How Collage Artist Mark
Wagner Makes Portraits
From Dollar Bills
By Kristin Hohenadel
Brooklyn-­‐based collage artist Mark Wagner uses real dollar bills to make his series of currency portraits of American icons like Abraham Lincoln (close-­‐up).f Courtesy of Mark Wagner Courtesy of Mark Wagner
Brooklyn-based collage artist Mark Wagner is well-known for his series of meticulously
crafted “currency portraits” made from deconstructed dollar bills reassembled into the
faces of politicians and cultural figures. Wagner has said that the taboo of destroying
dollar bills makes people pay attention to his work in a way they would not were he using
any other kind of paper as a medium. Money elicits high emotions; it’s something people
worry about and fight over. Anarchists think he’s an anarchist, he says, because he cuts
up the tools of the oppression. Capitalists think he’s a capitalist because he revels in the
“almighty dollar.”
But if this is the kind of art that speaks for itself, I was curious to learn more about
Wagner's design process and recently spoke to him to find out more about how he works.
“A dollar bill is a great piece of paper for an artist,” Wagner told me by phone. “There’s no
commercially available paper that’s that hard and durable, because it’s hyper-engineered
by the government to be passed around by tens of thousands of people.”
Abe Lincoln by Mark Wagner Courtesy of Mark Wagner
Defacing currency for artistic purposes is allowed in Europe, but technically illegal in
America. Nevertheless, Wagner’s work is collected by institutions including the Museum
of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian. And
Wagner said that he has never heard of an artist being prosecuted for killing money (one
artist in California who makes military-themed dollar bill collages even claims torn-up bills
as a tax deduction).
Wagner cut up his first dollar bill in 1999. How did it feel?
Barack Obama by Mark Wagner Courtesy of Mark Wagner
“It’s taken me years to shake that cringe factor of feeling like I’m doing something I
shouldn’t be doing,” he said. But after sacrificing around $10,000 over the years for his
art, the act of carving up dollar bills with an X-Acto knife, which he often does while
watching TV, has lost its emotional power. “Now I don’t think about it like money,” he
said, “and it’s easy to cut up.”
To make a currency portrait, Wagner starts with a pencil sketch on paper based on
source material before painstakingly assembling the collages, sometimes working with an
assistant, in a process that takes between 30 and 40 hours to complete.
In the early days, Wagner gathered his art supplies by hoarding dollar bills after breaking
a $20 at the deli, but he has learned to plan ahead, ordering a fresh stack of 1,000 dollar
bills from the bank. New “crispy” bills work best, he said, because the color of old bills can
become dingy from too much handling. Plus, fresh singles lack the pungent odor of a
well-circulated bill. Obama vs. Romney Courtesy of Mark Wagner
New bills, he said, have the scent of “production, of the press room, so there’s probably
linseed oil and gum arabic and talc from the printing process.” Used dollar bills, on the
other hand, are redolent with “the stink of a gym locker, just from people handling it.”
Wagner said he’s learned over the years that the scale of the images on a dollar bill is
best suited to life-size portraits. While he slices bills into 20 to 25 individual components,
there are core elements that he repeatedly uses as building blocks: The oval around
George Washington is roughly the size of a human eye socket and the Treasury seal
functions well as an iris, for example. Foliage motifs often work well as hair and
eyebrows.
He said he sometimes puzzles out the design of a collage using photocopies of dollar
bills so as not to throw money away on a rough draft, which is a funny admission given
that this whole line of his work is built on stripping money of its buying power.
I.O.U. by Mark Wagner Courtesy of Mark Wagner
Check out this time-lapse video of the artist and his assistant Cat Glennon at work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH5WFlla5zA
Kristin Hohenadel is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Fast
Company, Vogue, Elle Decor, Lonny, and Apartment Therapy.