Developing While Doing at Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2025

WORKSHOPS AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2025

Developing While Doing

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Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 25-29 June 2025. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.

Workshops at Kolaj Fest New Orleans offer participants the opportunity to engage with their process or materials in a new way; explore subjects or themes; or practice a new collage technique to make. Over a dozen workshops take place during the festival. Here is a selection of workshops taking place this year:

WORKSHOP AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2025

1+1=∞ One plus one plus one equals infinity: A Collaborative Workshop Celebrating the Art of Juxtaposition, Layering & Superimposition

During this session, Stephen Tomasko (Akron, Ohio) and Clive Knights (Portland, Oregon) will lead a collaborative collage making session that will result in a pop-up exhibition at the Saturday evening event. They wrote, “To the collagist, found images combine to form thresholds into new, unanticipated worlds opened by their combination and interaction. This workshop will amplify the potency of the found image itself by exploring a practice of ‘no alteration’ (or at most very minimal) in order to foreground creative acts of juxtaposition, layering, superimposition, arrangement, orientation and composition. In round-table groups of four, each participant will work with no more than four images culled by themselves and three other participants from a reservoir of provided, pre-cut images. Then, with no (or very minimal) further cutting/tearing they will collage these on a provided substrate aiming to activate the latent visual energy of metaphoric shift. A pop-up gallery display of the outcomes will be mounted to incite conversation within the broader festival community.”

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Clive Knights is an English collagist, printmaker and creator of festival  structures based in Portland, Oregon. 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” at LeMieux Galleries during Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2024. 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. He was the founding director of the School of Architecture at Portland State University. Knights has presented at Kolaj Fest New Orleans in 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024 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 and www.cliveknights.com.

Stephen Tomasko is an artist and curator from Akron, Ohio and the director of The Little Gallery at Bowling Green State University. He holds a BA in Art History and Philosophy from Bowling Green State University and an MFA from the University of Delaware. His work has been presented widely in exhibitions across the US and in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Togo, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. His work is held in multiple public collections, ranging from the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art to the Philatelic Bureau Gallery on the island of Tristan Da Cunha. Learn more at www.stephentomasko.com.

WORKSHOP AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2025

Inner Bully to Inner Bestie

In this three-hour workshop, New Orleans artist and life coach Jaclyn McCabe will guide participants through engaging, creative exercises that help them explore and unlock their potential; to overcome imposter syndrome and to boost their confidence and well-being, both in their personal lives and their artistic practice. The workshop unfolds in three parts:

“Part 1: Teaching. While life is full of both positive and negative experiences, our minds tend to hold tightly to the negative ones. But here’s the good news: With a few simple tools and a little practice, you can retrain your brain to hold the positive. The teaching portion of this workshop will draw from the research on negativity bias by neuroscientist Rick Hanson. Ph.D., as well as my own anthropological observations and therapeutic training around cultural, emotional, and biological aspects of why the inner critic is the loudest voice in our heads. You’ll also leave with tangle tools to stop the negative thought pattern in real-time, freeing you to create with confidence, share your work boldly, and embrace your artistic voice with authenticity and clarity.”

“Part 2: Collage. The key to confidence is self-trust, and an intuitive artistic process like creating collages is a powerful way to cultivate it. In this exercise—which involves selecting and assembling images—participants will give a visual form to their inner critic, the voice that expresses self-doubt, criticism, or judgment. By externalizing this voice in a visual, tangible way, we’ll foster self-awareness and help them recognize the origins and triggers of their inner criticism.”

“Part 3: Reflection. The Buddhists say that when you see something beautiful, breathe it in for ten breaths. Neuroscience says it takes forty seconds to make a new neurotransmitter. Ten breaths and forty seconds are about the same time. To counter our inner bully and build positive neurotransmitters, each person will say one positive word about each collage or the person who made it.”

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Jaclyn McCabe is a New Orleans-based artist and life coach. She holds degrees in Photojournalism and Cultural Anthropology from Western Kentucky University. Learn more at the Kolaj Magazine Artist Directory and www.jaclynmccabe.com.

WORKSHOP AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2025

Building Creative Communities: Arts-based Research Exercise

Belmont, Massachusetts artist and educator Missy Arellano works with students at Harvard University to use collage to express ideas about creative placemaking. She wrote, “I want to listen to other people’s stories, hopes, and dreams. I hope to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to others to exist in a world where we have had to make being creative into an economy. Creatives cannot simply exist, but we must carve a place for ourselves in this world and understanding how others view creativity and the importance of having creative jobs is invaluable information when looking to make a case to stakeholders, especially in local governments. I believe in the power of stories, and I am hoping to spend time documenting other people’s stories through visual artifacts, meaningful conversations, and collective experiences of creating, dreaming, and weaving ideas.”

In this workshop, she will lead an Arts-based Research activity that invites collage artists envision the role of art in their communities. Arellano will present her research into the value of the creative economy and invite “participants to reflect on what a creative city looks like in their own eyes. Participants will make collage that expresses their vision and then share that with the group. The resulting collage are data points in a larger discussion about how artists see their communities. Her goal is to “collect visual artifacts that can be used along with quotes, pictures, and interviews to…present to policymakers to…show [how] citizens believe creativity should be represented, protected, and assisted.”

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Missy Arellano holds a BA in Art History and French from California State University, Long Beach, an MPA from the University of Southern California, and an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Over more than two decades, the artist has contributed to a wide range of creative initiatives, from facilitating children’s programming in museums to managing artists at festivals, fundraising for public television, and teaching young children about contemporary art. Arellano took part in Kolaj Institute’s Joy & Grief Virtual Collage Residency in March 2025. The artist lives and works in the Boston area. Learn more at www.missyarellano.com.

Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 25-29 June 2025. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.