National Museum for Women in the Arts, University of Washington Special Collections, Ben Blount, Ester Ervin, Colette Gaiter, Julie McGee, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, The Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts, and the Wits Art Museum.

Colette Gaiter is Professor Emerita in the departments of Africana Studies and Art & Design at the University of Delaware. After working in graphic design for ten years, she began teaching visual communications and computer graphics. She taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and Columbia College Chicago before landing at the University of Delaware in 2006.

She was introduced to book arts in college at Carnegie-Mellon University, where graphic design students hand-set and printed letterpress type and learned to bind hardcover books. Her teaching and other creative pursuits have been mutually generative, keeping her work innovative and interdisciplinary. Mixed-media works, including artist websites (digital interactive books), interactive digital installations, multimedia collages, assemblages, digitally manipulated prints, and artist books, have been exhibited internationally. Her artist books are in collections across the U.S. Her work, in a range of media, almost always combines images and text.

Currently, she writes about artists and designers, particularly Emory Douglas, the original Black Panther Party’s Minister of Culture and activist artist. Since 2005, her essays and articles on his work have appeared in publications including Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, and Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Other arts writing includes essays in The Black Experience in Design, The Education of a Design Writer, and for exhibition catalogs: Delaware Art Museum’s Jazz Age Illustration, the Poster House Museum’s New York Posters, and the Norman Rockwell Museum’s exhibition Imprinted: Illustrating Race.

Her professional lectures and presentations over the years expanded historical and current knowledge of African American creative producers in a range of visual disciplines. As in the book arts, Black creative producers often work across disciplines and are not specifically associated with one medium. She presented lectures on Civil Rights-era graphic design and Emory Douglas for Silas Munro and Brian Johnson’s BIPOC Design History online lecture series, which has continued since 2021.

In 2024, she curated the exhibition “Carrying On: Black Panther Party Artists Continue the Legacy” at Rowan University Museum. Four currently practicing artists who created images for The Black Panther newspaper in the 1970s showed their past and current work.

Colette Gaiter’s work explores under-represented visual phenomena, contributing documentation and ideas that might inform the ongoing cultural conversation.