Chicago Collage Community

Chicagoland, Illinois, USA

HISTORY

The Chicago Collage Community (C3) was founded by Chicagoland area artists and new moms, Christine Vilutis and Charlea Taylor, after Charlea happened upon a small exhibition of Christine’s collage artwork at a local gallery space. Charlea reached out to Christine over Instagram, and they agreed to get together over coffee and collage at a local cafe in November of 2022. This initial meeting led to the beginning of the Chicago Collage Community on Instagram. They then held their first official in-person artist meetup and gathering in December of that same year and have been growing in number and diversity of activities and projects ever since.

MISSION

The Chicago Collage Community strives to connect and uplift the diverse array of talented collage artists in the greater Chicagoland area. It is their intention to be an inclusive, nurturing, and safe space while ensuring Chicago is in the ongoing conversations being had about collage art and artists throughout the world. They do this by building a vibrant, connected community.

ASSOCIATION

Five core members are heading up Chicago Collage Community at this time.

Charlea Taylor, cofounder of C3, is a third-generation mothering artist whose collage-based work explores themes of sexuality and motherhood in the context of leaving fundamentalist Christianity, deconstructing forced ideals, conformity, religious trauma, and sexual repression.

Christine Vilutis, cofounder of C3, is a public library worker and mothering artist whose collage practice centers on an analog approach to the intersection of the personal and political.

Miranda Livingston, curator and one of the group’s coordinators, is an attorney, a mother, and a mixed-media artist who uses various acrylic pouring methods, photography, and botanicals to tell stories and create new narratives about the beauty, pain, and resilience of the people of the African Diaspora worldwide.

Jennifer Roche, a curator of the C3 Instagram and event volunteer, is a poet and collage artist who lives and works in Chicago.

Lo Marie, a curator of the C3 Instagram and event volunteer, is a photographer and collage artist whose work attempts to embody the frustrations of wealth disparity and living as a black person in underserved communities of Chicago.

JOIN

Follow along on Instagram to find out how you can get involved locally and in their online community. They charge no dues or fees for events or open calls.

The general public is welcome to join in the creative fun at any of their artist meetups and events, as well as purchase copies of Chicago Collage Magazine through the link in their Instagram bio.

KEY ACTIVITIES

While continuing to offer local artist meetups about every other month, the group is also launching the Chicago Collage Magazine, an independent publication that features collage and assemblage artists, introducing them to the art world at large. Chicago Collage Magazine Volume 1, which was released in November of 2024, holds the artworks of thirty collage and assemblage artists from all over the greater Chicagoland area. Volume 1 was curated and edited by co-founders Charlea Taylor and Christine Vilutis, along with fellow collage artist and curator Miranda Livingston. They plan on issuing Volume 2 sometime next year.

Over the past two years, they have held numerous artist gatherings across the Chicagoland area in hopes of providing fun and inclusive spaces to meetup, nerd out over collage with other interested parties, and foster future collaborations of all types.

They held a group show entitled “Community Through Collage” featuring Chicagoland collage artists in honor of World Collage Day in May of 2023. They participated in and provided an interactive collage exhibition and workshop space at The Other Art Fair Chicago in the spring of 2023, featuring members of their local community. To celebrate Mother’s and Father’s Days and caregivers of all kinds, they curated and put on “Play As Art,” a parenting and caregiving artists show, at One River School in Evanston in the spring of 2024.

They also put on Chicagollage, an Instagram-based collage challenge, once a year in the first week of January.

CONTACT

LINKTREE | EMAIL | INSTAGRAM