Bethany Collins (b. 1984) is a multidisciplinary American artist whose work explores the intersections of language, race, and identity. Using text as both medium and subject, Collins creates powerful, thought-provoking works that often involve erasure or alteration of texts. In her Erasure series, for example, she manipulates historical documents by systematically removing words to create compositions that confront the power dynamics embedded in language. Erasure, along with works like The Color of Law (2017), where she reworks pages from racially charged legal texts, reflects Collins’s interest in how language shapes and excludes, particularly in relation to race and history.
Collins’ work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, Alabama; Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama. Her work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, New York, among others. She has been recognized as an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the 3Arts Next Level Visual Arts Award (2024), Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence Prize (2023), Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2022), The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2015), and the Hudgens Prize (2015).
Exhibitions at GRAY include Retreat, 2014; Inquiry’s End, 2015; and GRAY at 60, 2023.
