Billy Copley: Bags, Maps, and Ledgers
Exhibition Dates: October 24 – November 22, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 24, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Room for Art is pleased to present Bags, Maps, and Ledgers, an exhibition of collage and works on paper by Billy Copley. Across three series, Copley builds his work from everyday things: the shopping bag, the map, and the ledger page.
Born in Los Angeles and educated there and in New York, including at Chouinard Art School, Copley lives and works in New York City and the Hudson Valley. His career spans over five decades, from the Guggenheim Museum's 1971 "Ten Young Artists: Theodoron Awards" to solo exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Cleveland, and Fort Worth.
His ongoing Bag Series treats the plastic shopping bag as a free-floating form that morphs from container to animal to electric guitar to cartoon head. Copley sets out to elevate these objects into "something miraculous and extraordinary." Once painted on plastic sheeting and transferred to paper, the bags are then built from layers of prepared rice and mulberry papers, and painted and printed with plaids, grids, checkerboards, and stripes. Cut and glued, the papers form the bag and the atmosphere around it. Cartoons, Mexican souvenirs, American folk art, and paint-store stencils each find their way in.
The 13 New World Maps, begun during COVID-19, strip that method down to figure and ground. Portrait silhouettes give way to shapes that read as countries or continents, brighter and more graphic than the bags. The Ledger Drawings are looser. Copley draws and collages on pages torn from a late-1940s ledger, each carrying handwritten names, dates, and numbers, and builds an "imagined historical document" that reads as a record of life's successes and failures.
