Standard Processes in Dressmaking

A collaged altered book by nine members of the International Collage Community. Using E. Lucy Towers’s iconic, 1948 instruction manual as a point of departure, artists added fragments to the pages of the book as a means of exploring womanhood and fashion. The result is a collaborative meditation on how the clothes we wear shape identity, meaning, and place in the world. Project lead, Alison Kurke, notes, “We subverted her dressmaking strictures, narrow rules of structure and construction.” The altered book is an example of how the International Collage Community operates through project-based collaboration that transcends borders. MORE

World Collage Day 2024 Special Edition

In honor of World Collage Day, 11 May 2024, Kolaj Magazine is releasing a special edition of the magazine. The Special Edition is a booklet full of Cut-Out Pages and stories from inspiring collage artists. MORE

Collage Street Art: New Orleans

What happens when you take collage to where the people are? Kolaj Street Krewe is an international group of artists exploring the role of collage in street art as a practice and phenomenon since 2018. In June 2023, a dozen artists gathered in New Orleans for a week-long, in-person artist residency. This zine is a document of what they made. MORE

PoetryXCollage Volume Four

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. Each issue 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. MORE

Collage Saves The World

Collage Saves the World is the second book from Kolaj Institute’s Politics in Collage Project, a series of residencies, publications, discussions, and exhibitions examining complex socio-political issues that contemporary society is contending with, in order to spark meaningful dialogue and inspire deeper engagement. Each artist chose specific issues to explore through the medium of collage. Their artwork allows viewers an opportunity to reflect on various forms of racism, colorism, ableism, and sexism; the war in Ukraine; climate change and the importance of permaculture; beauty standards and women’s autonomy. MORE

The Awakening

by Kate Chopin, illustrated & interpreted by contemporary collage artists

Set in New Orleans, Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel, The Awakening, touches on 19th century feminism, identity, and societal themes. Under the art direction and creative leadership of Nancy Bernardo and Christopher Kurts, a dozen international collage artists collaborated to illustrate the book. Working as a group, the artists analyzed the story, discussed themes, uncovered symbols, and asked questions to visually interpret this seminal feminist text for a 21st century audience. MORE

Folklore of the Upper Nithsdale

Thirty-three collage artists illustrate stories of witches, ghosts, and other spirits from Sanquhar, Scotland. Using stories collected from William Wilson’s 1904 book, artists reimagine these tales in a 21st Century context and invite us to see folklore as the imagination of the past, understood in the present. MORE

PoetryXCollage Volume Three

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. Each issue 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. MORE

Wallflowers: Collage as Street Art

Wallflowers: Collage as Street Art explores the intersection of collage and street art. Christopher Kurts recalls the formation of the Kolaj Street Krewe from its creation at Kolaj Fest New Orleans to a guerilla art project during the COVID-19 pandemic to an artist residency for Street Artists. The book contains examples of collage as street art by twenty-four artists from eight countries. MORE

Artists in the Archives

Local history museums, archives, and collections are vital to building healthy communities and to anchoring our understanding of the world around us in the place where we live, work, and play. Collage artists have unique skills that are particularly useful in our historical moment. They understand that something beautiful, something meaningful can come from chaos; that destruction is easier than creation, which takes patience, precision, thoughtfulness, and intuition. What happens when we bring those two groups together? MORE

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. Each issue 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. MORE

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

transitional MOMENTS: restoring equilibrium through the art of collage

The 112-page book 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. Suzanne Winkel writes that the book “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.” MORE

Tissue Box: A pandemic response | Boite à mouchoir: Une réponse à la pandémie

In the Fall of 2021, Kolaj Institute worked with Virginie Maltais of Québec Collage in Montreal to present their pandemic project as a bilingual book. In Spring 2020, as the world was going into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, 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. MORE

Oh, Money! Money!by Eleanor H. Porter

Kolaj Institute is pleased to announce the publication of Oh, Money! Money! by Eleanor H. Porter and illustrated by a collective of collage artists. In Porter’s 1918 novel, a Chicago multi-millionaire struggles to decide to whom he should leave his money. The book is a time capsule of early 20th century American life with a strong focus on the lives of women and observations about material culture and communities before the rampant consumerism of the 1920s and the Great Depression. To illustrate the book, Kolaj Institute organized a residency that brought together ten artists who worked collaboratively to make sixty-three collages that interpret Porter’s novel for a 21st century audience. MORE

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

International Directory of Collage Communities

Collage is unique in the larger art world in that communities and collectives play an important role in the production and promotion of the art form. Collage groups organize exhibitions, run online calls to artists, facilitate exchange across borders. While the presence of these groups is felt, who they are, how they function, and how they are evolving over time is poorly understood. The International Directory of Collage Communities is a 104-page survey of collage networks, guilds, communities, projects as well as online efforts and groups focused on collage research. MORE

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 artists describe how they want to reimagine the world. MORE

The Book as a Place of Collage

The companion to COLLAGE::BOOKS, a symposium about the role of publishing in collage, considers as a point of departure that the book, not the gallery, is the best place to experience collage. In this book, Ric Kasini Kadour investigates this idea using examples from the magazine’s collection of collage books and work by presenters are the symposium, Kadour traces the history of collage publishing, offers a taxonomy of various publishing activities, and discusses the function of the book in art practice, for art professionals, for viewer or collector. MORE

Where the Sun Casts No Shadow

“Where The Sun Casts No Shadow: Postcards from the Creative Crossroads of Quito, Ecuador” is a testament to the power of artist communities. A companion to the traveling exhibition, the book brings together the in-camera collage works of Stephen & Eve Schaub, the murals of Mo Vàsquez, documentary photographs of PLAYhouse in Quito, the poetry of Maria Clara Sharupi Jua in Spanish, English, and Shuar; and art from Quito’s El Club de Collage. MORE

Revolutionary Paths

When the collage is presented in exhibition, it is often done so without the critical framework granted other mediums. “Revolutionary Paths: Critical Issues in Collage” 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