Untitled 1990

Rosemary Karuga made this collage from discarded magazine pages, probably without any idea that people like me would be talking about it someday.   It's all about touch, the way one page meets another, building a picture from these scraps of color and information. I love the surface texture, the way the little squares make a kind of pixelated image. Look at the skirt, a mosaic of red and pink fragments—it feels like she’s piecing together a memory.   There's something so tender about the two figures. They are built from the world, from the very stuff of everyday life, and it’s like she’s saying, love is everywhere. Karuga's work reminds me a bit of Romare Bearden, another collagist who turned everyday materials into powerful stories. Art's all about these ongoing conversations, isn't it? There are so many possibilities for what this picture could mean, and none of them are wrong.