AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS
Strategies for Showing, Sharing, & Selling Collage Outside of Gallery Context
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. Learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend HERE.
From the exchange of mail art to the publication of zines, collage artists are experts at showing, sharing, and selling their work outside of the traditional gallery system. In this session, we hear from a number of presenters engaged in such work: Steven McCarthy, Aaron Beebe, Allan Bealy, Andrea Burgay, Charles Wilkin, Rosie Schinners and Katie Blake. While this session focuses heavily on publishing, we are interested in the strategies collage artists use to share and expose the public to their work.
For over thirty years Steven McCarthy has worked at the confluence of graphic design, art, writing and self-publishing. Many of his works are artist’s books, because “books are a terrific way to package narrative structures” and “books are a relatively inexpensive and democratic form of expression.” Aaron Beebe recently organized Th(ink), a collaborative booklet of collage art. “The Dystopian Reader” is a guerrilla project by Rosie Schinners to inject art into unusual places. She will speak about her aim to use collage to bring joy and levity in our current dystopian climate. Allan Bealy was co-publisher of Benzene, an arts magazine in the 1980s and has worked with Redfoxpress and Black Scat Books to publish his collage. Andrea Burgay is the founder of Cut Me Up, a participatory collage magazine that mimics musical call and response in visual form. In 2003, Gestalten published Charles Wilkin’s monograph, Index-A, and in doing “shaped contemporary collage as we know it.” In 2018, he marked the 15-year anniversary of the publication by releasing a commemorative box set that included two other works, Monuments and Dust and Meat on the Overhead. Katie Blake focuses on zines made by women and discusses the inventiveness of collage in zine culture.
About the Symposium
The program at Kolaj Fest will be a unique experience. We have multiple goals and are serving multiple audiences: We aim to breakdown hierarchy and foster dialogue among art professionals working in a variety of capacities. We aim to build bridges between the collage community and the larger art world; between the art world and the general public. Our hope is that participants will have fun, network, play, and socialize while engaging in deep, real talk about issues that are important to them. We aim that people will leave Kolaj Fest New Orleans connected to a community, armed with ideas for their art, the presentation of collage, their writing and curatorial work, or simply a deeper appreciation and understanding of collage and the people who make it.
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. Learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend HERE.
Images (top to bottom):
EP_03 by Allan Bealy
10″x12″; collage on open packaging with gel medium transfer; 2016
Psychic Growth by Andrea Burgay
7.5″x8.5″x1.25″; collage on book, UV glaze; 2017
lady001 by Aaron Beebe
7″x4.5″; paper; 2018