It is the persistent question asked of artists but answered mostly by the ecosystems surrounding them: What do you call your work? Is it assemblage? Collage? Found sculpture? Is it a tapestry? You call that a painting?

Lovie Olivia, a self-described autodidact, calls it work. Beauty as a Method, Olivia’s solo show at Tinney Contemporary, is curated by Michael J. Ewing, and is concurrent with the Frist Art Museum’s Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which includes four of Olivia’s paper-, ephemera-, scrap- and vellum-based works. Those works are, for lack of a better word, collage, but the Tinney show puts Olivia’s interdisciplinary practice on display — it includes a cross-examination of the artist’s vibrant collage works as well as her color-filled paintings. 

The paintings in the Tinney space are modestly scaled. Ewing organizes these more traditionally presented paintings and frescoes — which feature whole figures in colorful, patterned interiors — alongside the framed collages. For the framed works, Olivia cuts figures and shapes from cardstock, then places them, nested with scrawled notes, in ordinary file folders that she transforms through slicing, coloring, painting and even quilting. Silhouetted heads peek out from under graph paper, and bodies in profile interleaf as layers of cut shapes, sometimes subdued with antique metal brads. 

Olivia is not only collaging material, but also ideas, as do the best artists of our time. “Squid ink is 99 percent melanin, so I am trying to tell a story through a material,” she says in a short video that screens in a loop in the Frist’s Multiplicity show. The works are part reading list, part book, part Joseph Cornell-inspired collage, part origami, part sculpture. They are a dense amalgam of her interests in embodied material and intersectionality. 

Traditionally, file folders keep unsightly papers organized and offices tidy, collected and protected. These ordinary manila office folders make me think of jobs. In my early post-undergraduate days, I had a temp job that had me in the bowels of the filing/claims room of a mega-insurance company in the Financial District in Boston. The files were worn, chock-full of information, handled, stacked and stuffed, made to be opened, read and researched. You can imagine the density of care, knowledge and experience that’s encased in just one folder. Seen through the organization of an artist in the studio — in this case Lovie Olivia’s in St. Louis — viewers are privy to what went into making her paintings. I see Kara Walker’s silhouettes and Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines and flatbed picture planes. 

In addition to the care and collection in a folder, floral imagery in the Tinney show references retreat, compositionally (and conceptually) recalling Aaron Douglas’ murals, and here they are just a mile from his old stomping grounds at Fisk University. In keeping with the formal moves of Olivia’s work, you can find references to the interiority of refuge, solace and things kept secret — as if you’re a disorganized detective or a confused mapmaker. 

Many artists insist on calling interdisciplinary works paintings. In breathing space into what we call a painting, drawing or collage, we can also — in repetition and difference — make something that has no category. If, as academic Saidiya Hartman writes, “Beauty is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure,” then Beauty as a Method shows us frescoes and free association, inviting pure color and designed interiors to live together. If anything, I can’t wait to see how these definitions conflate even more. τ