Laura Collins Dissects Celebrity Culture

by J. Howard Rosier (MFA 2018)
Photo by Leah Wendzinski

Britney Spears stares dead-eyed toward the left of the frame while wearing a beige trench coat—eyeglasses hanging on her shirt collar.

Cropped from the waist up, the late Princess Diana curtsies on a sunny day amid a group of smiling onlookers, strands of her hair blown backward by the wind, apprehension on her face as a man takes a bit too much pleasure in kissing her hand. Eyes tearing, Taylor Armstrong of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is comforted by fellow cast member Kyle Richards while she angrily points off-camera at Dee Dee Crawford—the background murky and darkened and their figures rendered in warm tones, as if spotlighted. You’ve seen them all before, but not like this.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alum Laura Collins (MFA 2021) is a pop culture interpreter. Her paintings (mostly done in acrylic) wipe away the ennui of streaming and scrolling to reveal women who are fleeing, hiding, gesticulating, and brandishing their cosmetic surgery wounds while we watch and comment. Local write-ups in the Chicago Reader and Michigan Avenue magazine, and the hustle of her gallerists—Matt Harkins and Viviana Rosales Olen at THNK1994 Museum, and the gallerists at salonlb. in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood—have culminated in exhibitions throughout Chicago and New York that have been covered in Artnet, Vice, Smithsonian, Rolling Stone, and Refinery29, among other publications. Superficially, the appeal lies in the familiarity of the material, but Collins is less interested in glamour than in vulnerability. 

“Whatever your practices or whatever your focus is, there's a space for you.”

“I actually don't know a ton about celebrity culture,” said Collins, who remains based in Chicago. “I find certain things about celebrity culture to be interesting in an absurd way. But I'm not the biggest fan.” Her brilliance is to sift through these images to find where the facade breaks.

“I feel like I try to pick the moments that speak to me that feel the most relatable and the most human,” she said. “So that tends to be moments of wondering, or faltering. I hope that other people see the paintings and feel that they can relate to those feelings of discomfort or scrutiny.”

One needs only to look at Warhol’s silkscreens of Jackie O. to acknowledge the emotional register familiarity can reach. “Warhol is my favorite artist,” Collins said, for his ability to look at much-seen images from a different angle. She also admires the line work of David Hockney, Alex Katz’s “soothing” tones of colors, and the work of Barbara Kruger. Her years studying the foundations of art at Trinity High School in River Forest, Illinois, set Collins up for the arts program of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the curriculum of which was very focused on conceptual art during her time there.

“That helped me really think about, what are you painting and why are you painting it?” she said. It also sparked Collins’s interest in celebrity. Through a steady accumulation of images for her collages, she began to notice the nuances of how celebrity women were rendered. These conversations were accentuated by a new media studies degree and a certificate in women’s studies at DePaul University.

This combination of experiences prepared her for graduate school at SAIC, which was a return of sorts: Collins studied in the School’s Early College Program, where she now teaches. Her affinity for portraiture arose from a desire to improve her fundamentals by learning to draw faces. While studying for her master’s, she learned from Associate Professor Mari Eastman, Associate Professor Jose Lerma, Professor Michelle Grabner, and Professor Lisa Wainwright to value her work and the necessity of powering through moments of doubt. She was able to follow her intuition while receiving in-depth, but open-ended, feedback. 

“Whatever your practices or whatever your focus is, there's a space for you,” she said.

This past spring, Collins worked on a hand-drawn animation of Britney Spears’s Instagram posts, which she released in the summer of 2022. The Real Housewives Pointing Fingers series, which includes the Armstrong piece, is currently on display at the Dollop Coffee on 345 East Ohio Street in Chicago. These two series, along with Princess Diana Curtsying and The Olsen Twins Hiding from the Paparazzi, have taken up a chunk of Collins’s media coverage. Just don’t call it fan art. ■