MAGAZINE | INSTITUTE | CURRENT ISSUE | ARTIST DIRECTORY | SHOP
CALLS TO ARTISTS
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Piranesi
Ian Tothill at Bradford City Library in Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, 17 September-15 October 2022. The collages in this exhibition depict imagined scenes from Piranesi, a 2020 novel by Susanna Clarke. As a reader, Ian Tothill was captivated by the rich complex world of the halls and the character of Piranesi. Was this his elaborate hallucination, an inner world? Was he held captive in some way? How was he so deeply content in conditions which seemed so harsh? MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
New Reality: Contemporary Collage in Ireland
at Market House Craftworks in Cappoquin, Co. Waterford, Ireland, 9 September-1 October 2022. “New Reality: Contemporary Collage in Ireland” is a showcase exhibition of new, original artworks created by 20 collage artists living and working in Ireland today. The exhibition is part of The New Reality Festival, 9-11 September, which includes a presentation by Alan Keane, live music, a talk by Sean Hillen about his life and collage work, community engagement with the collage artists, and a short film, Moving Collage. MORE
COLLAGE COMMUNITIES
Waverley Collage Makers
The group explores different themes and styles each week in a relaxed environment. Their aim is to promote the alternative art form to a broader community and promote the library’s art programs in general. Offering free community programs to everyone. Current activities include exploring new styles of collage each week. Running a weekly collage making class in the day, and also a once a month night class. They plan on making the international World Collage Day a bigger event for their calendar of events going forward. For the past 3 years the group has run an end of year exhibition in the library gallery space, inviting community members to regard collage as a fine art and encouraging them to come to next years classes. MORE
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Sketch/Cut/Stitch
Ruth Rodriguez at Empty Set in Bronx, New York, USA, 9 September-17 October 2022. “Sketch/Cut/Stitch” is a solo exhibition of work by Ruth Rodriguez, a Dominican American artist. Curated by Sasha Louis Bush, this show presents a series of digitally- and physically-made collages and wall-mounted tapestries by the artist. The exhibition marks both Rodriguez’s and Bush’s New York City debut as an artist and as a curator, respectively. Many of the works in “Sketch/Cut/Stitch” begin with sketches in a notebook. After scanning these, she continues to work on them digitally, making adjustments on her iPad. Once a drawing is complete, it is printed digitally, often on inexpensive materials such as shower curtains and commercially produced fabrics purchased in Rodriguez’s neighborhood in the Bronx. MORE
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Open Ended Narratives
Brooklyn, New York, USA. Haylie Werhanowicz gravitates towards older magazines for her work to produce a narrative image. Other materials include found postcards and images as well as paints and other media. Werhanowicz has experimented with digital collage, primarily using old family photos, to create semi-surrealist images and finds that these lend themselves to more open-ended narratives. She likes using a sense of humor and irony in her composition, even if the story itself is more melancholic, or scary, for example. MORE
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
A Glimpse into Our History
Kenmore, Washington, USA. Lisa Sheets’ mixed media collages often explore history, gender roles, and cultural norms, and how these things impact our lives. Sheets uses combinations of religious and historical iconography along with pop culture images, creating a lens to examine a glimpse into our history and reflect on its influence on our present. She often uses repetition and digital manipulation of source images to emphasize key imagery and create symmetrical compositions. She is fascinated by the constantly shifting and changing roles that shape us, and examines how we unravel those roles through history. MORE
COLLAGE BOOKS
Cut Me Up Issue 9: Scars and All
The most recent issue, curated by Laurent Seljan, is a selection of 18 self-portraits that use assembling methods—tape, thread, glue, staples and pins—as expressive elements to describe each artist’s personal psychology. MORE
CALL TO ARTISTS
New Orleans Collage Artist Lab: City as Archive
November 2022 | Click for details
PRINT MAGAZINE
Kolaj Magazine relies on our subscribers. Your support of this magazine keeps us going and makes it possible for us to investigate and document collage and to promote a deeper, more complex understanding of the medium and its role in art history and contemporary art.
CURRENT SUBSCRIBERS: The postal service continues to be slow so please bear with us. If you do not receive your copy by 30 September 2022, please let us know.
NEW ISSUE
Kolaj #36
Barbara Bertino's Sailing the Dry Land graces the front cover of Kolaj 36 which we think is an apt metaphor for a print magazine where each issue travels around the world of collage. In the print magazine, we travel from the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada to Rio de Janeiro to Kampala, Uganda to report on the international community of collage artists and what this 21st century art movement is doing. Kelli Bodle takes us back in time to explore the legacy of Italian Proto-Arte Povera Artist Salvatore Meo. We hear from a collective of composers in Peru (all of whom are women) who are making collage heard as well as seen. We get an update on how the U.S. Supreme Court may be changing Fair Use. And we consider the painterly influences and attitudes of collage artists, whether two-bit collage is a sort of minimalism, and how one artist came to love collage in motion. We hope each issue of Kolaj Magazine takes you someplace you've never been. MORE
Kolaj 36 is sent automatically to members of the Silver Scissors & Golden Glue Societies.
These special subscribers support the work of Kolaj Institute while receiving an item from Kolaj each month. Join before September 15th, 2022 to receive the print magazine as your first item.
NEW PUBLICATIONS
BOOK
Politics in Collage
In a time where the challenges facing us as individuals and communities have grown to seemingly insurmountable levels, further exacerbated by the increasing toxicity of the political climate, artists are using their work to confront these challenges by engaging their viewers in a higher level of discourse. Through a virtual residency, twenty-five artists created collage works examining complex socio-political issues that contemporary society is contending with, in order to spark meaningful dialogue and inspire deeper engagement. MORE
POETRY JOURNAL
PoetryXCollage
Volume One
PoetryXCollage is a printed journal of artwork and writing which operates at the intersection of poetry and collage. We are interested in found poetry, blackout poetry, collage poems, haikus, centos, response collages, response poems, word scrambles, concrete poetry, scatter collage poems, and other poems and artwork that inhabit this world. In this issue: Rosemary Rae, El Cajon, California, USA | Cathy Greenhalgh, London, United Kingdom | Jennifer Roche, Chicago, Illinois, USA | doriana diaz, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA | Thomas Mayer, Berlin, Germany l Cheryl Chudyk, Kirkland, Washington, USA
POETRY JOURNAL
PoetryXCollage
Volume Two
Each issue of PoetryXCollage presents six movements of work by artists and curators. Page spreads are meant to be free zones of thinking where the contributor has chosen all elements of the layout: font, image place, composition, etc. In this issue: Anthony D. Kelly, Castle Bar, County Mayo, Ireland l Carla Reyes, Astoria, New York, USA l Janice McDonald, Denver, Colorado, USA l Samantha Brown, Blackrock, County Louth, Ireland l Laura Tafe, Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA l Collaborations by Cathy Greenhalgh, Thomas Mayer, Rosemary Rae, Anthony D. Kelly, & Cheryl Chudyk
Recent Publications
SPECIAL EDITION
World Collage Day 2022
In honor of World Collage Day, 14 May 2022, Kolaj Magazine is releasing a special edition of the magazine.The Special Edition is full of Cut-Out Pages and stories from inspiring collage artists.The printed magazine also includes an interview with 2022 World Collage Day Poster Artist Erin McCluskey Wheeler. MORE
BOOK
The Money $how: Cash, Labor, Capitalism & Collage
The Money $how juxtaposes contemporary artwork against fragments of history and literature as a way of showing how collage can help us deconstruct culture and understand the world differently. Artists collage dollar bills into flowers and mine material remnants to tell stories about home economics. MORE
BOOK
Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream
A companion book to the project of the same name, Ric Kasini Kadour unpacks what monuments are and their role in our communities. The book shows what happens when collage artists reimagine monuments as sites of truth and reconciliation. The book features the collages of eighteen international artists made a series of collages that reimagined the empty column in the center of Birr, County Offaly, Ireland. MORE
ZINE
Identiblocks: Portrait #001
by Mark Vargo, 2022. Vargo's project pushes the boundaries of traditional paper collage into an interactive, dynamic and 3-dimensional space allowing individuals to both create and perform their own collage mask that represents their identity, vision and emotions. MORE
BOOK
Radical Reimaginings
The curators of the 96-page book invited artists who use collage in their practice to put forward a work of art that offers a visual narrative that speaks to the unprecedented change unfolding in 2020. An essay by Ric Kasini Kadour reflects upon collage's unique ability to imagine new realities. Forty artists from nine countries and multiple Indigenous peoples—Salish-Kootenai/Métis-Cree/Sho-Ban, Tlingit/Nisga’a, Oglala/Lakota, and Seneca Nation—offer a variety of perspectives. The voices of Black, Latinx, Native, and white Americans mingle with those from Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Canada, France, and Germany. Artwork is accompanied by a statement in which the artists describe how they want to reimagine the world. MORE
BOOK
Collage Magic
by Emma Anna
Part autobiography, part fantasy, Emma Anna’s vision of The New Old World (aka The NOW) fuses vintage ephemera with modern imaging technologies. Emma shapes this strange world by using the pen tool from Adobe Photoshop as her magic wand, in the process declaring herself to be a “collage magician”. Part artist book, part document of art making, Collage Magic, from La Casa Verde Editions, is Emma Anna’s journey through magic and art. MORE
BOOK
Revolutionary Paths
When the collage is presented in exhibition, it is often done so without the critical framework granted other mediums. In "Revolutionary Paths: Critical Issues in Collage", exhibition curator Ric Kasini Kadour presents examples of collage that represent various aspects and takes on the medium. Each work in the exhibition represents the potential for deeper inquiry and further curatorial exploration of the medium. MORE
BOOK
Cultural Deconstructions
Collage is unique as a medium in that it uses as its material artifacts from the world itself. To harvest those fragments, the artist must first deconstruct culture; they must select, cut, and remove the elements they do not wish to use and then reconstruct work that tells a new story. In "Cultural Deconstructions: Critical Issues in Collage", exhibition curator Ric Kasini Kadour presents examples of collage artists who are deconstructing identity as a way to critique culture. MORE
COLLAGE BOOK
Tissue Box:
A Pandemic Response
Boite à mouchoir: Une réponse à la pandémie. In Spring 2020, as the world was going into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Quebec Collagiste Virginie Maltais felt a deep need for a point of reference. Her solution was a project that asked collage artists from around the world to make a collage using the top of a tissue box. "Small projects are important. You regain your courage and hope when you start and manage to finish something. There is no small project. We do big projects with lots of little steps. Step by step, we move forward. Together. And it is all of these small steps, together, that led to the creation of this book." Maltais worked with Kolaj Institute and Kasini House to produce a bilingual book about the project. MORE
COLLAGE BOOK
transitional MOMENTS
transitional MOMENTS: restoring equilibrium through the art of collage includes one hundred collages selected from over 2000 submissions created from 600 collage packets sent to artists around the world for World Collage Day 2021 by the Arizona Collage Collective. transitional MOMENTS "reflects our current state of uncertainty as we wrestle with feeling constrained, disoriented and suspended in air between what was and what will be. Yet, these thresholds, unsettling as they are, can be spaces of great creativity and transformation," writes ACC's Suzanne Winkel. MORE
COLLAGE BOOK
Unfamiliar Vegetables: Variations in Collage
Unfamiliar Vegetables is a collection of collage where each of the fifty artists interpreted, in their own way, Carlotta Bonnecaze’s 1892 Carnival float design Familiar Vegetables. Project organizer Christopher Kurts observed, “Unfamiliar Vegetables is an experiment in controlled chaos….tiny variations within each artist’s creative sphere accumulate until the outcomes are as unique as the people creating them.” MORE
COLLAGE COMMUNITIES
The International Directory of Collage Communities
The 104-page book is a survey of collage networks, guilds, communities, and projects as well as online efforts and groups focused on collage research. For each community, the directory presents their key activities, mission, how to join, and a bit of their history. Copious images illustrate the book. MORE
Our goal with every issue is that Kolaj Magazine is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of contemporary collage in art, culture, and society. Each issue of Kolaj Magazine is dedicated to reviewing and surveying contemporary collage with an international perspective. We are interested in collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century art movement.
