Louis Armstrong is internationally renowned as a trumpet player and vocalist (he had hit records for five decades), actor (appearances in more than 30 films), and writer (two autobiographies and thousands of letters). Yet few people know that Armstrong created more than 500 collages, clipped and ... Read more
Louis Armstrong is internationally renowned as a trumpet player and vocalist (he had hit records for five decades), actor (appearances in more than 30 films), and writer (two autobiographies and thousands of letters). Yet few people know that Armstrong created more than 500 collages, clipped and assembled from photographs, news stories, postcards, letters, telegrams, and other diverse material. Made in part to pass the time, the result was a body of sometimes sophisticated and sometimes whimsical works of art.
“The art of collage is very much like the art of jazz,” said Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum. “Found material is divided and then rearranged to create new meanings. Many of Louis’s collages display multiple layers of meaning which are more intuitive than deliberate.” Armstrong himself acknowledged that his collage-making was like improvising a jazz solo. As he wrote to a friend in 1953, “My hobbie (sic) is to pick out the different things…and piece them together…making a little story of my own.”
A Little Story of My Own provides the public a rare opportunity to view the collages. Except for several that were loaned to a national traveling exhibit sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution in the early 1990s, Armstrong’s collages have never been exhibited outside of the Louis Armstrong House Museum. In fact, all but one of the collages in this exhibit are on view for the first time.
