Aggie Toppins
Low Reserves, 2026
collage on plywood (adhesive-backed digital prints, window film, acrylic paint)
Artist statement
I make collage using materials found in archives, mid-century magazines, and my daily life to index everyday experience and access the historical imagination. I ask questions about how the past remains in the present, with a particular interest in gendered discourses of class. As a graphic designer by training (and an academic researcher by vocation), I am drawn to the polysemous potential of fragmentary forms. I combine my studio background with historical research methods to position these fragments as primary sources. Upon revisiting, recombining, and reinterpreting these sources, I make pictures that engage viewers in cognizant acts of translation.
My most recent body of work explores working-class women’s lives through three generations of family history. I was raised almost exclusively by women with roots in rural Ohio and the coal fields of West Virginia. My grandmothers were born during the Great Depression and raised their children (my mother and aunts) during the Cold War. Their era was marked by significant social and technological changes, yet they left behind little evidence that they ever existed.
Through collage, I trace the contours of their being, contrasting the material and symbolic realities of their lives — how they worked, ate, and passed the time — against visual evidence of the continuation of patriarchal power, from major political events to the media messages that attempted to shape their self-image.
Artist bio
Aggie Toppins is a designer, collagist, and scholar who explores where graphics come from, what
they do, and how they change over time. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at the Saint Louis Artists’ Guild (St. Louis, mo) and the Paul Mesaros Gallery at West Virginia University (Morgantown, wv).
As a scholar, Toppins is the author ofThinking Through Graphic Design History (Bloomsbury 2025) and has contributed writing to several books and field-leading journals. She is an award-winning educator on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis.
Toppins earned a Bachelor of Science in graphic design from the University of Cincinnati in 2003 and a Master of Fine Arts in graphic design from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012.
@aggietoppins
