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WORLD COLLAGE DAY | KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Corporeal Gestures
at the Portland State University School of Architecture in Portland, Oregon, USA through 29 April 2022. In 2019, collage artist Clive Knights put out an international call for submissions from collage artists, asking them to respond to nine “muses”, characterized as the bodily necessities of breathing, nourishing, sleeping, discharging waste, procreating, resisting the earth’s pull, communicating, aging and dying. The result is an exhibition of work by more than 100 collage artists from twenty-one countries. The work presents a diverse response to the ways in which our actions, rhythms, relationships and shared experience of being alive are both predetermined and made possible by the modicum of matter borrowed from the world that constitutes each of our bodies. The project challenged collage artists to consider how one’s body is activated in the world–acting, gesturing, making–amidst the shared rhythms pertaining to our common, mortal predicament in a single, unfolding cosmos. MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
The Art of Jean LaMarr
at the Nevada Museum of Art through 29 May 2022. “The Art of Jean LaMarr” is a major retrospective of the work of one the most influential Native American artists practicing today. The exhibition presents more than 100 paintings, prints, and sculptures spanning five decades of the art and activism of Jean LaMarr (b. 1945), whose melding of post-modern eclecticism and Native American motifs and subject matter has affirmed the dignity of Native American women, addressed the legacy of colonialism, and above all sounded a ringing “rejection of the idea of the vanished American Indian.” MORE
COLLAGE RESIDENCY
Poetry & Collage Residency – Round 2
After learning a lot from March’s artists, Kolaj Institute heads back in for another round and we’re excited to announce the next twelve artists selected to participate in the Poetry & Collage Residency. Throughout April, through discussion and collaboration, the participating artists and writers will investigate what is at the intersection of collage and poetry. Their efforts will result in a publication of the work they’ve made throughout the month. MORE
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Joyful, Whimsical & Dark
Winscombe, North Somerset, United Kingdom. Ros Cuthbert embraces joyful, whimsical and dark imagery. Musical, theatrical, ecological, socio-political and personal themes permeate her work. Cuthbert has worked with a variety of materials and for the past few years has explored collage with paint and graphic media. The colored or printed pieces offer a visual conversation between design and meaning which can allow the image to develop in surprising ways. MORE
CALL TO ARTISTS
Create for Ukraine
Sunday, 24 April 2022, 9AM EDT/3PM CEST. Art Therapist Julia Volonts facilitates a three-hour art therapy workshop on Zoom using collage for social action to provide community support, raise funds and further awareness on the war in Ukraine. Donation Fee to Participate: $25 USD. All proceeds will go to the Kyiv Collage Collective. MORE
CALL TO ARTISTS
ColabCollage
Deadline: Tuesday, 10 May 2022 (residents of Europe only). Brazilian-Swiss collagist Ana Barros’ idea for World Collage Day 2022 is to create together! Ana will start a collage on an A6 sheet (148x105mm) and mail it to the participants to finish it. Participants have until Tuesday, 10 May 2022 to complete it and send her a photo (or scanned image). Ana will put all the artworks together and prepare a video with them to celebrate World Collage Day. For logistical reasons, Ana can only mail starter collages to residents of Europe. A digital starter collage will be made available for non-Europeans to take part. MORE
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Reveal What’s Beneath
Brooklyn, New York, USA. Meghan Larimer’s collages are her visual diary, interpretations of thoughts and observations, therapy for her wild range of feelings, and a visualization of the poetic narrative in her head. They vary from whimsical to violent, dreamy and surreal. Inspired by the unintentional collage of New York and other cities, Larimer writes, “The street art and walls tell a story of the transient art that is constantly changing with every tag, poster, and attempt to cover it all up with a fresh coat of paint, only to be peeled away to reveal what’s beneath. I try to replicate this beautiful process in my work.” MORE
CALL TO ARTISTS
Collagists in the Archives
Deadline: Sunday, 17 April 2022. The materials collage artists use for the artwork can play a critical role in the work’s meaning and how it makes its way into the world. Historical archives, when one understands how to use them, can be fruitful grounds. In this virtual Residency, held in May 2022, collage artists will learn how to work with an archive to build a project that speaks to themes of community and history. Centered around the Stewart-Swift Research Center at the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont, participating artists will explore their collections and develop tools they can use to work with archives in their home communities. During the residency, artists will make a collage and write a brief statement about the material used and what the collage says about community, the material in the archive and its history. The resulting artwork will be considered for an exhibition at the Henry Sheldon Museum and for inclusion in a folio of prints and a book. MORE
Current Issue
Our goal with every issue is that Kolaj Magazine is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of contemporary collage in art, culture, and society. We not only hope you enjoy the articles and images in Kolaj 35, we hope it leads you to asking great questions.
CURRENT SUBSCRIBERS: The postal service continues to be slow so please bear with us. If you do not receive your copy by 30 April 2022, please let us know.
PRINT MAGAZINE
Kolaj 35
From the Scottish Highlands to the shores of Lake Ontario to Mombasa, Kenya, Kolaj 35 brings the wide-world of collage to your doorstep: Ellsworth Kelly‘s postcard collages, uncollage in action, collage en plein air, the practice of collecting fragments, Black collage in Baltimore, the wild artwork of a Montreal-based mushroom and pinball enthusiast, collage at New Orleans' city-wide art triennial, and more. On the cover is a collaborative collage in solidarity with the Ukrainian people, a small gesture of hope for a more peaceful world in the future. Each issue of Kolaj Magazine shows how collage artists are making their way through the world. International in scope, we explore all aspects of collage and its impact on society and culture. MORE
Kolaj 35 is sent automatically to members of the Silver Scissors & Golden Glue Societies.
These special subscribers support the work of Kolaj Institute while receiving an item from Kolaj each month.
Recent Publications
SPECIAL EDITION
World Collage Day 2022
In honor of World Collage Day, 14 May 2022, Kolaj Magazine is releasing a special edition of the magazine.The Special Edition is full of Cut-Out Pages and stories from inspiring collage artists.The printed magazine also includes an interview with 2022 World Collage Day Poster Artist Erin McCluskey Wheeler. Those who purchase the Special Edition before May 14, 2022 will also receive a World Collage Day 2022 poster and a set of World Collage Day postcards that feature McCluskey Wheeler’s “Glitter Highways” series. The collages use car advertisements to evoke the romanticism of 20th century road trips and the spirit of freedom, the openness to new experiences, and the curiosity about others they entail. MORE
BOOK
Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream
A companion book to the project of the same name, Ric Kasini Kadour unpacks what monuments are and their role in our communities. The book shows what happens when collage artists reimagine monuments as sites of truth and reconciliation. The book features the collages of eighteen international artists made a series of collages that reimagined the empty column in the center of Birr, County Offaly, Ireland. MORE
ZINE
Identiblocks: Portrait #001
by Mark Vargo, 2022. Vargo's project pushes the boundaries of traditional paper collage into an interactive, dynamic and 3-dimensional space allowing individuals to both create and perform their own collage mask that represents their identity, vision and emotions. MORE
BOOK
The Money $how: Cash, Labor, Capitalism & Collage
The Money $how juxtaposes contemporary artwork against fragments of history and literature as a way of showing how collage can help us deconstruct culture and understand the world differently. Artists collage dollar bills into flowers and mine material remnants to tell stories about home economics. MORE
NEW BOOK
Oh, Money! Money!
by Eleanor H. Porter
Kolaj Institute is pleased to announce the publication of Oh, Money! Money!by Eleanor H. Porter and illustrated by a collective of collage artists. In Porter’s 1918 novel, a Chicago multi-millionaire struggles to decide to whom he should leave his money. The book is a time capsule of early 20th century American life with a strong focus on the lives of women and observations about material culture and communities before the rampant consumerism of the 1920s and the Great Depression. To illustrate the book, Kolaj Institute organized a residency that brought together ten artists who worked collaboratively to make sixty-three collages that interpret Porter’s novel for a 21st century audience. MORE
BOOK
Radical Reimaginings
The curators of the 96-page book invited artists who use collage in their practice to put forward a work of art that offers a visual narrative that speaks to the unprecedented change unfolding in 2020. An essay by Ric Kasini Kadour reflects upon collage's unique ability to imagine new realities. Forty artists from nine countries and multiple Indigenous peoples—Salish-Kootenai/Métis-Cree/Sho-Ban, Tlingit/Nisga’a, Oglala/Lakota, and Seneca Nation—offer a variety of perspectives. The voices of Black, Latinx, Native, and white Americans mingle with those from Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Canada, France, and Germany. Artwork is accompanied by a statement in which the artists describe how they want to reimagine the world. MORE
BOOK
Collage Magic
by Emma Anna
Part autobiography, part fantasy, Emma Anna’s vision of The New Old World (aka The NOW) fuses vintage ephemera with modern imaging technologies. Emma shapes this strange world by using the pen tool from Adobe Photoshop as her magic wand, in the process declaring herself to be a “collage magician”. Part artist book, part document of art making, Collage Magic, from La Casa Verde Editions, is Emma Anna’s journey through magic and art. MORE
BOOK
Revolutionary Paths
When the collage is presented in exhibition, it is often done so without the critical framework granted other mediums. In "Revolutionary Paths: Critical Issues in Collage", exhibition curator Ric Kasini Kadour presents examples of collage that represent various aspects and takes on the medium. Each work in the exhibition represents the potential for deeper inquiry and further curatorial exploration of the medium. MORE
BOOK
Cultural Deconstructions
Collage is unique as a medium in that it uses as its material artifacts from the world itself. To harvest those fragments, the artist must first deconstruct culture; they must select, cut, and remove the elements they do not wish to use and then reconstruct work that tells a new story. In "Cultural Deconstructions: Critical Issues in Collage", exhibition curator Ric Kasini Kadour presents examples of collage artists who are deconstructing identity as a way to critique culture. MORE
COLLAGE BOOK
Tissue Box:
A Pandemic Response
Boite à mouchoir: Une réponse à la pandémie. In Spring 2020, as the world was going into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Quebec Collagiste Virginie Maltais felt a deep need for a point of reference. Her solution was a project that asked collage artists from around the world to make a collage using the top of a tissue box. "Small projects are important. You regain your courage and hope when you start and manage to finish something. There is no small project. We do big projects with lots of little steps. Step by step, we move forward. Together. And it is all of these small steps, together, that led to the creation of this book." Maltais worked with Kolaj Institute and Kasini House to produce a bilingual book about the project. MORE
COLLAGE BOOK
transitional MOMENTS
transitional MOMENTS: restoring equilibrium through the art of collage includes one hundred collages selected from over 2000 submissions created from 600 collage packets sent to artists around the world for World Collage Day 2021 by the Arizona Collage Collective. transitional MOMENTS "reflects our current state of uncertainty as we wrestle with feeling constrained, disoriented and suspended in air between what was and what will be. Yet, these thresholds, unsettling as they are, can be spaces of great creativity and transformation," writes ACC's Suzanne Winkel. MORE
COLLAGE BOOK
Unfamiliar Vegetables: Variations in Collage
Unfamiliar Vegetables is a collection of collage where each of the fifty artists interpreted, in their own way, Carlotta Bonnecaze’s 1892 Carnival float design Familiar Vegetables. Project organizer Christopher Kurts observed, “Unfamiliar Vegetables is an experiment in controlled chaos….tiny variations within each artist’s creative sphere accumulate until the outcomes are as unique as the people creating them.” MORE
COLLAGE COMMUNITIES
The International Directory of Collage Communities
The 104-page book is a survey of collage networks, guilds, communities, and projects as well as online efforts and groups focused on collage research. For each community, the directory presents their key activities, mission, how to join, and a bit of their history. Copious images illustrate the book. MORE
Our goal with every issue is that Kolaj Magazine is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of contemporary collage in art, culture, and society. Each issue of Kolaj Magazine is dedicated to reviewing and surveying contemporary collage with an international perspective. We are interested in collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century art movement.
