The artists included in NoBody Left Behind expand the possibilities of collage. Across painting, mixed media, assemblage, and sculptural approaches, they demonstrate that collage is not simply a formal technique: It is a broader way of constructing meaning.

The art works in the show utilize collage or traditional assemblage, yet move beyond the flat picture plane entirely, incorporating physical objects, layered textures, or materials that carry personal and historical associations. The gestures created by melding images together transform the artwork into something more than a static image: a space where memory, contradiction, and lived experience remain visible within the surface itself.

There’s an acute interest, here, in “femmage,” a term historically connected to collage and assemblage practices associated with women artists and domestic materials. Here, though, femmage is approached as an open and evolving framework rather than a fixed category. The exhibition does not attempt to define femininity through familiar visual shorthand or inherited expectations. Instead, it considers femininity as something expansive and often contradictory: a language, a strategy, a social condition, or a mode of perception that can exist both within gender and well beyond it.

In this context, femininity is not confined to softness or to delicacy, to decoration or submission. It can be forceful. It can be confrontational or fractured or humorous—it’s often all these things at once. It is always intimate. It can emerge through acts of layering and concealment, through disruption and improvisation, through gestures of repair, or through a refusal of coherence altogether. The works included in the exhibition challenge the idea that femininity must appear in recognizable or conventional forms. Of course femininity doesn’t have to be immediately apprehensible: encountered in the wild, in our day-to-day lives, it’s almost never so simple.

And so consequently, and quite importantly, the exhibition is not limited to artists who identify as women, nor does it suggest that femininity belongs exclusively to them.

Several artists in the exhibition incorporate found imagery or repurposed materials, emphasizing the ability of objects to carry history and emotional residue. Elsewhere, abstraction and layered mark-making create visual spaces that feel unstable, shifting, or unresolved. Across the exhibition, materials become active participants in the work rather than passive supports. Torn surfaces, accumulated textures, visible revisions, and physical interventions reveal processes of construction and reconstruction, suggesting that meaning itself is constantly being negotiated.

The exhibition also reflects a growing collapse of rigid distinctions between painting, collage, sculpture, and assemblage in contemporary art. Rather than operating within isolated categories, many of the works exist across multiple disciplines simultaneously. Paintings become sculptural; fragments become narrative; decorative gestures coexist with critique and disruption. This is, of course, the nature of femininity. It’s the nature of modernity, too.

By refusing fixed categories and inherited assumptions, NoBody Left Behind proposes a more expansive understanding of both collage and contemporary identity. Through their varied approaches, the artists in the exhibition create a layered dialogue about perception, material, and social expectation—one that embraces complexity while remaining deeply attentive to the possibilities of transformation within contemporary art.

—Justice Apple, Curator of, NoBody Left Behind September 2026