Scholar, translator, and editor Brent Hayes Edwards was invited by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought to exhibit a series of collages he began work on as the COVID pandemic emerged in the US in early 2020. The project is called the Prevenance Suite, which you check out here.

Here is an excerpt from the website about the project and Edwards’ intentions:

For this online exhibition, a small series of his “quarantine collages” is interwoven with a series of poems composed for the occasion, adding new layers of implication and visual counterpoint. The texts suggest a theory of collage Edwards calls “prevenance”: a practice that seems to bend and reshape time in the way it recombines print artifacts from different historical sources and moments. At the same time, as collages themselves — poems comprised of fragmentary quotations clipped from a wide range of sources — the texts take that practice into another realm. Yet another medium emerges in the interstices between text and image with Edwards’s audio recordings of some of the texts (as well as some texts not provided visually) amplifying both the lyricism of the poems and the delicacy of the visual constructions. This suggest that for Edwards, the contrapuntal aesthetics of collage is above all a matter of achieving a certain sound.

What I find most interesting about what Edwards is doing here is the strategy of using collaged multisource texts to be in conversation with the visual collages themselves.

For black ekphrastic considerations, I do pause to ask: Are all the sourced texts from Black authors? Does it matter if they are not? Does the fact that these reconfigurations and “found” texts are re-assembled by Edwards make them now a “Black” text?

Go to the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought website and spend some time with this exhibition, Prevenance Suite.