AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS
Societies, Projects, and Collaborations
Collage is more than a medium. It’s a community of people, networked and international. This community doesn’t just happen. It is the product of hard work by people who organize societies, open collage nights, collaborative projects. In this panel, we will hear from a number of organizers who work in various capacities. What makes for a successful community, collaboration, or project? What will help these efforts be more successful and develop a broader audience? How can these initiatives interact more with the art world at large?
Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, July 12-15, 2018. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.
For the past two years, Kike Congrains has organized CollageWave, an annual festival celebrating all things collage in Lima. He also travels to remote places in the country to improve the quality of life of the people living there by offering collage workshops. He will present on the community of collagists in Peru and how he works in his country and with the rest of the world.
From 2014 to 2018, writer and collagist Kevin Sampsell hosted Open Collage Night at Portland, Oregon’s Independent Publishing Resource Center. Held the second Wednesday of the month, experienced collagists mingled with those just learning more about collage. The event was a low-key, high-fun collage experience that reflected the open, friendly, community spirit of collagists.
Janice McDonald is an active member of the Denver Collage Club and the National Collage Society. She will speak about the work of these two organizations.
Founded by Morgan Jesse Lappin in 2013, the Brooklyn Collage Collective has worked and exhibited with both local collage artists and from around the world. The collective’s goal is to orchestrate and hold both local and international collage exhibits.
From Albuquerque, New Mexico, Zach Collins has participated in hundreds of collaborations with collage artists from around the world. In 2015, he published a collection of this work in We Said Hello and Shook Hands. He wrote about collaborative collage in Kolaj #16 and Kolaj #17.
For the past thirty-seven months, LaGrange Park, Illinois collagist LuEllen Joy Giera has organized the Monthly International Playing Card Exchange, where from four to a dozen people make collage on playing cards and exchange them with each other. Prior to that, she organized a 100-month postcard exchange. She a member of the International Union of Mail-Artists and other artist groups.
Laurie O’Brien works in collage, video, installation, and animation. She is interested in hybrid forms of expression that combine and defy categories. In this session, she will talk about the Diorama & Collage League in San Francisco, which she founded in 2016 and later in Rochester, New York. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Media in the Photography Department at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Image:
Six collaborations with Zach Collins
1. France, Flore Kunst
2. Colombia, Sara Serna
3. Denmark, Claes Otto Jennow
4. Germany, Bernd Schuman
5. USA, Michael Tunk
6. USA, Allan Bealy