An established American artist with a growing international reputation, Lance Letscher transforms found paper into works of art that are mysteriously evocative, often playful, and graphically beautiful. Letscher precisely cuts and recombines scraps of old books and letters, children's school exercises, recipes, album covers, and other ephemera into motifs that suggest forms abstract and representational. In these collages, which vary from small works on paper to elaborate constructions as large as nine by fourteen feet, Letscher emerges as a skilled colorist and abstractionist who allows blocks of color and fragments of phrases to open up intriguing avenues of memory and association.
Lance Letscher: Collage is the first full-length monograph on this important artist. It presents a catalog of 118 works dating from 2001 to 2008, accompanied by essays that explore Letscher's artistic development and place in contemporary art. Charles Dee Mitchell, a well-known critic and arts writer, recounts the artist's journey from academically trained improvisational sculptor to creator of collages using found materials. Brooke Davis Anderson traces Letscher's fruitful connections with prominent Outsider and self-taught artists, including James Castle, Martín Ramírez, Adolf Wölfli, and the quilters of Gee's Bend.

Lance Letscher: Collage

Arts & Photography

ANDERSON, Brooke Davis

History & Criticism

University of Texas Press

An established American artist with a growing international reputation, Lance Letscher transforms found paper into works of art that are mysteriously evocative, often playful, and graphically beautiful. In these collages, which vary from small works on paper to elaborate constructions as large as nine by fourteen feet, Letscher emerges as a skilled colorist and abstractionist who allows blocks of color and fragments of phrases to open up intriguing avenues of memory and association.This special limited edition of Lance Letscher: Collage contains an original pinwheel collage mounted on the title page of each copy. Each collage is unique, and every book in the edition of 250 copies is signed and numbered by Lance Letscher. The dust jacket is wrapped in an archival acetate cover, and the book is placed in a custom-made slipcase printed with a pattern for a Letscher collage.

Individual Artists

Ramirez (1895-1963), the great self-taught draftsman of the twentieth century, left his native Los Altos de Jalisco, Mexico, in 1925 to find work in the United States and support his wife and children back home. Political struggles in Mexico and the economic consequences of the Great Depression left him stranded, jobless and homeless, on the streets of California in 1931. Unable to communicate in English and apparently confused, he was soon detained by the police and committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he would eventually be diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. Ramirez hardly talked to anybody during those thirty-two years. Instead, he began to assemble found bits of paper--candy wrappers, greeting cards, flattened paper cups, hospital supply forms, and book pages, for example--using a self-made glue to create large surfaces for drawing. Sketched in graphite, colored pencil, or crayon, and often collaged with magazine illustrations, the artist's drawings range in size from several inches up to twelve feet. He was a master of pictorial space, using dramatic shifts in depth and scale to create a field in which multiple perspectives coexist. Ramirez's art depicts a variety of subjects, including caballeros, Madonnas, animals, trains, and tunnels. Memory and experience seep through each composition. While one strong component of Ramirez's work is the imagery of Mexico, another is an aesthetic found in the culture of mental illness. Martin Ramirez is the first book to give equal consideration to the biographical, historical, and cultural influences in Ramirez's oeuvre, its artistic quality and merit, and its standing in the context of the work of twentieth-century self-taught artists. An interdisciplinary exploration of Ramirez's life and complex, multilayered artwork, it presents a holistic examination of his drawings and collages beyond the boundaries of his diagnosed schizophrenia.

Martín Ramírez

Marquand Books and the American Folk Art Museum

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Books by ANDERSON, Brooke Davis

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Lance Letscher: Collage

Lance Letscher: Collage

Martín Ramírez