How to Use bricolage in a Sentence

bricolage

noun
  • Science is a bricolage in which no single gene or feature can explain human evolution.
    — Wired, 14 July 2022
  • The performance, composed in thematic layers, is itself a kind of bricolage.
    — Charles McNulty, latimes.com, 16 Apr. 2018
  • The whole house is an act of bricolage, from the surrealist staircase to the adobe embankment dripping with ferns against the neighboring plot.
    — New York Times, 15 Feb. 2021
  • But her poetic bricolage took on a new urgency as the memory of war was reactivated.
    — Sophie Pinkham, Harper's Magazine, 25 May 2021
  • How cities manage gentrification can yield an engaging and integrated bricolage, or not.
    — Bruce Fuller, The Mercury News, 20 Aug. 2019
  • From the music to the movie stills, the restaurant seems like an exercise in pop culture bricolage, meant to pique one’s interest without sustaining it with anything meaningful.
    — Soleil Ho, SFChronicle.com, 13 June 2019
  • Simultaneously there was a gathering of fragments in bricolage designs that conveyed a power-in-numbers or parts-making-a-whole kind of symbolism.
    — Laird Borrelli-Persson, Vogue, 29 Jan. 2024
  • But her art retained a visceral energy and an underlying gruesomeness, and in the sixties her bricolage works again incorporated direct references to the body, or body parts.
    — The New Yorker, 29 May 2017
  • Madonna’s shows are known for being meticulous and highly conceptual, but this bricolage of past styles and aesthetics made Celebration feel unusually scrappy.
    — Shaad D’souza, Pitchfork, 18 Oct. 2023
  • Their garments are a hodgepodge of deadstock textiles and mismatched notions that evoke Mike Kelley's playful bricolage artworks and Rodarte’s artisanally holy knitwear.
    — Lilah Ramzi, Vogue, 31 Jan. 2018
  • Accordingly, Water From Your Eyes’ proggy, taut, alt-rock bricolage captures an existential absurdity.
    — Jenn Pelly, Time, 4 Dec. 2025
  • Accordingly, Water From Your Eyes’ proggy, taut, alt-rock bricolage captures a certain existential absurdity.
    — Jenn Pelly, Time, 4 Dec. 2025
  • But her next record, partially recorded with Frou Frou’s Guy Sigsworth, foregrounds Margaret’s vocals against a bricolage of Gregorian chants, icy electro pop and turntablist flourish.
    — Nina Corcoran, Pitchfork, 23 Mar. 2026
  • Kinships with craftwork, toys, folk or outsider art, and bricolage inevitably suggest themselves, only to be plowed under by the rigor of an aesthetic as sophisticated as that of an Alexander Calder or a Joseph Cornell.
    — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 4 June 2017
  • In 1962, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss used bricolage to describe how people will recycle old cultural components and create something new.
    — Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 22 Apr. 2012
  • Just as Instagram’s nostalgic filters and the bricolage identity-curation platforms like Pinterest were catching on, here was someone gluing together disparate references using a Super 8 aesthetic.
    — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 15 Sep. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bricolage.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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