13″x10.5″; handmade paper collage on antique book page using art book cutouts, hand-cut giclée prints, vintage magazines, antique ephemera and cutouts from Cut Me Up Issue 12; 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2024
Daily Collage Congress
At each Daily Collage Congress, we will review the day’s agenda. Speakers will share ideas about the state of collage. We will also hear updates about special projects taking place during the festival.
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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.
DAILY COLLAGE CONGRESS THURSDAY
Welcome to Kolaj Fest New Orleans
Thursday, 13 June 2024
10:30-11AM
New Orleans Museum of Art
We will officially open Kolaj Fest New Orleans at Thursday’s Daily Collage Congress and hear from a number of artists about projects and exhibitions taking place during the festival. Artists will be invited to contribute to the Great Collage Swap taking place on Sunday. Thursday’s Congress is the primary orientation to Kolaj Fest New Orleans.
DAILY COLLAGE CONGRESS FRIDAY
Joy in All Its Forms
Friday, 14 June 2024, 10-10:45AM
Cafe Istanbul
Joy often trades on the irrational. Absurdity, whimsy, surrealism, humor, and its stable of cousins draw Joy from the discongruent, the unexpected, the departure from normality. That sounds a lot like collage. In January 2024, Kolaj Institute hosted the artist residency, “Joy as Subject” that saw six artists from across North America come to New Orleans to experience Carnival season and to make art about Joy. They joined the Mystic Krewe of Scissors & Glue in the first annual Paper Parade, where revelers dressed in paper costumes and walked around the neighborhood. Ric Kasini Kadour will speak about this project, debut a short film about joy, and share some of the artwork.
7.75″x7.75″x5.25″; cardboard, chipboard, paper, book board, bookcloth, PVA adhesive, binding thread, matte board, PET transparency film, LED screen, and cord; 2024
In the second part of the session, Ben DiNino will present, THIS SIDE TOWARD SCREEN, a box set of collages made from slide and negative film. “The book features over one hundred and thirty of these works from the last 5 years. I hand cut and assembled every element of the book using a tortoise-shell binding,” writes DiNino. “There are 3 types of collages featured in the work. Slide Overlays are pieces created by sandwiching two slides in a slide mount creating a new visual narrative. Slide Collages are created like a traditional paper collage. I cut them up and reassemble the pieces in slide mounts. The third type of work are my Negative Collages which are cut and collaged like the slide collages, except they use film negatives as source material. I have to use intuition and luck to create these negative based works since I can’t see their final look until they are scanned into a positive image.”
DAILY COLLAGE CONGRESS
The Concept of Ma
Andrea Burgay & Katie Blake, Joe Bertino
Saturday, 15 June 2024, 10-10:45AM
Cafe Istanbul
At Saturday’s Daily Collage Congress, Joe Bertino will share the results of the Passing Time Roundtable. Andrea Burgay will speak about Cut Me Up, a participatory magazine of visual call and response where each issue presents a call—a curated selection of original collage images that become raw material for reader-artists to respond by cutting, reconfiguring, and transforming them into new artworks. Each issue of Cut Me Up includes eighteen reproductions of the selected artworks. Burgay will be joined by Katie Blake, author of the book, What Kind Of Collage Is That?, and the guest curator of Cut Me Up Issue 13. Burgay and Blake will speak about the Japanese concept of Ma 間 which is described as a “pause in time, an interval or emptiness in space.” Blake writes, “The idea of Ma is to make emptiness into a substance itself. Participating artists are asked to explore this concept through previously untried collage techniques.”
DAILY COLLAGE CONGRESS
Great Collage Swap & Goodbyes
Sunday, 16 June 2024, 10:30AM-Noon
LeMieux Galleries, 332 Julia Street, in New Orleans’ Warehouse District
On Sunday, we will gather one final time to say our goodbyes and to conduct The Great Collage Swap. To participate, bring a collage to exchange to the Info Table before 10AM Sunday. In return, you will be given a number. All of the collages will be displayed. During the program, a collage will be selected and matched with a number and the holder of that number will receive the collage. As the collages are matched, each artist has a chance to share their story.
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.