Poetry & Collage Residency 2024

RESIDENCY UPDATE

Poetry & Collage Residency 2024

at Kolaj Institute
1-31 May 2024

A month-long, virtual/online residency

About the Residency

In January 2022, Kolaj Institute issued a call to artists for a Poetry & Collage Residency and received so many excellent responses that we organized a series of three residencies. In the residencies, we challenged artists to move beyond taxonomical debates. Ric Kasini Kadour said, “What is a poem? We do not need to have a singular answer to that question. Individually we must each answer that question for ourselves. In practice, every poem we make will be an example of what a poem is. In considering other people’s work, we should ask ourselves, How is this a poem?” During the residencies, artists interrogated each other’s artwork, collaborated, and shared ideas. And at the end of it, they sent us more page spreads than could fit into a single book. Impressed and moved by the volume and quality of cultural output and a deep belief that this practice, however you want to describe it, at the intersection of collage and poetry deserves a platform, we decided to create a new journal dedicated to it. 

PoetryXCollage is a printed journal of artwork and writing that 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.

After releasing several volumes of the journal and opening an ongoing call for submissions, we are returning to this residency program as a way to help artists develop their ideas, explore the intersection of collage and poetry, collaborate and form community, and prepare submissions for the journal. This project-driven residency is open to artists and poets.

Kolaj Institute Coordinator, Christopher Kurts will co-lead the residency with artist, poet, and writer, Jennifer Roche. Together they will guide artists in collaborative activities, research and discussion, and understanding the technical needs of design and layout necessary to submit page spreads to the PoetryXCollage Journal. Ric Kasini Kadour will talk about artist practice, the book as a place for collage, and how Kolaj Institute works to diffuse collage and poetry. Rod T. Boyer creates art and poetry under the moniker our thomas, exploring themes of redemption, mystery, and transformation. In Kolaj #32, his article, “Mind the Gap,” explored how collage and haiku share similar mechanisms of juxtaposition and disjunction. He will speak to these themes during the residency.

In four virtual meetings over the course of the month (see schedule below) and through ongoing, online discussion, artists will leave the residency with a deeper understanding of the intersection of collage and poetry. Individual participants will each be invited to create and submit 3-5 page spreads to the PoetryXCollage Journal. 

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PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Jennifer Price is a Chicago-born African American poet, visual artist, and librarian rooted in the southern United States. Her creative practice embraces theory and research, and her writing is informed by an experience of mothering that is accompanied by actual and perceived threats of violence, familial lineages, and protracted desires. In the summer of 2023, Price’s poetry around these themes merited acceptance to the Brooklyn Poets Fellowship as well as scholarship support to join the Southeast Review’s editors’ workshops, and last spring she was the recipient of the Altman Writers of Color Scholarship from the Hudson Valley Writers Center. Through collage, too, Price explores mothering and its tangents. In this visual practice, she weaves together consumer related materials that represent our ubiquitous codependency with capitalism. Price’s commitment to a life of creative practice culminated in 2022 with her acceptance to Obsidian Literature & Arts’ inaugural Black Listening Fellowship. Inspired by this collective of innovators, Price seeks to map her poetry and collage to the facets of her ethos that are specifically, culturally germane to the Black diasporic journey. Price has had the honor of poem publication with Torch Literary Arts and the up//root collective, her collage artwork is featured among collaborators in the Kolaj Institute’s re-envisioned illustrated edition of The Awakening, and her hybrid work appears within Obsidian Literature & Arts’ virtual Black Listening exhibit. From these creative communities, Price carries the tradition of using the image as a means of documenting the universally and personally political nature of the human condition. Because of her fascination with the relationship between poetry and art, she continually strives to capitalize on the visual in some fashion, most recently through ekphrastic writing and the creation of moving texts.

Eve-Marie Kimmerling is a Group Analyst in private practice based in Co. Mayo in the West of Ireland. Deeply rooted in her rural West of Ireland context, she was “astounded into being” as a collage artist in a creative response to the often turbulent, fragmented, and disembodied nature of our recent times. While she has over 20 years’ experience working as a therapist, she is relatively new to her art making practice, having started in 2022. As an artist, she sees her collage work as an extension of her group analytic practice. The groups she belongs to and their wider social context inform and influence the collages she creates. Creating her colorful pieces became a way of reflecting on, processing, and expressing themes arising in her work as a group analyst. This body of work represents a foray into new ways of attempting to represent and articulate the undrawn themes arising in these groups.

Erica “ERN” Rivera is a performance writer, editor, and visual artist. Her work attempts to intervene in the thorny political economy of art production. She is the author of The Ecology of Art, Strike!, her debut collection of essays that will be published by tRaum Books in 2025. In 2023, she was selected by NYU’s Washington Square Review as a finalist for their inaugural New Voices Award. Her debut visual artwork, self-portrait, is a mixed-media painting that was published by manywor(l)ds in February 2023. This month, Isele Magazine will publish the third entry in her ongoing series of essays, “everything i know about genocide,” which began in October 2023 in response to the escalation of the genocide of Palestinians carried out by the settler colonial state of so-called Israel. Her debut short story, The Hologram, will be published by The Emerson Review this month as well. She is currently seeking publishers for her debut chapbook of CNF prose poems titled the year that i was born into, as well as her debut collection of short stories titled The Girls from Pasadena. The first chapter of her in-progress memoir-in-essays, The Trans Girl’s Guide to Grey’s Anatomy, will be published in May 2024 by Under the Sun. She previously founded and served as co-editor of Art, Strike!, an online art/literary journal founded on the principles of mutual aid. Long-term, she intends to continue creating publishing opportunities for marginalized writers and artists, ultimately moving towards librarianship and archival work with a focus on non-Western literature and media created by and for trans and nonbinary peoples. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. For fun, she likes to watch TV and pretend all the characters are trans.

Kathryn Kim is a printmaker and collage artist who has exhibited work at various venues in the Pacific Northwest. Kim’s formal training is in mechanical engineering and the law, and her collages often incorporate moveable parts and/or prose or poetry. As an engineer, Kim enjoys tinkering in the regions where art and science intersect. For example, when printing, Kim employs various substrates that harden upon exposure to heat or ultraviolet light, as well as techniques that rely on the inherent properties of the materials involved and how they interact. As a lawyer, Kim understands the power of words, and she often frames her work around a phrase or sentiment of import in the moment. Using individually cut and pasted letters in her pieces, Kim describes her approach as “painting with words,” and she generally chooses language that is introspective, illuminating, or inspiring. Her prints and collages generally reflect the ephemeral nature of our world and the important role that art plays in capturing and preserving fleeting moments of beauty or significance. Kim is the Program Chair for the Northwest Collage Society, and over the past five years, she has built an online library of collage-related presentations and interviews, which are available to members via the NWCS’s website. In addition to editing and producing these videos, Kim has offered workshops on diverse topics, including marbling techniques, incorporating text into art, and the history and methods of scroll-making. She regularly participates in the NWCS’s juried shows and has won a number of awards.

Kelly Monico has been a Professor of Art at Metropolitan State University of Denver since 2007. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Denver and her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Minnesota. Monico’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, URB11 at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, and Design After Dark at the Denver Art Museum. A highlight is when she produced a two-year standing, large-scale public art installation called Alley Cats in Downtown Denver. Recently, Monico received the Fulbright Specialist Award and will be in Uruguay for the next year (2024-2025), teaching at Universidad ORT in September and developing a new artwork series focused on Uruguay’s flora, fauna, and changing ecosystems.

Diana Garcia is a Palm Beach County-based analog collage artist whose work breathes new life into forgotten imagery and textures sourced from books and magazines. With meticulous attention to detail and a passion for tactile creation, Garcia crafts compositions that blur the line between reality and imagination. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, her artistic journey began during her studies in Interior Architecture at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, where she discovered the expressive potential of black and white magazine clippings. Since then, Garcia has honed her skills through international experiences, including a university exchange program in Chihuahua, Mexico, and studies in graphic design in London, United Kingdom. Delving into the depths of analog collage, Garcia explores the interplay of colors and textures, often incorporating origami to add layers of depth and complexity to her work. Through her innovative approach and dedication to the craft, Garcia continues to push the boundaries of analog collage, captivating audiences with her unique storytelling and technique.

Tran Tran hails from Vietnam and writes in the muddle between English and Vietnamese. Her poetry explores facets of love, loss, and grief through intergenerational lenses and has been featured in Salamander Magazine, The Seventh Wave, Threads LitMag, and more. She is an upcoming editorial fellow at Shenandoah magazine. A community-driven artist, Tran has gathered more than 4 years of experience in running writing workshops and hosting open mics and poetry podcasts, both through her literary project Thơ Thở and in collaboration with other local arts organizations in Vietnam.

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FACULTY

Christopher Kurts is a storyteller, artist, and the Coordinator for Kolaj Institute. Kurts is also the co-founder and lead organizer of The Mystic Krewe of Scissors and Glue, a group of creatives in New Orleans who meet monthly to collage, converse, and foster community. His work appeared in “The Heart of a Dark Universe”, at Bar Redux; and “Unfamiliar Vegetables”, a group show and book Kurts helped organize for Kolaj Fest New Orleans at Artisan Bar & Cafe in Summer 2019. In the fall of 2019, Kurts curated, “The Lifting of the Veil: The Optimist’s Apocalypse”, a group show. He was the art director for the collage illustrated edition of Oh, Money! Money! by Eleanor H. Porter, published by Kolaj Institute and Maison Kasini. His art was also featured in issue #4 of Loner Magazine. www.christopherkurts.com

Jennifer Roche is a Chicago-based poet, writer, and collage artist whose work is fundamentally interested in upholding nature and humanity. Her book of poems, 20, (Alternating Current Press), was erased from Jules Verne’s epic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and her chapbook, “The Synonym Tables,” (The Poetry Question) contains Pushcart Prize-nominated works that contrast synonyms from 1947 for words, such as wealth, poverty, and race, with synonyms for the same words from 2021. Roche’s analog collages explore humanity through portraits created from eclectic paper sources, documents, and ephemera. Her “Ikea Series” placed portraits of people and animals within the ubiquitous interiors of the final edition of the print catalog to examine the cultural impact of the global distribution of identical furnishings. Her artwork appears in PoetryXCollage, Volume 1, and her collage, & God said, was exhibited in Woman Made Gallery’s “Roe 2.0” juried exhibit in early 2023. She facilitates the monthly meeting of the PXC Collage Cohort, which grew out of the original Kolaj Institute Poetry & Collage Residency, and her interview with Ukrainian collage artists about their record-breaking exhibit in Kyiv last year is forthcoming in Kolaj Magazine. www.jenniferrocheus.com

Ric Kasini Kadour, a 2021 recipient of a Curatorial Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, is a writer, artist, publisher, and cultural worker. With the Vermont Arts Council, he curated “Connection: The Art of Coming Together” (2017) and Vermont Artists to Watch (2018, 2019, 2020). In New Orleans (2018-2019), he curated “Revolutionary Paths” at Antenna Gallery and “Cultural Deconstructions” at LeMieux Galleries. As Curator of Contemporary Art at Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburgh, Vermont (2019-2020), he curated “Rokeby Through the Lens”, “Structures”, and “Mending Fences: New Works by Carol MacDonald”. At the Southern Vermont Arts Center (2019), he curated “Contemporary American Regionalism: Vermont Perspectives” and “Where the Sun Casts No Shadow: Postcards from the Creative Crossroads of Quito, Ecuador”.  With Frank Juarez, he co-curated “The Money $how: Cash, Labor, Capitalism & Collage” at Saint Kate-The Arts Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (April-September 2021). Kadour is editor and publisher of Kolaj Magazine. His writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, OEI, Vermont Magazine, Seven Days, and Art New England (where he was the Vermont editor). In Winter 2020, he was artist-in-residence at MERZ Gallery in Sanquhar, Scotland. He holds a BA in Comparative Religion from the University of Vermont. www.rickasinikadour.com

Rod T. Boyer creates art and poetry as our thomas, exploring themes of redemption, mystery, and transformation.  Like the rest of the world, he’s trying to make sense of the endless and overwhelming stream of flotsam (physical and metaphoric) that accompanies his life. His collage work has been exhibited in his local area and his haiku have recently appeared in the journals Modern Haiku, Acorn, is/let, Sonic Boom, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, Trash Panda, and Failed Haiku among others.  He was named a finalist in the first annual Trailblazer Contest and has had work selected for The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku, 2021.  He can be found wandering the streets in Exeter, New Hampshire, USA. www.ourthomasart.com