Emily Krill

Emily Krill
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

STATEMENT

Antique paper carries a particular kind of presence. The loop of a signature, the fade of ink, the texture of a page worn by a century or more of handling are not merely aesthetic qualities. They are evidence. Someone lived, worked, wrote, and left a mark.

My large-scale collages are built from ledgers, letters, blueprints, lessons, and autograph books spanning the early 1800s through the mid-1900s. I collect these materials for what they hold: the narrative residue of ordinary lives, the handwritten and the printed, the intimate and the institutional. Through the act of collage, I fragment and reconfigure them into new compositions that ask what it means to preserve, to disrupt, and to remember.

I am drawn to paper ephemera that was never meant to be art. That tension is where my work lives.

BIO

Emily Krill is a Pittsburgh-based collage artist, represented by ZYNKA Gallery, whose large-scale works are constructed from antique paper ephemera collected over years of dedicated searching. Her source materials span the 1800s through the 1970s and include ledgers, letters, blueprints, and children’s lessons, chosen as much for their historical context as for their visual and tactile qualities.

Krill maintains several ongoing bodies of work, among them the “Moving Still Lives Series,” the “Handwritten Seas Series,” and the “Orange Tree Series.” She also accepts private commissions incorporating genealogical and archival materials, creating collages that weave together a family’s documentary history into a single cohesive work. Notable commissions include Strong Roots, created for The Pittsburgh Foundation.

Her work has been exhibited throughout the Pittsburgh arts community, including the group exhibition “Color Stories” at Atithi Studios in Sharpsburg and her current solo exhibition “What Remains,” on view at The Portal in Bakery Square through May 2026. She writes about historical ephemera and the stories behind her finds through an ongoing collector’s blog.

ARTIST CONTACT

EMAIL | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

IMAGES