Imagine holding a single scrap of paper that once belonged to a soldier’s letter, or a delicate feather that adorned a ceremonial robe centuries ago. Each fragment carries a secret world—traces of language, belief, and ritual. When an artist glues such fragments together, they don’t just layer materials; they stack entire histories.
Collage isn’t merely about cutting and pasting random bits of paper; it’s about weaving distant cultures, voices, and eras into a cohesive new tapestry. It’s an art form of radical openness, welcoming everything from worn postcards to pressed flowers, gleaning the memory and meaning they hold.
Across the globe, communities have, for centuries, assembled shells, beads, and slivers of painted paper in acts that speak to both the sacred and the mundane. Long before the word “collage” was coined, artisans in Asia, Africa, and the Americas were already layering and melding materials to share stories of gods, royalty, or beloved ancestors. In modern times, this ancient impulse to fuse the many into one has become a bold statement of cultural conversation—an ongoing testament that the world itself is a messy, exquisite patchwork.
The journey we’re about to undertake moves from Aztec feather mosaics shimmering in Mesoamerican sunlight to the subversive photomontages of Dadaists challenging Europe’s status quo. We’ll see how Islamic manuscripts, with their sumptuous patchwork pages, whisper of empires that thrived on diverse influences, and how digital collage artists today remix the entire globe’s iconography in a single viral image.
As you’ll discover, collage is a narrative of endless becoming, a universal invitation to piece together hidden truths and personal experiences. Step into this realm of exquisite fragments and see how each shard of history can be reassembled into something not just beautiful, but deeply human.
Key Takeaways
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Collage is a timeless fusion of fragments—each shard, feather, or scrap an intimate whisper of culture, identity, and history—creating an art form that transcends geography and era.
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From shimmering Aztec feather mosaics to revolutionary Dada photomontages, collage reveals humanity’s enduring impulse to remix disparate worlds into profound new meanings.
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Rooted deeply in ritual and royalty—from Mughal muraqqa’ albums to African ceremonial masks—collage has always been an expressive bridge between the sacred, the political, and the personal.
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Today’s artists, digitally stitching global icons and reclaimed histories into powerful visual statements, reaffirm collage as an ever-evolving dialogue of identity, protest, and cultural remixing.
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Ultimately, collage invites us into its infinite tapestry of storytelling, affirming that art’s greatest beauty emerges not from singular narratives, but from the exquisite tension of diverse voices united.
Ancient and Pre-Modern Collage Traditions
Early forms of collage appeared long before the term was coined. In different corners of the world, artisans found ingenious ways to combine materials and images, creating composite artworks that spoke to their cultures. These precedents – from East Asian paper arts to African masks and Mesoamerican featherworks – set the stage for collage as a transcultural medium.
Asia: Paper, Poetry, and Fragments
The invention of paper in China paved the way for some of the first collage-like techniques. By the Tang and Song eras, pairing paintings with inscribed poems had become an esteemed practice – essentially mounting text and image together to form a harmonious whole. This union of word and image is an early example of the collage principle: disparate elements glued into one composition to enhance meaning.
Japan further developed these practices. In the Heian period (8th–12th centuries), noblewomen and monks famously layered papers and texts in the creation of poetic scrolls. By the 10th century, Japanese calligraphers were pasting poems onto decorated paper backgrounds.
An art form known as chigiri-e emerged around the 11th century, involving tearing colored handmade paper into shapes and gluing them to create images. These delicate paper collages – often of flowers, landscapes, or literary scenes – resembled watercolor paintings in their subtlety.
In essence, East Asian artists were experimenting with mixed-media art long before it acquired that name, embedding cultural aesthetics (poetry, calligraphy, nature motifs) into physical layers of paper.
Islamic World: Patchwork Manuscripts and Imperial Albums
Collage also has deep roots in the Islamic world, particularly in Persianate cultures of the Middle East and South Asia. Here, the medium of the book – illuminated manuscripts and albums – provided the canvas for collage-like assembly.
By the 16th century, the art of compiling muraqqa’ albums flourished in Mughal India, Safavid Persia, and Ottoman Turkey. These sumptuous imperial albums were literally “patched together” collections of paintings, calligraphy, and decorative borders. A single page would unite calligraphy by one master, a miniature painting by another, and ornate margins of cut patterned paper or textile.
One famous example is the Mughal emperor Jahangir’s albums (c. 1600), which combined Persian calligraphic panels with Mughal portraiture and even European prints collected at court. Some folios were true collages of European, Persian, and Mughal works arranged within richly painted borders.
The very term muraqqa’ reflects this composite nature – derived from the Arabic for “patched,” it evokes a textile quilt. In these albums, each page is an exercise in curation and connoisseurship: various artworks cut out and artfully glued onto new sheets, often enhanced with gold illumination.
Such practices reveal a collage-like quality in Islamic art: an understanding that beauty could be created by assembling fragments from diverse sources, whether to preserve beloved images or to create novel meaning through their interplay.
Africa: Beads, Shells, and Ancestral Assemblage
In African art, collage-like assemblage has long been present in the adornment of ritual objects and regalia. Traditional African artists often combined multiple materials to create a single work, valuing the textural and symbolic richness this brought. A striking example is African masks, frequently incorporating wood carving with additional media.
Many masks from West and Central Africa are not just carved wood; they are embellished with beads, shells, metal, fiber, and pigment in a composite design. Art historians note that an artist might carve the base form in wood and then adorn it privately with layers of meaning – attaching cowrie shells and colored glass beads to signify wealth and sacred power, affixing tufted raffia or feathers to invoke spiritual connection, or adding cloth and paint for color.
The Kuba people of Central Africa create royal masks covered in a mosaic of cowrie shells and beads. One 19th-century Kuba mask features a wooden face inlaid with hundreds of tiny shells forming geometric patterns, with additional layers of fabric and feather appliqué – effectively a collage of ethnographic materials that convey the king’s wealth and the community’s cosmology.
Masks illustrate how African artists were assembling media to convey meaning well before European modernists extolled “mixed media.” In Africa, the impulse to combine was tied to spiritual and social purposes: the materials came from far-flung trade and local nature, symbolically uniting the community with the wider world in one object.
Indigenous Americas: Feather Mosaics and More
Indigenous cultures of the Americas also developed collage-like arts, often using natural materials. One of the most celebrated is Aztec and Maya featherwork. In Mesoamerica, artisans known as amanteca specialized in creating stunning mosaics out of brilliantly colored bird feathers. These works, which predate European contact, involved meticulously arranging thousands of tiny feather fragments onto a substrate to form images of gods, animals, and royal emblems.
After the Spanish conquest, this feather collage tradition was repurposed in the service of colonization – and simultaneously became a point of transcultural exchange. By the mid-16th century, Franciscan friars in Mexico City had indigenous craftsmen making feather mosaics of Christian scenes to send back to Europe as marvels of the New World.
A famous piece called The Mass of Saint Gregory features an entire Catholic scene rendered in iridescent feathers and touches of gold, melding Indigenous technique with European iconography. These shimmering feather collages – images of Christian saints composed of quetzal and parrot feathers – astonished European audiences and spurred local artists abroad to explore new materials.
Beyond featherwork, Native American and other Indigenous peoples also combined materials in wearable art and ritual objects. Plains Indian warriors, for instance, created collaged war shirts and ledger drawings incorporating cloth, beadwork, and painted narratives to record their deeds.
In the Arctic, Inuit artisans in the 20th century began to incorporate fabric and paper into their stone-cut prints and drawings, effectively layering mixed media to represent the clash of tradition and modernity. Whether using feathers, beads, cloth, or paper, Indigenous artists treated their works as cultural palimpsests – physical sites where different histories and materials meet.
These early examples underscore that collage is truly global in origin: a concept of assembling meaning from fragments, present in ceremonial and artistic practices across the world well before the modern era.
Collage as Political Protest Worldwide
From the 1930s through the late 20th century, collage became firmly established as a tool of political expression across the globe. The ease of combining photographs, texts, and symbols made collage a natural medium for propaganda, protest art, and social commentary.
The photocopier became an artist’s tool in the 1980s for collagists like Barbara Kruger, who layered text and found photos to deconstruct consumerism and gender roles. In apartheid-era Cape Town, Jane Alexander created sculptural collages to protest oppression. And in the Philippines, Brenda Fajardo made collage-like prints to comment on folk history under Marcos’s regime. Each instance reaffirms collage as a global art of resistance: accessible, visually striking, and inherently dialogic.
By the end of the 20th century, collage was truly a universal visual language. From the propaganda posters of Cuban graphic artists after the 1959 revolution to the subversive zines and photocopied collages of the punk movement in Britain and the U.S., collage empowered those outside the mainstream to cut, mix, and remix the imagery around them.
Europe
In Europe, anti-fascist artists continued the photomontage tradition through World War II. In the United States during the 1960s, the era of Vietnam War and civil rights struggles, collage and montage techniques were widely used in underground newspapers, protest posters, and pop art.
America
Romare Bearden, an African American artist, created collages from magazine clippings that depicted Black life in America, addressing issues of identity and social change. His 1964 series “Projections” overlaid cut photographs of African masks onto scenes of Harlem, literally collaging African heritage into contemporary Black experience.
One vivid example of collage as protest can be seen in the work of Carolee Schneemann, an American artist who in 1967 staged “Body Collage,” a performance against the Vietnam War. Schneemann covered her nearly nude body in glue and paper, literally becoming a human canvas to which she slapped and pasted shreds of newspaper – many of them war headlines – while writhing to music. The result was a living protest collage, the artist’s body merging with media fragments depicting the horrors of war. This piece illustrates how, by the late 20th century, collage had leapt off the page and into performance and installation, all in service of urgent political commentary.
Postcolonial Art
Collage also intersected with the rise of postcolonial art. In newly independent African and Asian nations mid-century, artists adapted collage to reflect the layered impact of colonialism and the forging of new identities.
In India, some experimented with collage printmaking to critique industrial development and political corruption. And in Latin America, the turbulent politics of the 1970s–80s found expression in collage and montage by artists like León Ferrari of Argentina, who collaged press clippings and religious imagery to protest state violence.
Collage in the Digital and Contemporary Era
As we entered the 21st century – an age of digital images, global connectivity, and intensified conversations about identity – collage has not only remained relevant; it has arguably become the defining art form of our time.
Today’s artists inherit a world saturated with images and influences from every corner of the globe, a world that is itself collaged together by the forces of globalization. In response, contemporary collage (both analog and digital) engages with themes of cultural hybridity, fragmented identities, and the blurring of boundaries between high and low art, local and global.
Digital Evolution and Globalization of Collage
The digital revolution has profoundly expanded the toolkit and reach of collage artists. With the advent of image editing software in the late 20th century, collagists gained the ability to cut, paste, layer, and manipulate images with a click of a mouse. This has led to an explosion of digital collage and photomontage, where scans or digital photos can be seamlessly blended.
Artists today might sample imagery from archives, internet memes, global news, and personal photos all in one digital canvas – a practice that mirrors the vast global image bank now accessible online.
Ironically, even as these tools proliferate, many collage artists still choose to work by hand, valuing the tactile process of assembling materials. But whether digital or analog, contemporary collage is undeniably influenced by the ease of access to diverse visual sources in the internet age.
Globalization has also enabled a greater exchange among collage artists worldwide. Through online platforms and international exhibitions, a global collage community has formed, with events like World Collage Day and collage festivals in cities from Lima to New Orleans. These forums highlight how artists from different cultures borrow motifs and methods from one another.
Artists can create works that exemplify their local culture with the globalization of the art market, online access to materials, and an international network. The mixed-media collage of the contemporary era often literally mixes global sources, reflecting a world where boundaries are porous.
Museums and galleries have embraced this global collage zeitgeist. The International Collage Center and traveling exhibitions have showcased contemporary collage from all continents. Shows like “Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage” in Edinburgh (2019) juxtaposed 16th-century Japanese paper collages with 20th-century European examples and 21st-century digital works, emphasizing a continuing lineage.
As art markets open up, artists from traditionally marginalized regions find recognition through collage. Thus, the digital era has amplified collage’s inherent quality as a transnational art. It allows more complex layering (in both content and technique) than ever before, echoing the layered, intersectional identities of contemporary artists and audiences.
Collage as Identity and Cultural Commentary
Much of today’s political graphic design – think of protest signs from major social movements – uses collage aesthetics to convey urgent hybrid messages. The key thread is that collage remains, as it has always been, an art of combination with intent. In the contemporary context, the intent is often to highlight the mosaic nature of identity and culture.
By fragmenting and reassembling visual culture, artists can question who “owns” an image or a narrative. They create what scholar Homi Bhabha might call “third space” images – collages that exist between cultures, generating new meanings.
Perhaps the most powerful trend in contemporary collage is its use as a tool to explore and assert identity – be it personal, cultural, racial, or gender identity. Around the globe, artists of color, women artists, LGBTQ+ artists, and others have turned to collage’s fragmentary language to reconstruct images of themselves and their communities, often in defiance of stereotypes. By cutting apart and reassembling images (especially images from mass media), they can literally deconstruct prevailing representations and create new, composite visions that reflect their own experience.
Collage today is as much about conversation (between past and present, self and society, one culture and another) as it is about aesthetics. Each fragment in a collage carries a story, and in bringing fragments together, artists spark a dialogue about how those stories intersect.
Wangechi Mutu
A shining example is Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan-born artist whose work exemplifies the global fusion at the heart of much contemporary collage. Mutu, now based in New York, creates large-scale collages that combine clippings from fashion magazines, anatomy textbooks, traditional African art imagery, and personal drawings.
Mutu's figures are fantastical hybrid women – part human, part machine, part animal, adorned with both the trappings of consumer culture and references to African myth. By gathering images from popular media and medical diagrams, she pieces together female bodies that both enchant and disturb.
Mutu’s work, in her own words, “commandeers control” of female representation by literally slicing apart the female form as portrayed in colonial and pornographic imagery, then reassembling it on her own terms. Through collage, she navigates her African identity in a Western context, creating a visual dialogue about race, gender, and power that resonates globally.
Rashid Rana
In South Asia, Rashid Rana of Pakistan has gained renown for his photographic collages that critique cultural stereotypes. His famed Veil series presents what appears from a distance to be an image of a woman in a burqa. On closer inspection, the portrait is revealed to be composed of thousands of tiny tile-like photographs, which are in fact blurred pornographic images of women.
By collaging “forbidden” images into the shape of another culturally charged image, Rana confronts the viewer with the intersection of East/West objectifications of women. He effectively forces us to “look beyond” the stereotype and critique the machinery of truth behind media representations. His collage method – using digital software to mosaic thousands of photos – also speaks to living in a media-saturated, globalized era where identities are increasingly mediated images.
Alberto Pereira
Across the Atlantic, in Brazil, artists have used collage to reclaim Black identity in a society marked by colonial imagery. Alberto Pereira, for instance, launched a series called Noble Negro in 2014, digitally inserting portraits of Black Brazilian cultural icons into reproductions of 15th–18th century European royal paintings. By literally collaging Black faces onto Old Master canvases, he proposes a new narrative for images that were produced at a time when the Black man was never portrayed.
One of Pereira's works, Jesus Pretinho (Black Jesus), depicts Christ as a Black man and thus challenges centuries of Eurocentric religious imagery. Pereira explains that through collage he realized he could “offer other insights, retell stories, invert logic, and redefine” symbols in society. This is the crux of identity collage: taking apart existing images (often icons of oppression or exclusion) and remixing them to visualize an alternative reality.
Deborah Roberts
Similarly, women artists from marginalized communities have embraced collage to assert their perspectives. In the United States, Deborah Roberts creates collaged portraits of young Black girls from magazine scraps, giving form to their beauty and complexity in a culture that often tries to caricature or erase them.
Destiny Deacon
In Australia, Destiny Deacon uses collage and assemblage in photography to address Aboriginal identity and the experience of colonization, often inserting family photographs into kitschy found imagery to disrupt colonial narratives. And among queer artists, collage’s mixing of signs has been a natural fit for exploring fluid identities.
The Ever-Evolving Cultural Dialogue of Collage
From its ancient incarnations to its digital renaissance, collage has proven to be an enduring and infinitely adaptable form of artistic expression. What began with humble scraps of paper in East Asia or glittering feathers in Mesoamerica has blossomed into a global visual language – one that transcends borders and time periods.
Collage’s history is not a linear progression owned by any one culture, but rather a rich tapestry woven of many threads: the devotional patchwork of a Mughal album page; the ceremonial assemblage of an African mask; the modernist shock of a Cubist newspaper snippet; the agitprop photomontage of a Dada pamphlet; the personal and political remixing of today’s digital artists.
Each iteration, in its own way, speaks to the fundamental human impulse to make meaning by connecting pieces, by acknowledging that no single image or perspective tells the whole story.
Throughout the 20th century, collage became a means to challenge artistic conventions and social injustices, a true avant-garde medium precisely because it brought reality into art and art into reality. In the 21st century, that role continues with even greater resonance. We live in a collage world – bombarded by images, navigating multicultural identities, piecing together our histories and futures from fragments.
It is perhaps no surprise that collage art is flourishing anew, as evidenced by the myriad global exhibitions, online communities, and academic studies dedicated to it. Curator Pavel Zoubok has called collage “the most democratic of art forms” because its materials are accessible to anyone and its message can be instantly grasped in the clash and harmony of recognizable elements.
Collage invites participation: the viewer instinctively tries to decode the pieces and their relationships, effectively re-creating the collage in their own mind.
Importantly, collage also invites dialogue. A collage is never just one voice; it is many voices in conversation – sometimes in conflict, sometimes in chorus. In a world increasingly aware of the value of diverse voices, this aspect of collage is profoundly relevant.
As artists from Lagos to London, São Paulo to Seoul continue to cut, tear, layer, and fuse bits of our global visual culture, they are carrying on a dialogue that began centuries ago when the first craftsperson decided to glue one thing onto another and see what it could say. Each collage is a small act of world-making – an assertion that from disparate pieces a new coherence can emerge.
In closing, the journey of collage art across history exemplifies how cultural influences circulate and inspire. Collage is both a mirror and a mosaic of global culture: it reflects the collisions and blendings that define human experience, and it assembles those shards into forms that challenge and enchant us.
As long as artists feel the urge to combine images and materials to tell a story – be it personal, political, or poetic – collage will continue to evolve. It remains an open conversation, an art of many languages spoken all at once.
In this dynamic, overlapping chorus, we can perceive the shape of our shared artistic heritage: forever rearranging itself, seeking new meanings, much like a collage in progress.
Reading List
- Cai Lun. History of Collage. Photosynthesis Magazine.
- Muraqqa’: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Asian Art.
- Elliott, Patrick. “Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage.” Collage Research Network, June 13, 2019.
- Minneapolis Institute of Art. “African Masks and Masquerades – Idea Four.” Teaching the Arts: Five Ideas.
- Russo, Alessandra, et al., eds. Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe 1400–1700. Hirmer, 2015.
- Wolfe, Shira. “The History of Collage in Art.” Artland Magazine.
- Art in Context. “Dada Collage.”
- Saatchi Gallery. Artist Profile: Rashid Rana.
- Encyclopædia Britannica. “Wangechi Mutu.” By Debra N. Mancoff. Updated 2022.
- Buttini, Madelaine. “The Influence of Cultural Diversity in Collage Art.” Madbutt Blog, Feb 26, 2024.
- Sybaris Collection. “Collage Art’s Place in 21st Century Art Development.” 2020.
- Contemporary And (C& América Latina). “Collage as Reaffirmation of Identities.” Nov 2021.
- National Galleries Scotland. Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage (Exhibition Catalogue). Edinburgh, 2019.
- Hyperallergic. “Plumage of the Saints: Aztec Feather Art in the Age of Colonialism.” Feb 5, 2016.
