“Collage is both a process of learning to see and seeing to learn.”
(Pamela Markus)

Collage is an art of now, even though its roots go back several centuries. It is an assemblage of diverse elements and can be seen as visual sampling, a two- or sometimes three-dimensional compilation of visual ideas. Collage “reflects the very way we see the world with objects being given meaning not from something within themselves, but rather through the way we perceive they stand in relationship to one another” (Robertson, 2004).

We see collage all around us, in magazines, newspapers, advertisements and billboards, on the Internet, in our family photo albums, in quilts – everywhere where different visual ideas are combined to seduce, to convince, to persuade, to charm, to explain, and to critique.

Collage is a particularly democratic art form. It can be technologically sophisticated, as in the use of image manipulation software; it can be composed in a dispersed fashion, and then combined, like the AIDS quilt; or it can be very low-tech, using glue, scissors, paper and images or found objects. It doesn’t need developing, like film; it doesn’t require electronics like Photoshop, or the Internet, though the Internet is a particularly useful place for dissemination of such work (www.globalcollage.com).

Collage can thus speak to children and youth through its accessibility and immediacy. It is particularly suited to collaborative work, parallel side-by-side or together. It can be big, like the collaborative inclusive mural project done by Xavier Cortada, or small, like art cards (2" by 3" like hockey or baseball cards). “In collage, children feel less limited by their technical abilities than when they draw. The method seems to increase their visualizing capabilities.” (www.unicef.org/teachers/researchers/alternate.htm) Collage “reflects the very way we see the world with objects being given meaning not from something within themselves, but rather through the way we perceive they stand in relationship to one another” (Robertson, 2004)

The two-dimenional collages of socially aware artists like Romare Bearden or Theodore Harris confront us with a juxtaposition of images that are particularly forceful. The equally forceful but nuanced three-dimensional collage boxes of Joseph Cornell talk to us about our every-day worlds. We need not be named as artists, however, to use collage as a form of discovery, of exploration, of inquiry and of analysis.