Brent Edwards has one of five inspiring, indispensable art-centric Instagram accounts worth following, according to the New York Times.
5 Art Accounts to Follow on Instagram Now
Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and his feed is an extension of his scholarship — but also a creative outlet. During the lockdown, Edwards started making quarantine collages, which he described on the feed as “old-fashioned cutting and pasting,” and he is rather good at it. One depicts the old reading room at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, with Edwards sitting among great musicians and scholars. Another shows Black marching bands wielding their trombones and tubas. Edwards’s work has already been featured on the Instagram feed Black Collagists (@blackcollagists). On that occasion he wrote, “Collage is an art of intervals” referring to the juxtapositions of time and space presented by the different images. However, collage shortens those distances, and so “its implications are ‘profoundly social,’ as [Romare] Bearden once counseled that all African-American artists must strive to be.”