Lucy Sante

Picture Theory is pleased to present Two Strikes on a Snow Man, an exhibition of collages by Lucy Sante, on view concurrently with her exhibition titled Knots at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Sante has been making collages for nearly sixty years. What began in adolescence—with scissors, Elmer’s glue, and stacks of magazines—became a lifelong, parallel practice: what she calls her violon d’Ingres, an outlet that answered a permanent need to make images when drawing could not.

After relocating to New York and working at the Strand Bookstore, Sante found herself immersed in a flood of discarded printed matter—paperbacks, maps, technical manuals, propaganda, and magazines—much of which she preserved and continues to use decades later. In the late 1970s she created collaged gig flyers for downtown bands, wheat-pasting them across the city. Though the practice paused for years, she never relinquished the materials. In recent years she has returned to collage with renewed focus, drawing from an archive that spans the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, favoring matte surfaces marked by foxing, fading, stains, and tears.

Sante situates herself within a lineage that includes Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Joseph Cornell, and Robert Rauschenberg, yet her works remain distinctly her own: spare, text-forward compositions she thinks of as “posters,” often structured from only a word, a figure, and a ground. Dominated by charged phrases and isolated images, they suggest advertisements for imaginary films or vanished futures. “I think of my collages as tightly held knots of ambiguity,” Sante writes—objects that can be consumed at a glance yet introduce a thought just beyond meaning. The works in Two Strikes on a Snow Man embody this tension between immediacy and opacity. Drawing on a century-old visual vocabulary, Sante compresses memory, innocence, commerce, and estrangement into compact visual poems that resist resolution while inviting sustained attention.

Presented in dialogue with her concurrent institutional exhibition, this focused presentation foregrounds Sante’s collage practice as essential rather than ancillary: an art of salvage, compression, and quiet insistence, sustained across decades.