In Bethany Collins’s Red Noise series, begun in 2018, the artist once again pushes the formal and conceptual inquiries established in her White Noise and Blue Noise series, this time creating paintings for each of the patriotic songs listed in American educator and literary critic E.D. Hirsch’s 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Using chalk and/or charcoal on red acrylic or latex paintings, Collins incorporates and fragments lyrics from songs like “You’re A Grand Old Flag,” “America the Beautiful,” and “Amazing Grace,” along with her own addition to Hirsch’s list: The Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Once again employing the artist’s labor-intensive process of manually handwriting and obscuring words, Collins’s Red Noise paintings invite viewers to consider how language and meaning can change and shift over time.
