COLLAGE ON SCREEN AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS
Collage on Screen & The Inquisitor
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Admission to Collage on Screen is free for those registered for Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2026. A limited number of tickets is available for the general public at $10.00.
Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 10-14 June 2026. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.
Thursday, 11 June 2026, 7-9PM
Cafe Istanbul
in the New Orleans Healing Center, 2372 Saint Claude Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA 70117
Collage on Screen, an eclectic evening of moving images, is part of Kolaj Institute’s Collage in Motion project, which explores collage and the moving image, a broad, loosely defined category that includes animations, film cut-ups, collage film, stop-motion, documentaries about collage artists, and other forms of media in which collage—as medium or genre—is present.
This year’s presentation will show the feature-length film, The Inquisitor, by New Orleans, Louisiana artist and filmmaker Angela Lynn Tucker. The film follows the life and career of Barbara Jordan (1936-1996), the first Black Texas state senator, the first Southern Black woman to join Congress (1973-1979), and the first Black American and the first woman to give a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention (1976). In the documentary, Kelly Gallagher’s collage stop-motion animation helps tell the full story of Jordan’s life and to illustrate aspects missing or erased from the historical record.
The program will begin with a series of short films made by participants in Kolaj Institute’s 2025 Collage on Screen Artist Residency, a five-week program designed to support artists who want to develop a practice that includes motion in their artmaking. The artists worked virtually over five weeks in Summer 2025 where they explored the history of collage on screen and the various ways that collage makes its way to the screen and how collage artists operate in the space of moving images and sound.
Sedona, Arizona-based Jennifer Myhre‘s A Wonderful Opportunity for You “draws upon documentary materials from the U.S. period during and immediately following World War I, including wartime propaganda, music and film footage, news accounts, and U.S. military intelligence files” to “tell the story of how the U.S. government weaponized wartime propaganda against civil liberties and laid out a template for surveillance and repression of progressives that remains active a hundred years later at a much larger scale.” Myhre’s other film, The Ear Pinchers, remembers the queer history of Susan B Anthony and Jane Addams. “History is wallpaper.”
Apple Eye by Kingston, New York-based artist Sui Jenneris “opens on Venus, a figure who represents femininity and the fruits of nature. As she eats an apple, the camera follows the apple’s journey, leading to Hat Man, a comic-style character I created when I was young. Hat Man carries a sense of innocence and protection. He tosses the apple back toward me, where it rolls across a table scattered with books.” The artist wrote, “Apple Eye explores the thread of innocence within my inner world through a sequence of drawn characters and symbolic imagery.” Sui Jenneris’s other film, Trinkets, is a collage in motion short about the beginning of an unlikely friendship between a crow and a human.
Feeding the Birds is award-winning playwright Kate Lavut‘s first film. The Montreal, Quebec-based artist used paper cut-outs drawn by her father, Canadian filmmaker Martin Lavut (1939-2016), which “move across a hand-built stage frame by frame, revealing a sinister story expressed not through words but by music. The queen feeds the birds, who drop their seeds and plant two beings. They grow with love until they fill with hate, and in a battle to the death, they spill their blood. The queen returns, gathers the blood, and feeds the birds.”
Working at a time when the President of the United States threatened to invade major American cities, FLOCK by Chicago, Illinois poet and artist Jennifer Roche “reimagines Chicago’s resistance and solidarity as pigeons versus clowns, and in this way, I hope its message endures longer and flies farther.”
The program will be the debut of the short collaborative film Gain of Function: Hope by Emily Denlinger. Gain of Function is a project led by the Cape Girardeau, Missouri artist that speaks to the role of art, ritual, and resilience. The project intersects with Folklore, Photography, and Motion and is realized as a zine published by Kolaj Institute; a folio of photographs available for exhibition, and now, a short film. At Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2025, Denlinger asked participants “How do we retain and grow hope? How do the people we surround ourselves with help facilitate that in our lives?” and invited participants to make stop action animations with which she has made into a film. Over the past year, Denlinger worked with co-writer Svetlana Litvichuk to develop the film using these stop motion animations as a folk narrative involving the “Big Orange Monster” made by Ric Kasini Kadour for the exhibition and forthcoming book of the same name. In the film, the Big Orange Monster is tamed by seeing the joy of community play.
For the Collage in Motion project, Kolaj Institute sees its role as not one of defining “collage in motion” but as one of asking what “collage in motion” can be. The project manifests as articles in Kolaj Magazine, an online directory, workshops, residencies, and screenings. Artists with a practice of Collage in Motion are encouraged to submit to the online directory.