collage on wood panel; 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
SYMPOSIUM AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2024
1-2-3 Bop! Collage, Jazz & Collaboration
Thursday, 13 June 2024, 2:15-3PM
New Orleans Museum of Art
Paloma Trecka & Todd Bartel
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Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 12-16 June 2024. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.
Collage and Jazz have a long history of being in conversation with one another. The legendary Louis Armstrong was a prolific collage artist who used photographs, promotional materials, and newspaper articles to fill scrapbooks and make art on reel-to-reel tape boxes. Jazz scenes were frequent subjects of Romare Bearden, who often used titles of jazz performances in his artwork. Bearden made album covers for Charlie Parker, Donald Byrd, and many others. With fragments floating in space, the paintings of Miles Davis show how collage influenced his style. In surrealist collage, Gertrude Abercrombie, a staple of the Chicago jazz scene and friends with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan, found a visual language to make sense of the city’s improvised urban planning. Visual artists and jazz musicians informed each other’s work.
Chicago-based Paloma Trecka and Watertown, Massachusetts-based Todd Bartel will speak about the intersection of collage and jazz in light of the upcoming collage exhibition, “BOP!”. In its third iteration, “BOP!” will take place in May 2025 at the Beverly Arts Center on the South Side of Chicago. Exhibition co-curators Trecka and Bartel will preview some of the work planned. Trecka will speak about the first two iterations of “BOP!”, as well as read from her ongoing work in progress, a motion-inspired, rhythmic collage art manifesto. Bartel will discuss connections between jazz improvisation and collage; “when gluing becomes fluid, playful, structured, chaotic, repetitive and sampled.”
Trecka’s collage art is influenced by geometric abstract art and music. She takes her love of color from Mexico and from Chicago, the love of the grid, line and texture found in architecture. Bartel’s research-based studio practice compliments a rigorous investigation of collage theory which has frequently manifested in exhibition, museum tours, and as articles in Kolaj Magazine.
ARTIST BIOS
Paloma Trecka was born in Xalapa, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, in 1964. Paloma was raised by artists and anthropologists and grew up in an environment filled with music, folklore and art. As a small child, her family came to Tulane University in New Orleans, where they lived on a Mardi Gras parade route instilling a love for performance, pageantry and music. Her formative years were spent travelling around Europe and Mexico and living in Montreal where she studied Studio Art and Design for the Theater at Concordia University. After receiving her BFA, Paloma discovered her attraction to stop motion animation and the possibilities of setting her art in motion with sounds and music. In her work, the rhythmic repetitions of the grid, and the push pull effect of abstraction are devices used to both hear and see her art. Today she is an educator and artist based in Chicago. www.palomashaloma.comwww.palomashaloma.com
Todd Bartel holds a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. He also studied in Rome as part of RISD’s European Honors Program. He holds an MFA in Painting from Carnegie Mellon University. Bartel teaches drawing, painting, collage, and conceptual art at the Cambridge School of Weston, Weston, Massachusetts. Bartel is the founder of IS (Installation Space), a proposal-based installation gallery, and the founder of the Cambridge School’s Thompson Gallery, a teaching gallery dedicated to thematic inquiry. The artist lives in Watertown, Massachusetts. www.toddbartel.com
Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 12-16 June 2024. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.