Krista Franklin a poetic collages of lifes

Krista Franklin is a poet and visual artist from Dayton, OH who lives and works in Chicago. Her work straddles the literary and visual worlds. As a writer and mixed media artist, Krista create complex, interrogative images that reflect the vernacular experiences, dream worlds, and psychic landscapes of the black community in the United States and larger African Diaspora.


Her art has a strong focus on subtext. She often utilize distinct, recognizable and familiar images of people of color, popular iconography, and the juxtaposition of text to engage the viewer and deconstruct the ways in which our gaze reifies and distorts notions of culture and gender, race and class, power and privilege.


Krista is deeply inspired by popular culture and public history, as well as by the frenetic glamour of music videos and magazines. Using a variety of mixed media — acrylic, watercolor, handmade paper and found objects: old letters, vintage magazine advertisements, playing cards, old photographs, and receipts —she work to create "post-modern" American totems wherein the complexities of our present and our past(s) are evoked through purposeful layering


African Diaspora folklore and mythmaking are the conceptual concerns of my current visual explorations. Informed by the gothic fugitive slave narrative of Toni Morrison's Beloved, the shapeshifter, telepathic, and dystopic visions of Octavia E. Butler, and the elaborate collages of Romare Bearden, my recent work in papermaking, letterpress and bookmaking explore retro-Afro-Futuristic and Afro-Surrealist themes of the "fantastic" and the "speculative". - via artist statement



“At the heart of my collages is a deep concern for creating complex and interrogative images, dream worlds and psychic landscapes. Deeply inspired by American popular culture and histories, as well as by the frenetic glamour of music videos and magazines, I create my collages in much the same way a hiphop producer creates a beat: through a process comparable to ‘sampling.’ Using a variety of medium—paint, handmade paper, playing cards, old photographs, receipts—I create new visions and totems wherein image is in dialogue with words (sometimes prominent, sometimes obscured), and the complexities of histories are evoked through a purposeful layering.” - krista franklin