Featuring a series of blind-embossed prints from the Spring 1963 cover pages of The Birmingham News, Bethany Collins’s The Birmingham News, 1963 (2017) draws attention to how, despite being widely publicized by news outlets nationwide, stories relating to the civil rights movement were virtually nonexistent in the local Alabama newspaper. In the work, Collins utilizes a twice-embossed technique to press the selected covers into slate gray newsprint paper—involving soaking, pressing, and registering the paper two times—which leaves pages partially deteriorated. “The deterioration marks the loss of a shared public reality, which is a state we’ve returned to,” Collins explains. “[W]hen we refuse to name a thing in one place, it morphs into another form in order to be recognized … [T]he deliberate absence of coverage of violence against the civil rights movement appears as abrasions, tears, and removals.” By highlighting this absence in coverage, Collins highlights the incomplete narrative found in historical records, what she describes as “the intentional burying of civil rights stories.”
