Kolaj #16 delivers a look at the wonderful world of contemporary collage: the people who make it and the people who love it.

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

In the issue, Jenny Hampe tells the tale of how she went from American suburbanite to Norwegian goat herder to collage artist. It’s quite a ride and a story about how the drive to make art always wins out in the end. A collage by Hampe is on the front cover. The back cover features Loan Officer by Canadian artist Danielle Cole. Her artist portfolio appears in the issue along with portfolios by artists from Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Kolaj Editor Ric Kasini Kadour‘s editorial is a departure from our regular format. His discussion about the “soft power” of art is a call to artists during these turbulent times.

André van der Wende profiles collagist Varujan Boghosian, who turns 90 this year. He writes, “Boghosian explored construction and collage with lyrical play and emotive depth for over six decades, and still works and fires in the studio most days.”

In collage book news, The Collagemonauts released a comic book, Collagemonauts Volume 1: To the Center of the Microverse. Terri Lloyd‘s new book, When I Grow Up and Other Mantras, features her iconic star, Pink Buddha. We review both of these titles.

Zach Collins, who with Laura Tringali Holmes, published We Said Hello and Shook Hands, an epic, 270-page book of collaborative collages. A testament to medium’s unique suitability to collaboration, the book contains over 500 works with 100 different artists. Kolaj Magazine has asked Collins to contribute a series of articles on collaboration, the first of which appears in the issue.

With collage, one might argue that collaboration is naturally part of the process, that the use of source materials is a passive collaboration with the original creators. Artists select pieces that speak to them and in doing so they are collaborating with the photographer, designer, or editor that produced the materials. Once selected, glued, cut, torn, sanded and put on display in a physical gallery or shared online, a collaboration with the rest of the world occurs.

-from “How I Became a Collaborator: How a Collage Artist Found Community” by Zach Collins

The Collage Taxonomy Project is an ongoing survey of the wider collage community that attempts to define the language we use to talk about collage. In the first in a series of articles from this project, Ric Kasini Kadour writes about “The Cut.” He writes, “Cutting strikes me as the first step in collage making and, yet, it is something we speak little about.”

Dian Parker profiles Galen Cheney and explains why “lately she has taken up shredding her older paintings and assembling the pieces onto blank canvas.”

The Exhibition-in-Print features work in the “Collagism: A Survey of Contemporary Collage” show at Museum Strathroy-Caradoc in Strathroy, Ontario, Canada, curated by Christian Julien Siroyt.

In News & Notes, we report on a collage book created in honour of the Queen’s 90th birthday; a show of collage by Larry Walker at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York; information on how Montreal artist Anouk Sugàr‘s collages are being used to fight cancer; and a call to artists for Kolaj Magazine‘s upcoming animated collage exhibition. And as always, a Kolaj Artist Directory.

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