Saying Yes to Everything

This exhibition looks at the use of collage in American art since the 1960s, primarily by artists working in Los Angeles and New York. The exhibition features artists who use found images, objects, and text in collages, creating innovative compositions by using the accumulation, isolation, and repetition in tandem with color, shape, and mixed mediums to explore the formal potential of the technique while engaging varying degrees of cultural critique.

Saying Yes to Everything presents collage as both a unifying and individuating strategy, bringing together artists who advance diverse styles and who propose a variety of positions. The exhibition is intended to be historical in scope, underscoring the importance of collage over time and drawing out relationships between art made by three generations of artists working from the 1960s into the present, including Mike Cloud, Meg Cranston, Al Hansen, Richard Hawkins, Robert Heinecken, Ray Johnson, David X. Levine, T. Kelly Mason, Erik Parker, Fay Ray, Amanda Ross-Ho, Alexis Smith, Frances Stark, Stan Vanderbeek, Ray Yoshida, and Brenna Youngblood. Far from being comprehensive, however, the exhibition is intended as a loose constellation of artists who share an affinity for re-arranging bits and pieces of the culture within new contexts, always with idiosyncratic beauty and wit.