Community Collage

It’s the kind of commission any artist would savor. For Sonya Michel ’64, a retired professor emerita from the University of Maryland, being asked to create a special collage for her congressional representative, Jamie Raskin,

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was an especially sweet affirmation of her second career as an artist.

Eight years ago, a serendipitous encounter with Raskin at a street fair in Maryland led to the purchase of one of her paintings. The two stayed in touch. After Raskin’s cancer diagnosis last year, Michel learned from a Washington Post article that he had been wearing bandanas gifted to him by Steven Van Zandt, the actor and guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, who is known for his own collection of head coverings. Since she had already used a section of a bandana in a collage, she sent Raskin a photo of the work, which led to yet another sale.

This past spring, Raskin told Michel he was trying to figure out what to do with all the bandanas his constituents had been sending to him during his recent cancer treatment. Michel stepped up to incorporate some of those bandanas into a distinctive collage, which Raskin gave to his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, as a birthday gift.

The transformation from retired academic to practicing artist wasn’t too much of a stretch, says Michel. As a professor of history and women’s and gender studies, she took an interest in “the materials of everyday life." Her work has been shown at galleries in Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.

Reflecting on the project, she told the Washington Post that when she began assembling the bandanas, she realized that “they don’t always go together; they’re not always that harmonious. In fact, sometimes they contrast and even conflict, which is exactly the way our society works.”