SYMPOSIUM AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2025
Victorian Scrapbook House for Paper Dolls
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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, 25-29 June 2025. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.
During her thirty-year career in academia, Englewood, Florida artist, writer, and educator Beverly Gordon focused a global lens on art identified as domestic and “women’s work”. Her interests spanned from Shaker textile arts to the crafts made at turn of the century fundraising bazaars. Her 2011 book, Textiles: The Whole Story, considers its subject’s history from the perspective of art, science, history, and anthropology from the Stone Age to the 21st century. While Gordon began her artistic practice as a weaver and fiber artist, in the last 15 years, she has focused almost exclusively on collage and assemblage.
At Kolaj Fest at New Orleans, Gordon will present on collages found in late Victorian scrapbook houses. She writes: “These were collage book albums, ostensibly made as paper doll houses, which featured double-page spreads representing different rooms in a house. The cover of a given album served as the front door, the next pages represented the front hall, and so on into the inner rooms of the home and garden. The furnishings of the rooms consisted of images cut out from trade catalogs, newspapers and other visual material, which was ubiquitous in the late 19th century. The albums also included a fascinating variety of paper materials (e.g., crepe paper, wallpaper) and a wild play with scale. Experiencing their great whimsy provides fodder for the contemporary imagination, as well as greater insight into the development of the collage medium; this is a largely unknown but fascinating chapter of collage history. Scrapbook houses are related to Victorian photocollage, but the genre stands alone as a particularized tradition.”
In a chapter published in The Scrapbook in American Life (Susan Tucker, et al eds., Temple University Press, 2006) titled “Scrapbook Houses for Paper Dolls: Creative Expression, Aesthetic Elaboration and Bonding in the Female World,” Gordon wrote, “It is time to fully recognize the inexorable fascination, the pleasure, and indeed the magic of the these albums and to fully acknowledge the creativity and artistic integrity of the house makers. Paper dollhouses are works of art; they represent an underacknowledged and undervalued form of collage.”
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Beverly Gordon is an artist, writer, and educator. As professor of Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a specialty in textiles, she taught both studio and lecture classes for over 30 years. Her research focused a global lens on art identified as domestic and “women’s work”. Her many published books include Shaker Textile Arts; Feltmaking: Traditions, Techniques and Contemporary Explorations; The Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women’s Lives, 1890-1940; Bazaars and Fair Ladies; and Textiles: The Whole Story. Gordon began her artistic practice as a weaver and fiber artist, but especially in the last 15 years has focused almost exclusively on collage and assemblage. She has exhibited at venues such as the Design Gallery and the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, Wisconsin; and the Venice Art Center and Sea Grape Gallery in Southwest Florida. She is a certified facilitator of SoulCollage®, a tool for personal exploration, and has also developed unique Intuitive Collage workshops, where she has led hundreds of people through experimental collage journeys. Currently, she teaches collage at the Venice Art Center, and both collage and writing at Suncoast Technical Collage in Sarasota, Florida. Learn more at www.beverlygordon.info.
Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 25-29 June 2025. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.