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COLLAGE COMMUNITIES
Red Collage Perú
Red Collage Peru was founded December 14th, 2020 by Patricia Benavides, visual artist and graphic designer, and Caroline Cruz, visual artist, musician and communicator. The idea of creating the network arose from the search for Peruvian artists who work with the collage technique and noticing the lack of a community to showcase the work of artists in or from Peru. The community has grown to 110 artists since then. The group stays active on their Instagram account, where between 6 and 9 Peruvian artworks are published daily. They are working on the creation of the “100 Contemporary Peruvian Collagists Directory”, in addition to talks, workshops, tutorials and calls to artists. MORE
Want to learn more about how collage artists are getting together? Check out The International Directory of Collage Communities.
FROM KOLAJ 34
Land of Collage & Honey
In Kolaj 34, Cherie Rahkola profiles a virtual collage community that took shape during the pandemic. She writes, "What is unique about this community is the artistic generosity of the creators and hosts of the Virtual Collage Jam, Kal Honey and Kim-Lee Kho. Both are prolific Canadian fine artists who are busy exhibitors and teachers with long experience in design and graphic arts. This talented husband and wife team has given generously of their time to host a free forum for like-minded collage artists from all backgrounds to create and communicate." MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Abstraction
Romare Bearden at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, USA through 9 January 2022. With some fifty-five paintings, works on paper and collages, “Romare Bearden: Abstraction” is the first exhibition to fully examine and contextualize the artist’s significant body of abstract work. Bearden’s abstract watercolors, collages and stain paintings were executed mainly between his return to New York from Paris in 1950 and approximately 1964. The abstractions are striking in their variety and scale, with the artist freely employing diverse techniques to realize his unique vision and creating works ranging from under three inches tall to nearly six feet tall. Created with segments cut from paintings and affixed to painted boards, the large collages are distinctive for their powerfully defined shapes. MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Grandmothers
Vanessa Compton at Karma Bird House Gallery in Burlington, Vermont, USA through 9 December 2021. This exhibition is devoted to Vanessa Compton's Grandmothers. Coming from two very different cultures, both were/are professional visual artists and their collective devotion to color and lifelong creative practice informs Compton's own work. The pieces in this exhibition showcase her obsession with certain colors in the spectrum. This show is also about reckoning with different stages of life as this past year the artist has been trying to better understand how she thinks and feels about time, aging and elderhood. MORE
CALL TO ARTISTS
Blow Your Cover
Deadline: 20 December 2021. /DRI:M/SPACE has issued an Open Call for its premier digital magazine, which will be released 1 January 2022. Collagists are challenged to enter works that fit the brief: Blow Your Cover, co-curated by Petra Zehner. To enter this open call, rework the cover of your favourite book–fiction, non-fiction, highbrow, lowbrow, unibrow, pulp–whatever it is that keeps you up at night. Anything goes: analog, digital, mixed media, mixed technique. MORE
FROM KOLAJ 34
The Artist's Archive
How does an artist use their own archive? Brian Palm uses colored pencil, oil and spray paint to intervene on black-and-white photographs he took of Dublin in the 1980s. "The theme of disquietude is reinforced by the repeated depiction of an abandoned tricycle, left in the street forgotten after play was interrupted." A portfolio of Palm's work appears in Kolaj 34. MORE
COLLAGE BOOKS
Love: Volume 1
by Marc Alain. Self-published, 2010. This 56 page full color book is filled with hand-cut heart collages, word collage, poetry, love song lyrics, found imagery, and drawings. Intimate and playful, evoking the feeling of a personal love letter, this colorful zine reveals the tenderness and naiveté of desire. 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 34, we hope it leads you to asking great questions.
PRINT MAGAZINE
Kolaj 34
From Rockwall, Texas to Belarus to Dublin, Ireland, Kolaj 34 offers an international view of collage. In this issue we look at how the medium is being used to critique fashion advertising, build community, and investigate Black, Victorian spirituality. Writers wrestle with ideas about illusionary spaces, the psychology of the creative process, and concepts that expand our understanding of collage.
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 34 is automatically sent to Silver Scissors & Golden Glue Members of Kolaj Institute. These special members of Kolaj Institute support residencies, fellowships, publications, and traveling programs while receiving a piece of the collage community to their mailbox each month. LEARN MORE
Recent Publications
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
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
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
SPECIAL EDITION
World Collage Day 2021
In honour of World Collage Day, May 8, 2021, 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. MORE
Note: The World Collage Day Special Edition is not included in a regular Kolaj Magazine subscription.
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.
