The Townsend Center presents a yearlong exhibition of original collages by Lynne Huffer. Works on display explore themes of gender, extinction, and the ancient world, and are united by a focus on the influence of the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho.

Trained as a philosopher, Huffer began collaging as a coping strategy during the Covid shutdown of 2020. Since then, she has created a large body of work, including collaborative installations, altered books, and notebooks. Huffer's art is held in numerous special collections, including those of Bryn Mawr College and the Center for Book Arts.

Huffer's collage art grows out of her longstanding engagement with the philosophy of the fragment. In Foucault's Strange Eros (2020), Huffer reinterprets Michel Foucault as a Sapphic thinker, arguing that his understanding of history as discontinuous and fundamentally incomplete resonates with the fragmentary survival of Sappho's poetry, which reaches us through papyrus remains and citations by later authors. Huffer shows how the fractured Sapphic archive serves as a model for Foucault's approach to philosophy and history.

During a fellowship year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2022–23), Huffer began a project exploring the ethics of extinction in the anthropocene. Faced with the reality of the current mass extinction event, she asked how we might think about what seems impossible to comprehend. Returning to Foucault as a Sapphic thinker through her own practice of collage, Huffer found that fragmentation offered a way to approach this difficult subject: by cutting, rearranging, and juxtaposing disparate materials, she could imagine new ways of representing an otherwise unimaginable reality. The resulting book, These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction (Duke UP, 2025), is a richly layered assemblage that moves across ancient Greek culture, historical and contemporary narratives of violence, and Huffer’s personal experiences.

Lynne Huffer, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, is the author of seven books. Her scholarship brings literary criticism, Foucault studies, and philosophical reflection into conversation with questions of sexuality, gender, and history. She and Mario Telò are co-authors of a forthcoming book, The Pleasure of Texting: Sapphic Writing and Reading at the Edge of the World, which documents an extraordinary yearlong texting exchange in which the pair explored philosophical, cultural, and personal themes.