Most of us remember our grade-school art classes, in which we cut up construction paper or magazine photographs and glued them together to make a collage. Few of us thought then that we were making art, for it seemed so much fun.

But this personal and beautiful medium is full of expressive possibilities that can reveal the artist's most intimate thoughts and feelings. On December 16, regionally known artist and calligrapher Shelly Voss opens a retrospective exhibit of her magical collage meditations. The reception runs from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Leger Gallery in downtown Davenport, and the exhibit will be up through January 19.

Jim Riesberg's most recent series of large-format collages originated from an auctioned four-pound box of vintage photographs, musty old invoices, advertisements, and water-stained inventory sheets from a hardware store that had been in business in the 1880s. By scanning and combining these written and visual sources, he has created a many-layered body of images, full of emotion.

In the 1985 HBO mockumentary The History of White People in America, co-writer and host Martin Mull offered the world mayonnaise-loving WASPs - suburbanites who had lost any sense of their roots, to the point that one child's understanding of his own heritage was limited to the streets on which he and his parents had lived.

White people, the show seemed to be saying, are beyond ethnicity and culture.

Mull doesn't see a meaningful connection between that work and his paintings, which will be shown at the Figge Art Museum in a retrospective that opens October 28. The only link, he said in an interview last month, is that they reflect his upbringing in Ohio. "It comes from the same vein," he said, "the same mother lode."

When Joe Kelley was organizing the current Church | State exhibit for the Bucktown Center for the Arts, artist Les Bell asked him: "Is this going to be a blue show or a red show?" Kelley recalled.

In an interview this week, Kelley said he was hoping to find something in between: "I was hoping it would be a purple show."

It's curious that two arenas that are often best kept separated - art and politics - share the language of color. Blue signifies the Democrats on the electoral map, and red the Republicans. And red used to represent the threat of communism, whose adherents were of course called pinkos.

Yet those color labels reduce complex subjects and issues - even the populations of entire regions - and rob them of nuance.