Special Episode: Noble Liverpool
Artist Noble Liverpool
In this episode, Detroit-based abstract artist Noble Liverpool invites us into a practice where collage becomes more than composition, it becomes a language.
About the Artist
Noble Liverpool is a Black abstract artist based in Detroit, Michigan. They work primarily in abstract collage, book arts, and suminagashi. They have a formal education from Columbia College Chicago in fine art photography, they called Chicago home for 14 years before moving to North Carolina then settling in Detroit. Their childhood in a mixed race household with extended family always at home solidified their Black identity, passion for speaking through art, and love of their Trinidadian heritage.
Their art is bold, emotional and layered with intention - being Black, queer, trans, and neurodivergent while navigating complex life experiences like grief, isolation, poverty, and homelessness due to medical racism and an unjust lack of care cannot be ignored as you experience their art. Their work often explores difficult to discuss subject matter in a way that demonstrates deep duality - the humanity of life's grief simultaneous to glimmers of lightness and love that keep us anchored.
Connection, communication, and community are Noble’s main focus in creating art as sovereignty, allowing them to be fully themselves. They believe in the revolutionary power of being firmly rooted, planting seeds of joy + living loudly despite adversity. They have a strong belief in the power of art to supply us all with more hope, believing some days we must borrow hope from those we admire when ours falls short in supply.
In 2024, Noble designed their first art book, ‘A Zine to Let My Heart Speak;’ a 24 page full color book featuring their largest body of work to date. They also began a mail art swap for Black visual artists to share their creations and connect with peers across the country.
Inside Liverpool’s Studio + Process
“My art is rooted in fragmented duality. Abstraction allows me to balance oppositional elements, creating surface tension. In Suminagashi - the ancient Japanese art of floating ink - I bend ink on the water’s surface creating patterns of color we cannot reproduce. In abstract collage I get to do the same, incorporating gestural mark making, asemic writing, watercolor inks, paper scraps, and sumi paper to make a style of collage that feels uniquely my own. Finishing my collages often includes scraping the surface of the paper adding imperfection, erasing pencil lines messily, gluing trash or pencil shavings into the art or using splashes of paint to draw the eye in towards easily missed details.Collaging feels like bending time and energy, creating conflict with paper and stability by piecing them back together. Fragments made to fit despite difference, in texture, size, pattern and color. My artistic style balances sharp contrast with hyper pigmented bursts of color, flowing patterns with geometrical cut outs, wrinkles and tears with gestural scratches and thick curving lines. The work I make correlates directly with the complexity of my life experiences. It has provided me comfort and safety moving through impossibility. Hope when there was almost none. Conceptually my work illustrates how my racial identity, disabilities, gender and sexuality, and my survival needs clash with the way I am perceived in the world, the way I struggle to be embraced. I am deeply sensitive, emotionally complex, and evolving. My work is a bid for connection and a representation of me moving through the world - colorful, surprising, sometimes harsh, but full of light.”
-Noble Liverpool, Artist Statement (2026)
And It Felt Electric - 2026, 7×7 inches
Serpentine - 2025, analogue collage, 5×7 inches
See/k - 2024, analogue collage, 32×40 inches
Photo credit: Alexxus (IG: @alexxuslens)
“When you see my art, you will see my full humanity on the page. I’ll incorporate things I’m processing, things I’ve been through or even words about my experience that are heavy... I am incorporating them into these beautiful flowing shapes and neon colors.”
And on that day joy was all around them like water - 2026, analogue collage, 24x18 inches
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Bio + images courtesy of Liverpool.
