Art 101 | The Art of Everything: What is Mixed Media?

In an age where disciplines blend and artistic boundaries dissolve, the term mixed media has become something of a catchall—at once precise and elusive. It describes an approach rather than a style, an instinct rather than a movement. In its simplest definition, mixed media refers to any work of art that combines multiple materials or techniques. But at its heart, it is an act of defiance. It refuses the purity of the singular medium, embracing instead the complexity of layers, textures, and contradictions.

A Brief History of Mixing Things Up

Of course, artists have been blending materials for centuries. Gold leaf illuminated Byzantine icons. Oil and tempera shared space on Renaissance panels. But mixed media as an intentional practice—the kind that revels in its hybridity—didn’t fully emerge until the early 20th century, when modernist painters began to look beyond the brush and canvas.

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were among the first to introduce collage into fine art, pasting newspaper clippings and wallpaper scraps into their Cubist compositions. It was a bold move—art had always been about representation, and suddenly, here were real-world materials infiltrating the picture plane. The Dadaists took this further, embracing chance, absurdity, and found objects in their works. Hannah Höch cut and layered photographs into chaotic, disjointed collages. Kurt Schwitters built assemblages from street debris. Marcel Duchamp famously repurposed a urinal and called it Fountain.

By the mid-century, mixed media had evolved beyond the flat surface. Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines series—part painting, part sculpture—merged paint with fabric, wood, and taxidermy, challenging the hierarchy between painting and object.

Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1917, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz at 291 art gallery following the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibit.

Third Time Painting by Robert Rauchenberg, Combine: oil, fabric, wood, metal chain, string, glass bottle fragment with cap, and electric clock on canvas. Image courtesy of the Rauchenberg Foundation.

The Alchemy of Process

Today, mixed media is less a deviation from tradition than a given. The distinctions between mediums—painting, photography, sculpture, digital art—feel increasingly arbitrary. Contemporary artists work across disciplines as fluidly as they scroll between apps. A painter might embed digital prints into their canvas, a sculptor might use AI-generated forms, a photographer might layer encaustic wax over an image. The process is one of excavation: building up, scraping away, leaving behind.

But why mix at all? What compels an artist to reach for something beyond the medium they know best? Perhaps it is an impulse toward expansion. A painting alone might not be enough. A photograph might need something to disturb its surface. There is a particular charge in contrast—the smooth against the rough, the ephemeral against the solid. Paper holds history. Thread carries labor. A found object brings with it a life before the artwork, a meaning the artist can either embrace or subvert.

Tadahiro Gunji

Tadahiro Gunji’s collage practice repurposes found books, layering their pages into narrative images. By cutting, rearranging, and obscuring text, he transforms printed matter into abstract landscapes, exploring memory, time, and the fragility of language.

See more of Gunji’s work.

Between the Layers

Mixed media has also become a way of rethinking materials themselves. In an era of mass production and digital saturation, artists are drawn to the raw and the tactile. They scavenge, recycle, rework. The contemporary mixed media artist might incorporate worn textiles, rusted metal, discarded books—artifacts that tell stories even before they are transformed. There is an intimacy to these objects, a sense of time embedded in their fibers.

And yet, the digital is not excluded from this conversation. Many artists now navigate between physical and virtual realms, merging hand-painted elements with digital manipulation, integrating video, projection, and augmented reality. The medium expands, but the impulse remains the same: to create something that resists being reduced to a single category, that operates in the space between.

Ethan Caflisch

Ethan Caflisch’s A Man I Never Knew is an assemblage series that constructs fragmented portraits of an unknown figure—someone whose belongings the artist inherited but whose identity remains elusive. Through layered mixed media compositions, Caflisch pieces together a narrative from objects left behind, exploring how possessions reflect, distort, and obscure a person’s essence.

Ethan Caflisch’s multimedia works fuse hand-printed photographs, textiles, and handbuilt frames, balancing precision with imperfection. Embracing the beauty of the unprecious, he transforms test prints and experiments into finished pieces. A recurring central figure grounds the shifting textures and tones, while layered materials create a dialogue between process and finality, memory and material, presence and absence.

See more of Caflisch’s work.

Fanny Allié

Fanny Allié stitches together visual narratives, piecing found fabrics into figures that hold the weight of memory and time. Through layered textures and hand-sewn seams, her work evokes presence and absence, transforming discarded materials into bodies that tell quiet, deeply human stories.

See more of Allié’s work.

The Art of Refusal

To work in mixed media is to embrace contradiction. It is both additive and subtractive, constructed and deconstructed. It allows for disruption, for unexpected tensions. It is an art form that refuses to stay within its edges—because there are no edges, only layers, only openings.

In the end, mixed media is less about what it is made of than what it makes possible. It is an art of accumulation, of juxtaposition, of the refusal to choose just one thing when everything is available. It is, perhaps, the most accurate reflection of the way we experience the world: fragmented, overlapping, endlessly in flux.

More Contemporary Artists Working in Mixed Media

Jordan Wright Patterson

Jordan Wright Patterson dyes paper with tea to create warm, organic tones before meticulously hand-cutting it into delicate lines. This process introduces both structure and fragility, transforming everyday materials into layered compositions that turn the paper into a sculptural medium instead of a substrate for an image.

See more of Wright Patterson’s work.

Fei Li

Fei Li’s practice combines oil pastel and acrylic paint, shifting fluidly between the gestures of painting and drawing. This interplay of mediums allows for dynamic mark-making, where bold strokes and delicate lines converge to create layered, expressive compositions.

See more of Li’s work.

Luke Chiswell

Luke Chiswell’s Trophy Series challenges the boundaries of object, action, and meaning by transforming the skateboard into both canvas and medium. The act of skateboarding becomes integral to the process, elevating this fleeting activity into art. Chiswell skates on the board until it breaks, using the motion and force of skating as both destruction and creation.Once fractured, Chiswell carves a phrase into the damaged surface, adding layers of meaning, and then paints or casts the board in metal, preserving the balance between fragility and permanence. This process redefines the skateboard, turning it into a unique artwork where skateboarding itself becomes a tool, much like a paintbrush in traditional art-making.

See more of Chiswell’s work.

Michael DeSutter

Michael DeSutter’s Color Play series begins as a collage-based exploration of color and tone, but the work is fully activated through interaction with the collector. Using found magazine images, DeSutter built a library of 60 works meant to be viewed in shifting arrangements, allowing the collector to shape the final composition. Whether displayed individually or in a curated group, each arrangement transforms into a completed Color Play, merging the artist’s studio practice with the collector’s eye. Through this process, the work remains dynamic, evolving through selection, placement, and the relationships between color and form.

See more of DeSutter’s Work.

Crystal Gregory

Crystal Gregory’s process bridges weaving and sculpture, integrating textile traditions with architectural materials. She hand-dyes her textiles, making the creation of pigment an integral part of her practice before weaving intricate fabrics. These delicate structures are then encased in concrete, allowing the softness of fiber to interact with rigid, industrial surfaces. Through this interplay of soft and hard, she explores themes of tension, permanence, and the relationship between fragility and strength, transforming fiber into structural form.

See more of Gregory’s Work.

Caroline Pinney

Caroline Pinney begins with a pour—coffee staining the canvas in slow, organic currents, setting the foundation for what follows. Over this, she builds depth and structure, refining the forms with charcoal, ink, acrylic paint, and oil stick. Each mark responds to the shifting undertones of the coffee, balancing fluidity with intention. The result is a dialogue between control and surrender, where forms emerge through the tension of material and gesture. In Pinney’s work, composition isn’t imposed but uncovered, coaxed from the surface through a process that feels as much about discovery as creation.

See more of Pinney’s Work.

Chanee Vijay

Chanee Vijay hand-dyes hemp and meticulously sews it together, creating a work that blends collage, textile, and painting. The pigment and hue are embedded into the fabric, allowing color to become an integral part of the material itself.

See more of Vijay’s Work.

Catherine Lucky Chang

Catherine Lucky Chang’s hand-made paper integrates color, line, and texture during the papermaking process itself. By incorporating a variety of media, from natural elements sourced from specific places to pigments that shape both color and composition, Chang’s work collapses image-making and paper-making into one unified experience. The result is a composition where form and material are inseparable, reflecting Taoist principles of balance and interconnection.

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Sara Marlowe Hall

Sara Marlowe Hall’s plaster paintings blur the boundary between sculpture and painting, built through a meticulous process of layering hand-tinted plaster strips. Each work is a study in texture and depth, where the material itself dictates the composition—revealing subtle shifts in tone and form as layers accumulate. The surface, at once structured and organic, holds traces of each gesture, emphasizing both control and spontaneity. Colors emerge through the stacking of tinted plaster, creating a rich, atmospheric palette that feels both grounded and luminous, transforming physical weight into something fluid and dynamic.

See more of Hall’s Work.

Mixed media thrives in the space between categories, pushing the boundaries of what art can be and how it is made. By blending materials, artists expand not just their visual language but the very conversation around materiality and process. A single medium tells one story; a fusion of mediums complicates, enriches, and disrupts. In contemporary art, where traditions are questioned and innovation is constant, mixed media serves as both an experiment and a challenge—one that invites viewers to consider not just the image, but the history, labor, and transformation embedded within the work itself.