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College to collages: Artist Billy Renkl '85 returns to exhibit, educate at Auburn

Billy Renkl's award-winning mixed media work can be found around the world. Even among all his accolades, exhibiting at the Auburn University gallery where his career started left him overwhelmed with emotion.

Universities and colleges, hotels, museums and medical centers across the country have all housed Renkl's collections. He's exhibited throughout the U.S., as well as in Germany, and serves as a professor of art at Austin Peay State University.

Renkl said everything he studied at Auburn serves as inspiration to this day.

"This is where I turned into myself," Renkl said. "Up to the time I was 18, people were loving and generous, but they were telling me who I was. Then I got to Auburn and the question was, 'Who am I going to be?' That happened in every class. It happened in English, it happened in philosophy, it happened in anthropology and psychology."

Renkl's collage work is part creation, part curation. By reusing materials such as postcards from the 1950s, as he did in "Utopiaville," Renkl creates a tapestry of color, texture and story that transcends the frame. "Utopiaville" crafts a perfect world which does not exist but is created through idyllic postcards from the past given new life on canvas.

"Everything in here has a history that it brings to the artwork," Renkl said. "That's super interesting to me whether I'm going to use it or contradict it or push against it. But I'm always aware of the life. It's like they retired from being postcards and then I hired them to do something else, but their experience as postcards informs what they do."

Publishing houses and universities to The New York Times and Southwest Airlines have commissioned his illustrations. Notably, he illustrated "The Comfort of Crows" and "Late Migrations," both by his sister and Auburn English alumna Margaret Renkl '84.

Earlier this year, Billy and Margaret spoke at the annual Alabama OLLI Day. OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Auburn University, provides classes, public lectures, socials and field trips for the retired community. Renkl taught in the same classroom he once had as an Auburn freshman.

On Aug. 22, Renkl returned to Auburn for an artist lecture and closing reception for his exhibit, "The world is on its way to you always," at Biggin Gallery.

He encouraged current students to soak it all in – the courses outside of their major, lessons from faculty who deeply respect their subject matter and every opportunity to see the world in a new and beautiful way.

"There's so much to pay attention to. Your education serves you the rest of your life," Renkl said. "The goal has to be being educated, and graduation just happens as a byproduct of that."

The artist lecture and closing reception were sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

Learn more about the Department of Art & Art History in the College of Liberal Arts.

Tags: Art and Art History Arts and Culture Alumni