102″x140″ (diptych); collage on paper; 2003. Collection Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn, New York. Courtesy of the artist.
MUSEUM TOUR AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2024
“Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” Tour
Thursday, 13 June 2024, 11AM-Noon
New Orleans Museum of Art
Jennella Young, LaVonna Varnado-Brown, Aisha Shillingford
EVENT WEBSITE | REGISTER
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.
Immediately following the Daily Collage Congress, Jennella Young, LaVonna Varnardo Brown and Aisha Shillingford will introduce the exhibition, “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined”, and lead a tour. Speakers will highlight “how the exhibit explores Mutu’s evolution as a collage artist, as she pursues an inquiry related to the representation of Black women’s bodies.” Shillingford writes, “She does this through her early collage work and goes on to explore scale and power in a way that is really literal as well as metaphoric in terms of her subject matter. What does it look like for us to use collage to really take up space as Black women?” Mutu “is a real teacher” with how she “uses the detritus of collage (the detritus of detritus) to incorporate into sculptural work and assemblage that is really quite three dimensional relative to her earlier collage and film work” and “how she centers her own image in the work and also combines photography and collage eventually.”
Jennella Young is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator who is deeply committed to embedding arts, cultural, and community knowledge into the everyday experiences of the young people she works with. In her art practice, Young primarily focuses on portraiture, creating meditative spaces that bring forgotten stories of Black and Brown women back into existence. She draws inspiration from magical realism and artists who create figure drawings and portraits of people of color in everyday genres.
New Orleans-based LaVonna Varnado-Brown is a socially-engaged multidisciplinary artist, teacher, and community worker who makes AfroFuturistic collage with odes to history, the Divine Feminine, and floral daydreams abounding. She writes, “AfroFuturism is a cultural aesthetic that explores the intersection of art and history with intention to inspire action in the now by healing beyond trauma.”
Brooklyn-based Aisha Shillingford is an anti-disciplinary artist, world builder, and experience designer originally from Trinidad & Tobago who uses art, storytelling and immersive experiences to unleash the power of Black radical imagination to shape the future. Her collage, text-based work, street art, murals, installation and experiential design work reflect Black utopias, abolition, Black radical imagination, solidarity economics, climate futures, marronage and dreamspace. She draws on recurring themes and symbols of fugitivity, opacity and afrosurrealism.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS GIVING THE TOUR
Jennella Young holds a BA in Psychology from Lehigh University, an MA in Counseling Psychology from New York University, and advanced graduate work in Art History and Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute. Her artistic journey includes work with the Apollo Theater Oral History Project, Guggenheim Museum, and Weeksville Heritage Society. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Instagram @jennebella.
14″x11″; ribbon, printed media, glossy photograph; 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
LaVonna Varnado-Brown holds a BA from Southeastern University Louisiana with a focus on Theatre and Liberal Arts, with studies in London and Paris. She has worked as an installation artist, artist advocate, teaching artist, and tutor in and around New Orleans. At Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2023, LaVonna presented her collage workshop, “Uses of the Erotic”, and was a panelist for the symposium, “The Mystical, the Esoteric, & the Magical”. For 2022-2023, she was Artist in Residence at Longue Vue House & Gardens in New Orleans. The artist lives and works in New Orleans.
24″x18″; collage; 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Originally from Trinidad & Tobago, Aisha Shillingford lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has been an Artist in Residence within Laundromat Project’s Creative Change Program, a mentor at the New Museum Incubator, and a Project Fellow at New York University’s Tisch Interactive Technology Program. She is the Artistic Director of Intelligent Mischief, a creative studio using art, storytelling and immersive experiences to unleash the power of Black radical imagination to shape the future. www.intelligentmischief.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.