage magazines from the 1950’s through the 70’s – Franklin moves between the past and present through deft manipulation of Black ephemera, photographic archives, and publications. Her paintings and collages drift between the physical and metaphysical worlds and the Fantastic, and reflect her interest in the collisions between cultures and spaces, real and imagined, ultimately turning collage into a way of seeing, focusing on what has been cut out and what has been pasted in. 

Exhibited for the first time, Franklin’s multi-media series of collaged paintings containing spiral, tornado-like gestures with brush, pencil or pen, reflect growing up in Dayton, Ohio where the threat of tornadoes is prevalent; her mother and sister are both survivors of separate severe weather encounters. The swirling gestures function as a record-keeping of familial and geographical memory. Franklin uses ledger paper as support for collages in another body of work. The ledgers, found in an old railroad yard and gifted to her by an artist in Iowa, function as a visual allusion to the inventorying and itemizing of human life during and after the transatlantic slave trade and all its attending histories and horrors. The titles of three of the works are borrowed lines from Katherine McKittrick’s book, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006), which also largely informs some of the visuality that takes shape in this series. She will also exhibit collages for the first time inspired by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s method of the cut-up, one of the writing processes she uses to write poems and lyric essays. 

Much of Franklin’s work centers Black music and culture, here boldly realized in her series “Heavy Rotation” on view in Gallery 2. “Music is the underscore for everything I do,” Franklin says, “It’s the pulse of everything I make and write.” This series, started in 2014, consists primarily of works in handmade paper formed from pulped and deconstructed album covers. The paper itself is the artwork, not just a substrate for collage/drawing/painting, often with graphics from the cover art embedded or barely visible. Paradoxically, for work created from musical artifacts, the pieces in this series are about visual quietude. “Heavy Rotation” is Franklin’s attempt to discover if sound and memory can be visually or otherwise “captured.”

Krista Franklin (b. 1970) creates books, poetry, collages, handmade paper, installations, murals, performances, sound works, sculptures, and lectures. She is the author of Solo(s)(University of Chicago Press, 2022), Too Much Midnight (Haymarket Books, 2020), the artist book Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018), and the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012). She is a recipient of the Helen and Tim Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her solo shows include Solo(s) at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, which traveled to Colorado College; The Poetry Foundation in Chicago; and the Chicago Cultural Center, among others. She’s been included in group shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Konsthall C, Stockholm, Sweden; the Oakland Museum of California, CA; the Columbia Museum of Art, South Carolina; The Carnegie, Covington, KY; as set dressing for national television shows; and in Chicago at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Stony Island Arts Bank, National Museum of Mexican Art, Gallery 400, Hyde Park Art Center, Produce Model and RUSCHWOMAN. She has been published in Poetry, Black Camera, The Offing, Vinyl, and in several anthologies and artist books. Franklin received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2013. She lives and works in Chicago.