When author and illustrator Bryan Collier spoke with Charlotte Latin’s Lower School students in Thies Auditorium during his March visit to campus, he challenged them to define “collage” — but not to use the words “like” or “stuff.” A crowd of students frantically waved their hands in the air, electrified by Collier’s commanding presence as he engaged them in a conversation about making art. “When I was four I’d watch my grandmother make quilts,” he told them. “Can’t you see a connection between a quilt and a collage?”

Collier has illustrated dozens of picture books, usually with his trademark mixture of collage and watercolors, including City Shapes and All Because You Matter. His biographies include Trombone Shorty, Ode to Grapefruit: How James Earl Jones Found His Voice, and Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope (published before Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, it was the first picture book about him). He has won four Caldecott Honors and six Coretta Scott King Awards. He also spent twelve years as the program director of the Harlem Horizon Art Studio, located inside the Harlem Hospital Center.

Collier spoke of how strongly he identified with the young protagonist in Ezra Jack Keats’ groundbreaking 1962 picture book The Snowy Day — because, he told Latin’s students, he had pajamas just like the ones that the character wore.

During his day-long visit to campus, Collier spoke with students in both the Lower School and the Middle School, including visits to Leadership Labs in which he discussed how he shapes his own experiences into narrative form. He also illuminated his work and discussed questions of identity at a lunch session with adults in the Forum presented by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Team. His visit was also facilitated by Friends of Visual Arts and the Lower School librarians — and made possible by the Latin Arts Association, Student Leadership Development, the Lower School Visual Arts department, and Lower School’s Soar and Serve Day.

Students were fascinated by Collier’s career and his persistence: he went door-to-door from one publisher to another for seven years before he got his first book deal. And for his part, he seemed thrilled by the electrical energy of the visual arts program at Charlotte Latin School, and delighted by the collaged portrait of him, made by students before his visit.

He spoke to students about the mysterious alchemy of art, likening it to the process of baking a cake: “The ingredients have no relationship to each other, but when you put it in the oven, something brand new happens. When I’m making my art, all the ingredients I’m putting together, I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I just know something is going to happen. You make something new.”