Cowboys, The Kinks, Chinese factories, the street names of old Paris, the reservoirs of New York, yesterday’s tomorrows: Lucy Sante, the writer and cultural historian, gleans the past, squints and pores over it, bends it into new shapes. Printed matter is sacred to her. Handbills and flyers, pulp fictions and penny dreadfuls, mass-market ephemera.

Those same compulsions are present in Knots, an exhibition devoted to Sante’s collages. She’s been making them for nearly six decades and, more lately, sharing some on social media. Now they’re on display in the basement library of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a tony setting—here a globe, there a grand piano—that accentuates their off-kilter charm and quiet perversities.

Haussmann, or the Barricades (1979), which at less than letter size is one of the larger pieces, has a suggestive chunklet of text referencing “dream elements.” Most of the collages draw from early- and mid-twentieth-century sources—ads, games, medical textbooks. Some individuals look as if they’ve just stumbled back from WWI trenches—or the pages of a Surrealist journal. Colors pop. Words are used concisely—“Double Bubble,” the Ed-Ruscha-esque “OOF.” What’s not here? The savage satire of John Heartfield, punk’s ripped-and-torn aesthetics. Instead, whether on those collages framed on the Academy’s walls or presented as postcards on its bookshelf ledges, there are artful, tactile memories—of youthful yearning, the scent of big cities, magical modernism. —Sukhdev Sandhu