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CALLS TO ARTISTS
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Secretive Spaces
Sheboygan, Wisconsin, USA. Sara Willadsen makes pictures that satisfy her curiosity in aesthetics and found materials. Combining these articles with reappropriations of her own work allows her to employ past patterns and marks as prompts for new structures and environments. The aggressive process used to construct these secretive spaces is kept in balance with the consciousness to know when to stop. MORE
FROM THE PRINT MAGAZINE
Melissa Sutherland Moss
Brooklyn, New York & Baltimore, Maryland, USA. “By placing emphasis on black beauty, I carefully reimagine history through vibrant collage and typography,” writes Melissa Sutherland Moss who “as a Black woman of Costa Rican descent, [her] motivation often stems from an exploration of where she fits in within these different cultures.” She comes from a strong tradition of Black artists who use collage to celebrate Blackness, explore identity, challenge history, and share stories. A portfolio of her artwork appears in Kolaj 36. MORE
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
A Graphic Sense of Color & Design
Lexington, Kentucky, USA. Marika Christofides' prints, installations, and artist books are characterized by a graphic sense of color and design. She draws inspiration from the aesthetics of biological life under a microscope, using bilateral symmetry, replication, and self-similarity in her compositions. By situating her works within installation environments, she extends the act of collaging to the gallery wall. This emphasizes the physicality of the prints, building a world around them that suggests relationships of parasitism and symbiosis. The work is an homage to the beautiful, strange, and unknowable in the natural world. MORE
CALL TO ARTISTS
Curating Collage Workshop
DEADLINE: Wednesday, 28 December 2022. Curating is a vital part of art’s function: a curator creates a bridge between artwork and audience. For artists, this process can be confusing and mysterious. The goal of the Curating Collage Workshop is to equip artists with the tools to curate their own work, to work with curators, and build exhibitions that connect with diverse audiences. The Curating Collage Workshop is a four-week program in January 2023 designed to train artists as curators. In four virtual meetings over four weeks and through ongoing, online discussion, we will explore the fundamentals of curating, how to create critical context for collage, and various strategies for presenting collage to an audience. Topics will include art writing; gallery and museum issues; documenting artist practice; and working with art professionals. MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
I'm
Deborah Roberts at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida, USA through 4 December 2022. In “I’m”, artist Deborah Roberts critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. Her mixed media works combine found images, sourced from the internet, with hand-painted details in striking figural compositions that invite viewers to look closely. Her focus on Black children investigates how societal pressures, projected images of beauty or masculinity and the violence of American racism conditions their experiences growing up in this country as well as how others perceive them. MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
The Woods Women & Other Works
Saya Woolfalk at Leslie Tonkonow Artwork + Projects in New York, New York, USA through 23 November 2022. Saya Woolfalk creates works of art that combine elements of her African American, Japanese, and European heritage, with allusions to anthropology, feminist theory, science fiction, and Eastern religions. In this exhibition, Woolfalk introduces “The Woods Women”, a secret society that predates her Empathic Universe. The exhibition includes the artist’s newest works on paper, inspired by her study of the renowned Hudson River School and herbarium collections at The Newark Museum of Art where she was the Artist-in-Residence in 2019. MORE
KOLAJ LIVE ONLINE
Artists in the Archives: Women in the Archive
Wednesday, December 14, 2022, 7PM EST. In the past, the history of women's lives and experiences was marginalized in favor of a "Great Man" approach to history, but in the last fifty years, greater attention to women's history has produced a rich understanding of women's lives in the past. Materials relevant to women’s studies are well-represented in the Stewart-Swift Research Center’s collections. In this event, collage artists from the Artists in the Archives Project who focused on the stories of women from the past join Bernadette Birzer, Archivist for Collection Management and Digital Initiatives at the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans. Presented in partnership with the Henry Sheldon Museum's Stewart-Swift Research Center. MORE
NEW BOOK
Wallflowers: Collage as Street Art 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. Join before 24 November 2022 to receive the book as your first item. LEARN MORE
NEW BOOK
Wallflowers: Collage as Street Art
Wallflowers: Collage as Street Art explores the intersection of collage and street art. Christopher Kurts recalls the formation of the Kolaj Street Krewe from its creation at Kolaj Fest New Orleans to a guerilla art project during the COVID-19 pandemic to an artist residency for Street Artists. The book contains examples of collage as street art by twenty-four artists from eight countries.
Christopher Kurts explains the title, “Wallflower is often used to describe someone shy or awkward, standing at the edge of things, not participating. But we’re turning that on its head and drawing the solitary artist out from their secluded studio and onto the street. These flowers are blossoming in full view.” An introduction by Ric Kasini Kadour situates collage in the history of street art. LEARN MORE
PRINT MAGAZINE
Kolaj Magazine relies on our subscribers. Your support of this magazine keeps us going and makes it possible for us to investigate and document collage and to promote a deeper, more complex understanding of the medium and its role in art history and contemporary art.
NEW ISSUE
Kolaj #36
Barbara Bertino's Sailing the Dry Land graces the front cover of Kolaj 36 which we think is an apt metaphor for a print magazine where each issue travels around the world of collage. In the print magazine, we travel from the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada to Rio de Janeiro to Kampala, Uganda to report on the international community of collage artists and what this 21st century art movement is doing. Kelli Bodle takes us back in time to explore the legacy of Italian Proto-Arte Povera Artist Salvatore Meo. We hear from a collective of composers in Peru (all of whom are women) who are making collage heard as well as seen. We get an update on how the U.S. Supreme Court may be changing Fair Use. And we consider the painterly influences and attitudes of collage artists, whether two-bit collage is a sort of minimalism, and how one artist came to love collage in motion. We hope each issue of Kolaj Magazine takes you someplace you've never been. MORE
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
BOOK
Artists in the Archives
Local history museums, archives, and collections are vital to building healthy communities and to anchoring our understanding of the world around us in the place where we live, work, and play. Collage artists have unique skills that are particularly useful in our historical moment. Artists in the Archives contains artworks and commentary as well as an extensive essay by Ric Kasini Kadour about the project that brought twenty-three artists from seven countries to make twenty-four collage prints referencing history material in the archives of the Henry Sheldon Museum. The essay reflects on the role artists can play in the interpretation and presentation of historic material in light of this history. MORE
BOOK
Politics in Collage
In a time where the challenges facing us as individuals and communities have grown to seemingly insurmountable levels, further exacerbated by the increasing toxicity of the political climate, artists are using their work to confront these challenges by engaging their viewers in a higher level of discourse. Through a virtual residency, twenty-five artists created collage works examining complex socio-political issues that contemporary society is contending with, in order to spark meaningful dialogue and inspire deeper engagement. MORE
POETRY JOURNAL
PoetryXCollage
Volume One
PoetryXCollage is a printed journal of artwork and writing which operates at the intersection of poetry and collage. We are interested in found poetry, blackout poetry, collage poems, haikus, centos, response collages, response poems, word scrambles, concrete poetry, scatter collage poems, and other poems and artwork that inhabit this world. In this issue: Rosemary Rae, El Cajon, California, USA | Cathy Greenhalgh, London, United Kingdom | Jennifer Roche, Chicago, Illinois, USA | doriana diaz, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA | Thomas Mayer, Berlin, Germany l Cheryl Chudyk, Kirkland, Washington, USA
POETRY JOURNAL
PoetryXCollage
Volume Two
Each issue of PoetryXCollage presents six movements of work by artists and curators. Page spreads are meant to be free zones of thinking where the contributor has chosen all elements of the layout: font, image place, composition, etc. In this issue: Anthony D. Kelly, Castle Bar, County Mayo, Ireland l Carla Reyes, Astoria, New York, USA l Janice McDonald, Denver, Colorado, USA l Samantha Brown, Blackrock, County Louth, Ireland l Laura Tafe, Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA l Collaborations by Cathy Greenhalgh, Thomas Mayer, Rosemary Rae, Anthony D. Kelly, & Cheryl Chudyk
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. 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
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
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.
