Earlier this winter I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to see the excellent “Monuments” exhibition, which pairs decommissioned Confederate monuments with contemporary artworks. One of the standout newer pieces in the show was Love is dangerous, a sculptural work by the Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins composed of tiny rose petals made from the granite base of an old Stonewall Jackson statue. The pink petals looked soft and delicate, like little cupped hands, and knowing they came from something so physically and symbolically opposite drew me in.
A bit too close, apparently. When we spoke a few weeks later, I was somewhat embarrassed to tell Collins that I had been reprimanded by a museum guard. Turns out, it happened to her too. “They put the tough security guards in there,” she says. “I was like, ‘Good job, you are doing what you’re supposed to.’”
It’s perhaps not surprising that Collins’s piece requires heightened supervision: Her conceptual work has long demanded close looking, followed by deep contemplation. Using paper, ink, graphite, musical scores, stone, performance, and other mediums, Collins examines the relationship between language and race, whether by blind embossing newspaper clippings from the Civil Rights Movement, selectively erasing passages of Antigone or the Odyssey, comparing versions of the national anthem, or forging new sculptures from the detritus of a monument to a Confederate general. It’s an art of deconstruction, excavating the muddy histories that presage our current moment.
“I’m always trying to make sense of the present, and the way I know how to do that is to look backwards for echoes in time,” Collins says. The work may seem quiet, but it is heady and full of bold visions for the future.
Clearly her message is resonating. In the last two years alone she’s had presentations at the Prospect 6 Triennial in New Orleans, the Seattle Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, the Morgan Library Museum in New York, Patron gallery in Chicago, and LA’s MOCA. Just last week her work was at Frieze LA in a booth from Alexander Gray Associates, her New York gallery.
Now she adds another institution to her list: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver opens “Bethany Collins: The Deluge” on Thursday. The show contains several bodies of work, each pointing to waves of resistance found in historic struggles, be they from literary history or our own here in the United States.
Starting off the show is a sound piece that plays in the stairwell as you enter. It’s an abolitionist version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” from 1858, slowed down 100 times “so that it starts to sound like crashing waves,” Collins explains. “That’s the term of the deluge, right? Of overwhelm, constantly having something cresting over your head—that feels like now.”
With the tone properly set, visitors will encounter a series of circular song drawings that intertwine the ballad “Beautiful Dreamer” (written during the Civil War, though ostensibly a love song) with Verdi’s “Dies Irae” (about judgment and repentance). Nearby will be a sculptural work that uses pulverized stone from the same Stonewall Jackson monument as Love is dangerous, this time mixed into paper pulp cast in the shape of a rose. It’s modeled after a decorative element inside the Old Ship AME Zion Church, the oldest Black church in Montgomery, Alabama, where, in 1984, Collins was born.
Framed in plexiglass, Old Ship Rose III comes out six inches from the wall. “There’s an aesthetic, intentional confusion about what it is. It has a life to it,” Collins says. And a complexity, in that oh so American way: It contains traces of a Confederate monument, but its likeness is a flower installed in a site of Black resistance, where Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass once spoke. Over time, the stone bits will separate from the paper pulp. “The dust falls from the work and gets trapped in the frame,” she says. Dislodged, but not entirely gone.
Collins is perhaps best known for her works that manipulate text. At MCA Denver, two of her most potent examples, on Antigone and Moby-Dick, will be on display. The Antigone pieces are large framed works on paper in which various translations of Sophocles’s tragedy—about moral courage in the face of the law’s injustice—have been copied by hand by Collins and mostly erased, with particularly resonant lines remaining untouched. One legible quote belongs to Ismene, Antigone’s sister: “But now we both share the blame, right or wrong.” A parallel today being that we’re all suffering the consequences of a leader many of us did not choose.
“Antigone and the stone share the same themes,” Collins says. “How do you respond to state violence? She chooses dissent and resistance, even at the force of loss of life.”
But the story doesn’t have to end that way. Collins has also hand-copied all of Moby-Dick, split into three volumes. She wrote out the text on lightweight onion-skin paper using iron gall ink—a centuries-old material known for both its durability and corrosive properties. (The process took three months and resulted in a carpal tunnel brace.)
“The historian Nathaniel Philbrick calls Moby-Dick America’s Bible, because it’s supposed to be full of these prophetic warnings,” Collins says. “What happens to the crew or the country when you follow the lone madman who’s just obsessed with whiteness and vengeance? Almost everyone goes down with the ship, except for the narrator to tell the tale.”
But for the MCA Denver show, she’s including just the first and second volumes of her transcription. “There’s the possibility of a different ending. We don’t know if the text is going to burn itself away or not. It’ll take 100 years.”
Collins was exposed to art-making from a young age: Her mother is a painter who always kept a home studio, and her father is the fix-anything type, “a different kind of creativity,” Collins says.
She studied photojournalism in college in Alabama, along with studio art, thinking the former could provide a stable but still creative career. She interned at a few small newspapers in the South, but realized the work required a certain amount of extroversion. “I didn’t enjoy inserting myself in other people’s stories,” she remembers. “It just made me want to go back to my studio.”
She worked in arts administration, then enrolled at Georgia State University in pursuit of an MFA. It was in grad school that language entered her work. “My mind said, Aha,” Collins says of the discovery. Post-MFA she was invited to various residencies, including at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Theaster Gates’s Black Artists Retreat in Chicago, where she’s lived for 10 years now.
With “The Deluge” about to open, she’s focused next on a series of performances that will take place in Denver, LA, Chicago, and New York, each an extension of her long investigation into how to navigate our moment.
“The question I’m asking myself these days through the work is, What is required of us?” Collins isn’t particularly religious now, but growing up in the Presbyterian church she often heard her mother invoke those words of Micah. Even if you take religion out of it, she says, those are still keen values to hold.
If her Moby-Dick represents that question, functioning as “the warning in the middle of the show,” then “Antigone, Old Ship Rose, Beautiful Dreamer…they are kind of possibilities for response,” Collins says. “I’m thinking about: How do we live a good life? And not the fun kind of good life, but of how to be a good person in this moment.”
“Bethany Collins: The Deluge” is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, from March 5 through July 5, 2026.