RESIDENCY UPDATE
Collage as Street Art Residency – New Orleans 2024
at Kolaj Institute
9-16 June 2024
A week-long, in-person residency that coincides with Kolaj Fest New Orleans (12-16 June 2024), during which artists will explore the city, learn about the history and materials of street art, and make artwork for public display that Kolaj Fest attendees and New Orleanians will be able to view.
About the Residency
In this week-long, project-driven collage residency, artists will delve into the history, methods, and major artists of the “street art” movement with a particular emphasis on collage. Participants will endeavor to put some of those methods into practice, taking their collage art out into the streets. Documenting the entire process will be integral to the project, as the resulting work will be published in a Kolaj Street Krewe zine to be announced at a later date.
This residency is an extension of the ongoing Kolaj Street Krewe project. Kolaj Street Krewe, an informal group of artists interested in this subject, explores the role of collage in street art as a practice and phenomenon. The group formed out of a chance meeting of FANCLUB13, Rosie Schinners, and Laurie O’Brien at Kolaj Fest New Orleans in 2018. Realizing the three of them shared an interest in collage street art, they decided to form a group and pitch a project at Kolaj Fest New Orleans in 2019. During COVID-19, the Krewe led a forum as part of Kolaj LIVE Online which resulted in a Call to Artists. In July 2021, fourteen artists participated in the virtual Collage as Street Art Residency. This history is documented in the book, Wallflowers: Collage as Street Art. Today, the project manifests as residencies, presentations, articles, and publications. An in-person residency took place alongside Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2023 and Kolaj Institute is offering this opportunity again during Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2024.
Leading the residency is Lance Rothstein, aka FANCLUB 13, who has been creating street art for over 20 years in over 25 US cities and 31 European cities. Rothstein writes, “I consider my work to be a bit like archaeology, collecting the discarded items from people’s everyday lives and rearranging them in new relationships. Then I usually send them back out to the streets in this new form, with a new purpose. I look forward to continuing my personal scavenger hunt, finding little trashy treasures and combining them into intricate relationships for people to come across on the streets.”
Artists will arrive in New Orleans on the Sunday before Kolaj Fest begins and will spend those days coming together to learn about the work and methods of several established artists and discuss new techniques and strategies, with topics such as Placement, Materials, Visibility, Message, and Legality. Each day, we will challenge participants to get their work out onto the streets, document the process, and share it with the group for discussion and critique. There will be sanctioned walls where artists will have permission to put up their work and during Kolaj Fest attendees will be encouraged to seek them out as they tour the city. Once Kolaj Fest starts, the artists in this residency will be let loose from the formal sessions and encouraged to participate in Kolaj Fest programming while also keeping an eye out for street art opportunities. As Kolaj Fest comes to an end, the residency will meet once more to debrief and digest the experience together.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
5″x5″; handmade boxes, found objects; 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Dana Joon is a poet, maker, and flower farmer who currently lives in southwest Colorado. She holds an MFA in poetry and has worked in words, wood, fiber arts, photography, multi-media, mural, and collage for over 20 years. As she relishes collaborative creation, she was an EAST (East Austin Studio Tour) participant 4 times and co-founded (the now defunct) place-making collective PLACING ROUTES, which completed five murals in Austin, Texas. She has completed residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, worked with Patrick Dougherty on a woven-wood installation at Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, and exhibited her work in group shows in Austin, Virginia, Baltimore, and Mancos, Colorado. Her most recent dreams include the creation of a “pay-what-you-can” flower and art stand in Mancos, Colorado, which will be filled with her farm-grown flowers and welcome all community members to contribute, share, and partake in and with their own creative makings.
spray paint, acrylic paint; 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Estefania Fornelli was born and raised in Ciudad Juarez, in the last year of the millennial generation: 1993. She went to college for Visual Arts at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez right at the border between Mexico and the United States. Since the beginning, from her school days until this one, she has been experimenting with alternative graphic media such as zines, paste-ups, and more recently, murals, while also working with analog media such as film photography and oil painting. The mixture of these mediums has become her trademark. She has also been teaching art in formal education institutions or government and nongovernmental programs. Her body of work revolves around pop culture, individual and collective identity, the external representation of the self, mysticism, and occultism.
19.6″x15.7″; acrylic, graphite, and embroidery on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
Esther Gámez Rubio was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, México, and moved to Ensenada in 2004 where she has spent most of her professional life. She has a Bachelor’s in Visual Arts with a diploma in printmaking. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in over 150 group shows in México, the United States, Spain, and Qatar, as well as 11 solo shows since 2009. An active member of her local art scene, Rubio often wears the hat of cultural promoter and curator for other emerging artists. She is a founding member of Yerbamala Taller, a studio and art collective focusing on holding spaces for women and nonbinary artists. Rubio is a restless artist who has chosen to be open about the many paths and styles a creator has to walk in order to be able to survive and thrive. Her works cover traditional media such as drawing, painting, and printmaking, but spill into the experimental with found materials, textiles, and even tattoos. For the last ten years, she has collaborated as a visualist with a number of sound and music artists, where she has learned to be an improviser using analog media. Everything seems to fit within Rubio’s generous creative universe. The emergence and blooming of life, yes, but also its decay, the decomposition of organic materials that were once admired, loved, and vigorous human, animal, and vegetable bodies. The absurd culture of waste and obsolescence. The arbitrary invention and upholding of gender and inequities, along with the resistance and transformation that these conjure up. The desert, the sea. Flora, fauna. The complexity of human struggle, especially of women. Everything is revealed as palpably beautiful in the work of this reluctant shaman of the ordinary, a witch of the mundane, a witness and translator of the cycles of life, both permanent and transitory.
14″x11″; cardboard, paper, magazine clipping, pressed flower, black marker, paint, glue; 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Kristen Elzey, aka “elzapatista”, is a therapist, dreamer & collage artist presently roaming purposefully in search of home. A disaster mental health worker by profession who responds regularly to crises domestically & internationally, her engagement with both the emotional self & community healing deeply informs her artistic practice. After experiencing what she refers to as “creative constipation” for much of her life, she was both thrilled & relieved to discover collage as a liberating outlet & unique mode of communication during the pandemic. While most of her artmaking has been on an individual basis utilizing paper and other analog materials, recently she endeavored to share her passion for collage with a seasonal community in Bombay Beach, California. There she dabbled with remixing her work using AI tools, hosted introductory collage-making classes for children & also invited collaboration on a 10-foot piece of plywood that was ultimately transformed into a vibrant bar table in a shared use space. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources, Elzey’s artistic influences are multifaceted. From the raw emotions of everyday life to the surreal landscapes of dreams, her work reflects a profound connection to the human experience and a strong sense of advocacy for collective self-care & compassionate enlightenment.
found objects; computer monitors, microcomputers, chairs, keyboard, desk, manual; 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Marteen Martinez is a new media artist who creates fluidly between digital and physical spaces. His intermedia-based art practice utilizes digital 3D, photo/video, assemblage, collage, design, and performance. Working across mediums, his work critically engages with his environment and explores concepts of semiotics, materialism, ontology, post-internet art, and absurdism. Influenced by the Fluxus art movement, early computer artist Manfred Mohr, and new media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, his artistic approach is committed to experimentation and process art-making. He received a BA in Communication Studies from DePaul University and a Digital Multimedia Design Certificate from Harold Washington College. His work has been exhibited at spaces such as Agitator Gallery, Tom Robinson Studio, Gallery 901, Southwest Creative Studio, No Nation Art Lab, imnotArt Gallery, Comfort Station, and included in online exhibitions at Holden Gallery-Manchester School of Arts, Studio Harlem, and MoMA.
20″x20″; mixed media on paper/digital; 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Rollan Rodriguez is an artist and designer with more than a decade of solid experience in design and the visual arts. Managed and worked as a Design Director of a communication and design studio, Ape Creative, he merges design and art into the effortless consumable matter. His works blur between art and design, known for his edgy but contemporary subjects. Purveyor of the lowbrow/urban art movement in the UAE, Middle East, and Asia. He is the founder of a Dubai-based pop/urban art collective, The Brownmonkeys. He has curated and organized numerous, urban-art-related activations locally, resulting in the formation of sub-cultures. He is also part of the first-ever Filipino designer group that ever exhibited in the Dubai Design Week.
Tricia Rainwater (she/her) is a Choctaw Indigiqueer multimedia artist based on Ohlone land with roots stretching from Miwok land in the Central Valley to Diné land in New Mexico. Rainwater’s art ranges from self-portraits to sculpture and installations, earning recognition in both national and international exhibitions. She was a recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission Grant in 2022, which funded her project retracing the Choctaw route of the Trail of Tears. In her work, Rainwater crafts a visual story that goes beyond traditional boundaries. Over three years, she delved into self-discovery, capturing the intricate dance between herself and nature in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Beyond her art, Rainwater holds a Bachelor’s in Theology from the American Indian College and has a unique background, working as a pastor on the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona and the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. With this history and her now estrangement from the church, Rainwater grapples in her work with the dark history of her tribe in relationship to both the Catholic and Christian Church and the harm done by these institutions. Through her art practice, she raises the question of whether healing is possible by creating space to sit with the uncomfortable. Grounded in the intricate realms of identity and grief, her current artistic practice offers a perspective through the lens of an Indigiqueer Choctaw survivor. Working primarily with photography, along with installation and large scale murals she is not afraid to take up space and make the viewer notice. Within this exploration, she delves into the presence of displacement within the body, urging Indigenous people to confront and resist loss by revisiting the sources and places where both our wounds and those of our ancestors occurred.
FACULTY
FANCLUB 13 is the street art collage persona of Lance Rothstein. He has been making collages with trash and found objects, then leaving them out on the streets since 2010. A professional photojournalist by trade, he’s worked for many major newspapers and publications throughout the US and Europe, but he returned to his art school roots after moving to Belgium with his wife in 2009 and dove headfirst into producing several forms of Street Art. “I began leaving my little collage pieces everywhere I traveled, mostly working with objects found on the streets of the cities I visited, and making the artworks late at night in my hotel room before posting them up on the street the following day.” FANCLUB13 prefers the dubious methods of posting street art and mail art but has also had some more traditional exhibitions. His artwork has been shown in many local Belgian and Florida galleries, but also in Brooklyn, Detroit, Chicago, Pasadena, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, New Orleans, London, and Paris. His work has been featured in Kolaj Magazine, Be a Pal magazine, Unfamiliar Vegetables, and Circulaire 132. Works of his are also in the permanent collection of the Doug + Laurie Kanyer Art Collection in Yakima, Washington as well as The Schwitters’ Army Collection of Collage Art at MERZ Gallery in Sanquhar, Scotland, and the Postcards for Democracy traveling collection by Mark Mothersbaugh and Beatie Wolf, opening first at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Fort Myers, Florida.
Christopher Kurts is a storyteller and artist in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the Coordinator for Kolaj Institute, where he has organized artist labs, residencies, workshops, and forums which have often led to exhibitions and publications. In this role, Kurts acted as the Art Director for Kolaj Institute’s Oh, Money! Money! by Eleanor H. Porter, illustrated and interpreted by contemporary collage artists. His own work recently appeared in the exhibition, “Empty Columns are a Place to Dream” which debuted in August 2021 during the 53rd Annual Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival in Birr, County Offaly, Ireland. In January 2022, Kolaj Institute published a book about the project and the exhibition traveled to the Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, Tennessee. Kurts is also the co-founder and lead organizer for the Mystic Krewe of Scissors and Glue, a group of creatives in New Orleans who meet monthly to collage, converse, and foster community. Along with the Krewe, Kurts helped organize “Unfamiliar Vegetables”, a group exhibition for Kolaj Fest New Orleans in July 2019, which was later published as a book.
PARTNERS
About 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