Lindsey Brittain Collins

Artistically speaking, Lindsey Brittain Collins is an enigma. The New York-based painter received her MBA from Columbia University, but it was her time in business school that gave her the courage to pursue her love of art full time. Before graduation, the Virginia native enrolled in nighttime painting classes, wandering to the Parsons School of Design campus after dark, and as of today, one might say she’s come full circle. A recent MFA graduate—again at Columbia—Collins works across several mediums, from collage and sculpture to installation and other formats. Her work explores architecture (another career path she considered), economic structures, aesthetics, and more specifically, how these elements shape racial perceptions and urban environments. Confronting the erasure of Blackness and Black history, the artist has forged a path in exploring and reexamining the white gaze upon her work. 

 

Rooted in a blend of research and spontaneity, Collins finds inspiration in the things that captivate her as she simply exists in the world. Some of her earliest work, in concepts she still revisits, is a series featuring Nannie’s Grave or the burial site of a young girl who died in Georgetown just shy of her eighth birthday in 1856. Located outside of Washington, D.C., where the artist briefly lived after earning her business degree, the burial site was once a stop on the Underground Railroad. Steeped in historical narrative, there are nonetheless gaps in our collective knowledge, as Collins explains, no last names or death records, nor any information on Nannie’s life. Yet each time Collins returns to Nannie’s Grave, she finds new offerings: dolls, toys, laminated birthday cards, and other trinkets. 

 

To this day, the painter continues to explore Nannie’s legacy, as in the impactful Nannie’s Grave (2019), a 54 x 44-inch oil, acrylic, and cement on canvas work, where the artist depicts the child at a standstill—trapped, or perhaps suspended in space, her face at rest, eyes open and calm. Where do Black bodies come into play, Collins asks? How can a young girl about whom we know so little make such a significant impact? During quarantine, the artist made paintings of small figurines inspired by the same gravesite, and thus, a new and personal series based on the dolls left for Nannie. This same sense of intrigue guides Collins in all her work, from triptychs based on inkjet prints of her photographs—the architecturally striking Anguish Reaching into the Sky (2020), for instance—to a new and innovative series focused on Black students creating safe spaces in white institutions. Mainly based on her own experiences and that which most inspires her, Collins continues to approach the Black existence, contemporary and historical, through a critical lens. The artist’s work is research-based and emotive in equal measure, both conceptual and storied, broadly impactful in the way it sheds light on the people and places that are far too often overlooked.

Lindsey Brittain Collins: I was born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area and then moved to Princeton, New Jersey when I was 11. I went to undergraduate at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, and when I graduated, I moved to New York City and have been here ever since.

 

Economics and Sociology with a minor in Latin American studies.

 

Yes, I did my MBA at Columbia. I’ve always had an interest in business and was on a very different career path, but it was my time in business school that made me realize that what I was studying was just an interest and not what I wanted to do as a career. 

 

Yeah… the thing is I've always been an artist. I've always loved art and made art, and I think being in business school gave me the courage to pursue a career as an artist. While I was in business school, after my first semester, I enrolled in painting classes at Parsons. I was balancing business school during the day and painting at night because I didn't have any formal training prior to that.  I was mostly self-taught, and painting was something I was doing as a hobby. Then, after graduating from business school, I pursued art full-time.

I took time off. I was making and selling art while building my portfolio. But the idea of going back to graduate school was in the back of my mind.

 

I was actually making a lot of figurative work. I was interested in the Black body. I’ve always been interested in telling stories of Blackness and Black history, so I was making figurative and representational work up until my first semester here at Columbia. I started to think a lot about the gaze, both Black and white, in my work and what that meant for the Black bodies in my paintings.  

 

However, as the political climate started to intensify, I found that figurative work was becoming a bit exhausting for me. There were a lot of ideas that I wanted to express but I didn’t want to put that pressure on the figure. So, I slowly started to move into abstraction

 

Some of my earliest work, that I’m still doing today, is the Nannie’s Grave series. After business school, I moved down to D.C. for two years. While I was there, I was doing a lot of research on the Black history of Georgetown. Georgetown has a rich Black history and was about 45% Black during the late nineteenth century. Today, Georgetown is a mostly white, very affluent neighborhood with a large focus on upscale retail. 

 

 

Funny you say that because, at one point, I wanted to be both an architect and an artist. But the more I learned about architecture, the more I felt that it was too rigid and structured for me. It didn’t allow the same freedom as art making. All the same, I’ve always been fascinated with architecture, design, and space. I love studying how buildings live in space, how bodies move through space, and how architecture impacts our experience in space. So I’m excited about incorporating that dimension in my work.

 

Yes, this is a triptych. I showed it together as one piece. It’s just not assembled as one piece right now. I wanted the panels to be rearrangeable. It’s called Anguish Reaching into the Sky.

 

This piece was actually inspired by a class I took while I was in business school called Social Impact Real Estate Investing, which was under the social impact arm of the business school. The professor was the managing director of a prominent investment bank, which owned a lot of property across the city. Our final assignment was to put together a residential deal for land that the bank owned in Harlem.

 

 

First, I build a composition. These are all inkjet prints of my photographs. I use the blue tape to hold them up as I’m moving them around, and then everything is fixed with glue followed by a layer of varnish.

 

No, a paint brush. I wanted it to feel painterly and the blue tape also has the mark of my hand that gives it that painterly touch.

 

This collage painting is about how Black students are able to create safe spaces within predominantly white institutions. After reading your curatorial statement, I thought a lot about ideas of prestige, privilege, and power and how those values are reinforced through the neo-classical architecture at colleges and universities across the country. 

 

Thinking about my own experience as a Black student in predominantly white institutions, there was a sense of non-acceptance from the white students. This piece is focused on my experience at UVA, at a time when there was a lot of racial tension on campus and in the surrounding Charlottesville community. 

 

Every year I was at UVA, there was a racial incident, whether it was violence, or racial slurs… I can go on and on. As Black students, we were not made to feel safe in these spaces. I was reflecting on my experience at UVA, which, despite those incidents, I still regard with fondness. While I was there it almost felt like I was at a HBCU (Historically Black College or University) within a PWI (Predominately White Institution) because our community was so close-knit. I thought a lot about how in the midst of the architecture of the university, we created spaces for ourselves that contributed to that sense of community. 

 

The piece celebrates how Black students are able to repurpose the architecture to better serve their needs as students and to create safe spaces to exist—to commune, be our authentic selves, experience joy, and display our culture. The BBS (Black Bus Stop), BET (Black Eating Time), Black parties at white fraternity and sorority houses, and the Tree House, were all examples of ways the Black students at UVA gave new function to existing architecture at the university. These memories were an important inspiration for the work.

 

I took the same approach with the work as I did for Anguish Reaching into the Sky. I went down to Charlottesville and photographed the university. I used those prints to build out the composition, and within the collage, I’m also embedding some ephemera and memories from my scrapbook from undergrad. Some are very positive memories from parties and funny flyers, and others are not so positive. I saved things like the news clipping from the assault of a Black student on the lawn or a list of all of the buildings and spaces that are named after white men who have a history associated with racism. So there’s a lot embedded within the collage. It’s also a reflection on personal memories, and the color choices reflect that. The spaces are both real and imaginary and are drawn from my memory of attending UVA many years ago. The very act of producing this work makes our spaces permanent and elevates the stories of Black students.

I’m presently focused on my thesis. This year was very disruptive, and our schedule is really out of whack and way behind. I’m taking the time to reflect on my work from the first-year show and it’s really impacting how I’m choosing to approach my thesis. Without the traditional timeline of having a break between these major milestones, it's really accelerated the speed at which I work. I typically work pretty slowly because my work is largely research-based and very conceptual. So, it’s a change of pace for me, but it’s good because it’s pushing me. 

 

I just presented a video at the Jewish Museum about the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, VA, where UVA is. The work challenges the place and purpose of confederate monuments in America.

 

The video was part of the “in-response” program at the Jewish museum. We had the opportunity to respond to the exhibit “We Fight to Build A Free World”, or a particular piece within the exhibit. I chose to respond to Jonathan Horowitz’s piece, which is a sculpture of the Robert E. Lee statue covered in a Black shroud. After the “Unite the Right Rally” in 2017, the city was trying to determine if they could legally take down the protected statue. As you can imagine, there were two strong opposing views. The happy medium was to cover the statue in a Black tarp until the city was able to make a decision.

 

My video response narrates my experience encountering the statue in Charlottesville. I expressed my reaction in a poem which is narrated over a video of text that I projected onto the statue in the gallery. This was my first time making a video, which was fun, and even though things were challenging because of Covid, the museum was amazing to work with and they let me go into the gallery when it was closed to shoot. 

 

What was really exciting was that the day I sent the final video off to the Jewish Museum, the Supreme court ruled that the Robert E. Lee statue could be taken down. So that was a huge win and I secretly felt that even though my video hadn’t been seen by anyone else yet, it was so powerful that it magically influenced the timing and the decision. Although the statue has yet to be taken down, I’m glad these kinds of changes are starting to take place.