Some African Americans… pasted newspaper on the walls of their homes because it was thought that malevolent spirits would have to count every letter on the newsprint before they could direct harm towards the home’s inhabitants. This extra-sensory dimension that newspapers were believed to represent and, relatedly, that the inhabitants within these spaces radiated, is alluded to in not just Eldzier Cortor’s oil on canvases, but in contemporary works which, while primarily painted and conceived with a collage disposition, conjured communiqués not just about deterioration and poverty, but about modern life and its illusions, and about subliminal, underlying missives of African American dread and doubt.
“Hurston’s Law, or a Philosophy of Display,” in Kathryn E. Delmez, ed., Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary Collage (Nashville, TN: Frist Art Museum, 2023), 30-43.
