#assemblages

Aldwyth, via Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, photographed by Rick Rhodes

Mary Aldwyth Dickman (Nov 21, 1935 – April 10, 2026), simply known as Aldwyth, was an American artist in South Carolina who created complex collages and assemblages from found materials.

Her work is principally about and minutely engaged with the history of art and culture. She worked "in relative seclusion from the larger art world". via W

Nóra Békés - Assemblages

Everywhere among us, there are assemblages of species at work. We may not notice their labor, but we will notice when they are gone. By eradicating them we are eliminating our companions who sustain us, the assemblages to which we, too, belong. The coot, the hoverfly, the cattail, the clover, the thistle, and the horsetail. We don’t know which species, which individuals, will be laid down in the fossil record of our deep future. But we can imagine the elegies to be written for them.

some other days...

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show will be on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

Judith Scott began making art at age 46, producing an extraordinary body of idiosyncratic sculptural assemblages in a career spanning just seventeen years. From 1989 until her death in 2005, Scott worked assiduously at Creative Growth, a studio-based program in Oakland, California, founded to support artists with developmental disabilities. Fastidiously weaving, bundling, and wrapping fiber, found objects, and other unconventional materials, she often worked for weeks or months on a single piece. Scott’s life experience as an artist with Down syndrome who was also deaf and did not speak highlights the limitations of the conventional art-historical canon. Moving beyond the term “outsider artist,” critics and curators have recently contextualized her objects within mainstream modern and contemporary art history, telling a richer, more complex story about how artistic gifts can be nurtured and compelling works of art can be made.