CALL TO ARTISTS FOR A VIRTUAL RESIDENCY
Architecture & Collage
A four-week, virtual/online collage artist residency in August & September 2026
Deadline to Apply: Tuesday, 14 July 2026
Final Deadline to Apply: Tuesday, 28 July 2026
Submit your application HERE
THESIS
Kolaj Institute’s Architecture & Collage Project views Architecture as a building technology; as a form of visual art; and as culture. In this sense, a building can be a vessel of history or a site of storytelling and folklore. Buildings exist in time; their meaning and function may be different in the past, present, and future; and they exist in a dynamic cycle of construction, use, decay, preservation, reuse, and ultimately destruction. The project holds space for those buildings that are cultural symbols and works of art and those buildings that make up our neighborhoods and communities.
Collage and modern architecture share a closely connected history. In the early twentieth century, as mass printing, photography, advertising, and illustrated magazines became increasingly accessible, artists and designers began cutting, combining, and recontextualizing printed images as a way to imagine new realities. At the same time, architects associated with modernism were embracing new materials, technologies, and spatial ideas, using photography, photomontage, drawing, and printed media to communicate buildings and material explorations such as architect Bruce Goff inlaying glass and coal into concrete to realize his architectural stamp that often challenged historic styles and traditional forms. From avant-garde experiments in Europe to postwar design culture in the United States, collage and careful curation became a tool for visualizing the modern world.
When artists make collage about architecture, they invite the viewer to think about the buildings that make up our world and how they are used and how those buildings shape our relationship to place, identity, and culture. At Kolaj Institute, we believe art wields power in context.
ACTIVITIES
In this residency, artists will consider architecture as building technology, visual art, culture, history, storytelling, folklore, and preservation. Through presentations, discussion prompts, guest speakers, and collage-making activities, artists will explore how buildings, rooms, neighborhoods, and places shape our relationship to memory, identity, and community.
The residency will introduce artists to the Six Scales of Architecture: Neighborhood, Site or Property, Building, Room, Furniture or Body, and Detail. These scales offer artists a way to look closely at places, from the larger neighborhood around a building to the smallest details of a room, surface, object, or material.
The residency will also propose two additional scales of architecture: Time and Culture/Human Situations. Time considers architecture as something that changes, ages, gathers memory, and moves through cycles of construction, use, repair, decay, preservation, reuse, and loss. Culture/Human Situations considers the people, rituals, habits, labor, stories, conflicts, memories, and communities that give architecture meaning. Together, these eight scales will help artists think about buildings, interiors, architectural fragments, and places that are meaningful to their work.
The residency will unfold through a series of presentations followed by collage-making activities, with artists sharing the results with the group. Artists will be asked to identify a building, place, or architectural idea that interests them; map their relationship to it; gather visual and material fragments; and use collage to build context around the work. Activities may include photographing an element of place, creating a relationship map, building a material inventory, connecting one’s artist practice to architectural ideas, and developing a final artwork that speaks to the intersection of Architecture and Collage.
Guest speaker Clive Knights, collage artist and founding director of the School of Architecture at Portland State University, will lead artists through a conversation about spatial studies, collage, interiors, cities, and architecture as a poetic act. His session will help artists move from looking closely at buildings to imagining new spaces through collage. Artists will consider how collage can make space, shift scale, bring different moments in time together, and imagine new futures for architecture and place.
Throughout the residency, artists will develop language for speaking about their work in relation to architecture and collage. The activities will prepare artists to complete an Artist Interview at the end of the residency, which asks them to identify the building or architectural idea their work speaks to; describe their relationship to it; explain their materials and process; connect the work to their larger artist practice; and articulate what they want viewers to take away from the artwork.
Artists should be prepared to take photographs, gather visual materials, print or otherwise prepare images for collage, document their process, and share work-in-progress with the group. Strategies for doing so will be discussed during the first session.
ENDING THE RESIDENCY
Artists will leave this virtual residency with the tools to use collage to analyze and speak about architecture, the built environment, and the culture. They will make a collage that represents, illustrates, or exemplifies an idea at the intersection of Architecture & Collage. The Residency will help artists develop their artist practice to speak to architecture as a building technology; as a form of visual art; and as culture. It will also help them develop a critical context for artwork that uses collage to speak about Architecture so that artwork may be diffused into the larger ecosystem of art and have meaningful impact on and engagement with the communities who encounter it.
The residency is led by Seth Ter Haar, Managing Director of Kolaj Institute and 2024-2026 Fellow of Docomomo Wisconsin. Guest speakers will include Ric Kasini Kadour, Director of Kolaj Institute and a 2020-2021 Curatorial Fellow of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and Clive Knights, collage artist and founding director of the School of Architecture at Portland State University.
OUTCOME
Kolaj Institute Artist Residencies are designed to give space to artists to make artwork or a plan for a body of artwork in community with other artists. Artwork made during and after the residency will be considered for an exhibition at Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans, 18 February-10 April 2027, and future publications on Architecture & Collage. By participating in the Residency, artists will become members of Kolaj Institute’s Architecture & Collage Project and be invited to submit to exhibitions, contribute to programs at Kolaj Fest New Orleans or Kolaj LIVE Online, and receive curatorial and community support for their projects through one-on-one meetings and virtual meet-ups.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
The residency is intended for artists with a practice of collage and/or architecture who want to explore the intersections of the two mediums. Residencies are open to any artist over the age of 21 from anywhere in the world.
COST
The cost of the residency is $600 USD per artist. Kolaj Institute has a limited number of grants available to offset the cost of the residency for those in need. These grants are possible through the generous support of our donors.
HOW TO APPLY
Submit your application HERE.
RESIDENCY LOGISTICS
Dates: 13 August-3 September 2026
SESSION DATES:
Thursday, 13 August 2026, 7–9 PM EDT
Thursday, 20 August 2026, 7–9 PM EDT
Thursday, 27 August 2026, 7–9 PM EDT
Thursday, 3 September 2026, 7–9 PM EDT
In between our weekly Zoom meetings, we stay connected using WhatsApp and sharing files on Google Drive. Introductions and Orientation will take place during our first meeting on Thursday, 13 August 2026, 7–9 PM EDT.
The remaining sessions will take place on the following Thursdays (20, 27, and 3 September).
Artists are expected to attend all scheduled sessions and complete assignments.
APPLICATION PROCESS
The submission process asks applicants for:
• Contact information
• Artist Bio (50-250 words)
• Statement of Artist Practice (50-300 words)
• 5-7 images of artwork
• Statement of expectations
• Asks questions about your work and needs
QUESTIONS
If you have questions, send an email.
ABOUT THE FACULTY AND GUEST SPEAKERS
Seth Ter Haar
Seth Ter Haar is an artist, woodworker, curator, and self-proclaimed “fisher of men”, whose work explores the intersection of spirituality and contemporary gay culture. The 2024–2026 Fellow of Docomomo Wisconsin, Ter Haar studied modern art and architecture with particular attention to the queer femme–founded Layton School of Art and twentieth-century religious spaces across Wisconsin. His programming and research examined the ideologies behind making the sacred through postwar material experimentation and technical innovation, earning him the first-ever Student Documentation Award at Docomomo US’s Modernism in America Awards (2025). His work has been recognized through awards and fellowships, including the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (2023), participation in the gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix grant program (2023), finalist status for Milwaukee’s Nohl Fellowship (2025) and an Open Fund Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ (2025). Ter Haar is the Managing Director of Kolaj Institute. He has served as Gallery Director at the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network, preparator at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Jewish Museum Milwaukee and Tori Folliard Gallery and curated exhibitions for multiple organizations, including his alma mater the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Learn more at www.sethterhaar.com.
Ric Kasini Kadour
Ric Kasini Kadour is a writer, artist, publisher, and cultural worker. He maintains an active art practice and his photography, collage, and sculpture have been exhibited in and are part of private collections in North America, Australia, and Europe. He was the recipient of a 2020-2021 Curatorial Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts. He is interested in the role of art in the community and how art can impact communities. He is also interested in the role of art in people’s lives and believes contemporary regionalism is a means for rebuilding society’s relationship with art. His practice includes community organizing, curating, writing, publishing, and art making. He has curated exhibitions in galleries, museums and art venues in the US, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. His most recent curatorial work includes “Artists in the Archives” at The Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History (September 2022-January 2023) and “Mythical Landscapes: Secrets of the Vale” at the Knoxville Museum of Art in Tennessee (March-May 2023), as well as six exhibitions in 2024, five in 2025, and three in 2026 at the Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans, of which Kadour is the director. Kadour holds a BA in Comparative Religion from the University of Vermont. www.rickasinikadour.com
Clive Knights
Clive Knights is an English collagist, printmaker and creator of festival structures. Since 2021, he has had solo shows of his collages and monotype prints in Portland, Oregon; Rome, Italy; and Williamsburg, Virginia. He has exhibited work in over 40 group shows in multiple US states and internationally, including “Amuse-Bouche” and “Bird on a Wire” at LeMieux Galleries during Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2024, 2025 and 2026. In April 2022, he curated the international exhibition “Corporeal Gestures” in Portland. In June 2022, he published his first monograph, Gestures from a Body at Work: Unsuccessful Attempts at Grasping Eternity. In 2024 he collaborated with Canadian poet Terriann Walling to publish Labyrinth of Wind: Poems and Collages, which they presented at Kolaj Institute’s COLLAGE::BOOKS Symposium in Montreal in October 2025. The fine art publisher No Reply Press recently published two limited edition handmade books, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin, accompanied by ten original collage interpretations; and The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, accompanied by ten original monoprints. He was the founding director of the School of Architecture at Portland State University. Knights has presented at every Kolaj Fest New Orleans since 2018 and Kolaj LIVE Milwaukee. His fictional work, “The City of Objectivity”, appeared in Kolaj 30. His conversation with Andrea Burgay, “Excavations, Projections & Depth, Parts I & II” appeared in Kolaj 28 and 29. “Stranger at the Studio Table” appeared in Kolaj 17. His collage appears in Collage Artist Trading Cards, Pack Five. He is represented by Laura Vincent Design & Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Learn more at the Kolaj Magazine Artist Directory, www.cliveknights.com, and on Instagram @knightsclive.
Kolaj Institute
The mission of Kolaj Institute is to support artists, curators, and writers who seek to study, document, & disseminate ideas that deepen our understanding of collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century movement. We operate a number of initiatives meant to bring together community, investigate critical issues, and raise collage’s standing in the art world. www.kolajinstitute.org