Through assemblage and juxtaposition, Troy Montes Michie (b. 1985) creates work centering the Black male body and considers how it has historically been marginalized, fetishized, idealized, and criminalized. Often in dialogue with the canon of collage, Michie investigates society’s understanding of race, gender, sexuality, and other fields of identity and power.

Inspired by the poem “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” published in 1926 in Fire!! magazine by writer and painter Richard Bruce Nugent—one of the few openly gay Black men of the time—Michie created The Talking Skull and its Bronzed Silhouette (Meta Warwick Fuller) (2024) for his series Smoke Lilies, which examines the material past through family photo albums. Motivated by untold stories of the Harlem Renaissance like Nugent’s, Michie uses layered images sourced from vintage erotic magazines with drawn-on clothing, textiles, and cut paper to interrogate and subvert dominant stereotypes. Michie offers counternarratives that further question hidden histories by referencing the precarious nature of memory and the examination of what gets included, recorded, or lost from one’s lived experience. The resulting work in his “Banner Project” is a nonlinear exotification of political resistance, transgressive self-expression, and gesture.