A Collagist Pieces Houston Together Through Paper

For Treva McKissac, the materials in her collages have to be more than just pretty or unusual paper; they have to be Houston to the bone. When she works on a creation, she treats the canvas like a farm-to-table endeavor, seeking out flyers, newspapers, posters, and books specifically printed in the city, ensuring that the finished product has H-town all the way down to its core atomic structure. 

“This is the place that has afforded me the most lessons,” said McKissac in a phone interview. “This is the place where I had to start from scratch. Most of my creations are here in Houston with a bit of Houston somewhere, whether or not it's junk mail, or old school Houston Chronicles. When people find out that I love paper, they’re like, hey, Treva, here's these stacks of magazines. Would you like this?” 

From these scraps she produces remarkable canvasses highlighting her favorite subjects like mushrooms, crystals, and Black womanhood. Most resemble art deco structures that have gone slightly feral, growing past the sharp, gaudy lines of taste into something wilder and freer. There is a sense of escape in her canvasses, as if the subjects have unshackled themselves from their previous paper context to walk a liberated runway under her guidance.

Born in Brazoria, Texas, McKissac moved to Houston in 1995 to work as an English and art teacher, which she did in various school districts all over the city. For 25 years, she instructed students in Houston until she retired at the end of 2019 to focus on her own creations. From an early age, she was obsessed with paper. Even wrapping Christmas presents became an artform for her, taking a simple task and transforming it into a picturesque centerpiece. 

Once she moved to Houston, the city’s art scene immediately transfixed her and changed the way she saw paper arts.

“Houston is really a place of so much opportunity,” she said. “You can find any niche, any community, or you can build it with ease in Houston. I travel, I go to different places but Houston is it. I love the community and the possibility of just being a builder.”

Though she’s no longer a public school teacher, McKissac is still engaged in teaching and building the next generation of artists. She runs regular collage workshops out of Hardy and Nance Studios. 

One student of hers is Mandy Trichell, one of the city’s most unique polymaths. Between her stints as a queer wrestling referee and photographing thrashed Barbie dolls on weird adventures, she took one of McKissac’s classes this year.

“Treva's workshop felt like talking a college class,” said Trichell in an email interview. “She had us watch bits of documentaries on different artists - a musician and a stylist - which resulted in lively conversation around the room that got creativity flowing. I came away from the class with an entirely different perspective on the art of collage, and a new creative outlet that I'm still enjoying. When I look at Treva's work, it feels like all this possibility and liberation from the norm. It feels like she's saying to the viewer that they have permission to be a little wild, a little unhinged. I feel invited into her work, as opposed to just viewing it.” 

The medium of collage is inherently fractured. The whole idea is to break something to make something else, to strip away someone’s previous interpretation of an image and give it new, sometimes totally contradictory context.

For McKissac, collage is about using new contexts to remind people of things they may have forgotten. Repurposing paper goods from her adopted city allows the people who live in Houston to focus on things that were previously mundane set dressings and junk. It’s one of the reasons her style of collage has found such an appreciative audience in the city. By focusing on the detritus of Houston, she forms connections with the people who originally threw her materials away.  

“ I want people to know there's so much out there we could focus on that's beautiful,” said McKissac. “I love things that people discard without thought or seemingly dismiss. Because to me, that beauty, I want to pull it up front to remind you, hey, it's more than the world that we all have, our own little bubbles. My collage allows me to pop my bubble to see what else is out there. There’s power in minutia, and and I find that when people take a look at those things in different ways, it shows you that we're all connected in some kind of way.”