Bethany Collins: The Dixie of Our Union celebrates a new acquisition to the University Museums Art Collection and highlights the ways a single artwork can catalyze interdisciplinary programmatic collaborations across campus. The artwork comprises ten works on paper that appear at first glance to be framed pages of sheet music smudged with smoke. Looking more closely, one discovers that they are painstakingly-drawn replicas of sheet music. Eight American popular songs from the Civil War era unfold over ten images: Traitors Land (1860), Our Yankee Generals (1860), Dixie (1861), The Dixie of Our Union (1861), Dixie’s Land #5, Dixie Unionized 1861, Dixie #3, and Away to the Wars in Dixie (1865). Collins’s Dixie of Our Union belongs to a series of her works that are grounded in archival research into songs that were published with different lyrics for Union or Confederate audiences. In the South, including Richmond, such tunes were played and sung in minstrel shows, living rooms, clubs, and at sporting events. Collins intends the “clouds” of toner across the surface of Dixie to evoke tear gas. Her fingerprints adorn certain pages, a technique that runs throughout her work of the past ten years, a method of introducing her body into the received “texts” of American history.

Bethany Collins (born Montgomery, AL, 1984) is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptual practice examines the relationship between race and language. Centering language—its biases, contradictions, and ability to simultaneously forge connections and foster violence—her works illuminate America’s past and offer insight into the development of racial and national identities. Drawing on a wide variety of documents, ranging from nineteenth-century musical scores to US Department of Justice reports, she erases, obscures, excerpts, and rewrites portions of text to bring to the fore issues revolving around race, power, and histories of violence.

Bethany Collins: The Dixie of Our Union is organized by the University of Richmond Museums and curated by Issa Lampe, Director, University Museums.