SYMPOSIUM IN MONTREAL
The Book as a Place for Collage Symposium
Kolaj Institute is partnering with ARCMTL to produce a full day symposium on the subject of collage and the book on 3 October 2025 in Montreal. The symposium is part of VOLUME 8 MTL, Montreal’s annual conference and fair devoted to art publishing and artists’ books. The Symposium itself is part of a series of events for collage artists that takes place 2-5 October 2025. These events will run parallel to the events organized as part of VOLUME MTL and include collage making, visits to book collections, and networking.
CALLS TO ARTISTS
Photography & Collage Virtual Residency
Mondays, 8-29 September 2025, 7-9PM EDT Final Deadline to submit: Tuesday, 19 August 2025 The Photography & Collage Virtual Artist Residency will invite photographers and collage artists to come together in dialogue, learn from one another, and make artwork for a series of exhibitions that explore the intersection of collage and photography. Unfolding in two tracks over the course of a month, we will ask, What happens when a collagist picks up the camera? What happens when a photographer collages their pictures? Presentations will explore collage in theory, artist practice, the ecosystem of art, the state of photography, and the history of photography and collage. Artists will shoot with their own camera, in whatever process they choose (film & develop or digital & print), and then make collage with the photographs they take.
CALL TO ARTISTS
Collage the Planet: Trash as Material Artist Residency
In-person, 20-24 October 2025
Deadline to Apply: Sunday, 14 September 2025.
A five-day, in-person collage artist residency in New Orleans in October 2025. You can call it refuse or detritus or reclaimed materials or recycling or you can call it what it is, Trash. In collage, materials are never neutral. From how they are sourced to how they are used, the material a collage is made of shapes the story and experience of the artwork. Alongside Kolaj Institute Director Ric Kasini Kadour, the residency will be co-led by Weymouth, Dorset, United Kingdom artist and Kolaj Institute Artist in Residence Jodie House who will present her project, “Discarded & Caught”, inspired by plastic bags and other litter caught in roadside bramble in the English countryside. Artists will visit The Green Project, a salvage store and paint recycling program in the Bywater to learn about their work and explore ideas about how to use the materials on hand. They will also review an international, historic survey of artists that used trash in their work and consider how materials are never neutral in collage. During the “Collage the Planet: Trash as Material Artist Residency,” artists will develop a practice of using trash as materials and make artwork for an exhibition at Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans.
CALL TO ARTISTS & PRESENTERS
The Book as a Place of Collage Symposium
Deadline: Sunday, 24 August 2025. Kolaj Institute is partnering with ARCMTL to produce a full day symposium on the subject of collage and the book on 3 October 2025 in Montreal. The symposium will be a part of VOLUME 8 MTL, Montreal’s annual conference and fair devoted to art publishing and artists’ books. The Symposium will be part of a series of events for collage artists that will take place 2-5 October 2024. These events will run parallel to the events organized as part of VOLUME MTL and include collage making, visits to book collections, and networking. We would like to hear from those who wish to present a paper, practice, or book at this symposium and those artists with a practice of publishing, illustration, or poetry who wish to present at the symposium.
CALL TO ARTISTS
Big Orange Monster: An Emergency Collage Exhibition
You mix fear (yellow) and anger (red) and you get a Big Orange Monster. What’s the emergency? There are a lot of Big Orange Monsters on the loose. Kolaj Institute invites collage artists to make a big orange monster collage for an exhibition at Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans that will take place in September and October 2025. A selection will be featured in a small publication. This is an open exhibition and those artworks that meet the specifications and arrive by the deadline will be exhibited. For full details, read the Call to Artists.
CALL TO ARTISTS
Kolaj Institute Solo Artist Residency
Submissions are reviewed on an ongoing basis
Kolaj Institute’s solo residencies in New Orleans are designed to provide artists, curators, and writers with dedicated time and space to work on a project. We are open to your ideas. We are looking for artists with an articulated goal for their time in New Orleans. That goal need not to be explicitly related to New Orleans, though priority will be given to those artists whose projects need time in New Orleans. These Solo Residencies are taking place at Kolaj Institute’s home in the New Orleans Healing Center and help further Kolaj Institute’s mission to support artists, curators, and writers who seek to study, document, and disseminate ideas that deepen our understanding of collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century movement.
CALL TO ARTISTS
Collage Publishing
Sundays, 21 September to 12 October 2025, 2-4PM EDT
Next deadline: Sunday, 7 September 2025
A four-week, virtual/online workshop with Kolaj Institute in September and October 2025. In the Collage Publishing workshop, artists will turn a body of work or a project into a zine, art catalog, monograph, or book. We will explore different models of publishing and types of book projects. We will walk through the steps and support one another as we create publishing projects and prepare to put them out into the world. Participants will present and receive feedback on page spreads. Presentations will speak to issues around copyright and appropriation, getting the book printed, and launching and marketing the book.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
PoetryXCollage
PoetryXCollage is a printed journal of artwork and writing that operates at the intersection of poetry and collage. Artists and writers interested in submitting should prepare 3-5 page spreads for consideration. Page spreads must conform to exact specifications and include a general artist narrative and a short page spread narrative. Submissions are reviewed on an ongoing basis.
BOOK LAUNCH & PROJECT UPDATE
Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide
In January 2025, Kolaj Institute organized the residency, Politics in Collage 2025: Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide, that brought together collage artists to make artwork that responds to a global rise in authoritarianism. They explored the history of political collage and its early 20th century roots in the European anti-fascist movements. They learned how to read and decode authoritarianism, to understand how it operates, and strategies for resisting or countering it. Discussions and presentations centered on how an artist can make work that picks up the unfinished work of history and contributes to the civic discourse. Artists in the residency worked together to illustrate and elucidate The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide, a text written by Martin Mycielski, the Vice-President and Executive Director of the Brussels-based Open Dialogue Foundation. Based on the Polish experience, The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide offers its readers information and tools for recognizing and resisting authoritarianism. In a clear series of lists, the Guide lays out what to expect in a society being led by an authoritarian regime, rules for surviving such a regime, and strategies for engaging with authoritarian supporters. Kolaj Institute has published a book and folio of prints using the artwork made during the residency. Selections of the folio are currently on view at Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans as part of the exhibition, “Collage as Art Movement” (14 June-31 August 2025). The project will be the subject of a Kolaj LIVE Online that will take place on Saturday, 26 July, 3-5PM EDT.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Kolaj Institute Gallery in New OrleansKolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans is an exhibition gallery, residency center, artist studio, library and archive. Located at 2374 Saint Claude Avenue, Suite 230, at the corner with St. Roch Avenue above the Peach Cobbler Factory. The Gallery is open Thursday-Saturday, Noon-6PM or by appointment. Join us on Second Saturday for the Bywater Art Walk from 6-8PM.
ON VIEW: Big Orange Monster through 18 October 2025
At the heart of this exhibition at Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans is collage made and sent to the gallery in response to an open call to artists: “You mix fear (yellow) and anger (red) and you get a Big Orange Monster. What’s the emergency? There are a lot of Big Orange Monsters on the loose. Monsters only have power if you are afraid of them. So let’s create a space where we can slay our fear of Big Orange Monsters. Art helps us exorcise our demons. Monsters can be glorious and wonderful or horrible and evil. Let’s not cast aside the good Big Orange Monsters because some other Big Orange Monsters are well…unpleasant.” Artists sent 128 collages from 13 countries: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States. Nine artists from New Orleans contributed works to the exhibition. We ask visitors to the gallery to take care and not feed the monsters, some of which have been installed behind a protective iron gate for everyone’s safety.
ONLINE EXHIBITION
The Dancing Pixel
“The Dancing Pixel” presents eleven animated GIFs by an equal number of artists each of which offers a point of departure for a deeper understanding of this curious cultural output. The exhibition is intended to deepen our understanding of Animated GIFs and Collage in Motion, generally. We offer these artworks as a starting point. A place to debate and discuss both the technology and the art form and hopefully to inspire artists to consider where this medium fits into their larger practice.
PROJECT
Collage in Motion
The Collage in Motion project 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. We find Collage in Motion at film screenings, on social media, and projected as part of art exhibitions and at live events such as festivals and music concerts. Current activites include an exhibition of animated GIFs opening on 15 July 2025; the Collage on Screen Virtual Artist Residency; and a Kolaj LIVE Online on 6 August 2025.
RECENT TITLES
NEW PUBLICATION
Frankenstein
This new version of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s classic 19th century novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus features seventy-six illustrations by International Collage Artists who delved into the novel’s rich narrative and visual potential and created thought-provoking artworks that reflect the essence of Frankenstein in a 21st century context.
NEW PUBLICATION
Magic in the Modern World
Taking a broad view of magic and drawing from multiple histories, the book, Magic in the Modern World by Ric Kasini Kadour, proposes a way to think about magic in the 21st century, what it means to communities, and how it negotiates itself in systems of power. Generously illustrated, the book features the artwork of fifteen collage artists and dozens of historical images. The book asks, What role can artists play in nurturing and supporting magic traditions?
CURRENT ISSUES
Kolaj #41
Since 2011, Kolaj Magazine has documented, reported on, and explored the amazing artists who make up the international collage community. Inside Kolaj #41, you will learn about a collage series that unpacks a painful history, collaged seed packets, an exploration of Louisiana’s forgotten women, a review of a book on the history of collage, the reissue of a book about collage on screen, a curated selection from Kolaj Institute’s collection of collage, collage at the intersection of art and community history, a two-story collage in Miami, and artist portfolios. 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.
CURRENT ISSUE
PoetryXCollage: Volume 7
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.
Artist Development at Kolaj Institute
At Kolaj Institute, our philosophy is that if we bring artists together, explore ideas and concepts, share knowledge, we can stretch and develop as artists. When we bring that knowledge and skill into our communities, we raise the standing of collage and contribute to the civic discourse. Kolaj Institute’s Artist Development Program is a collection of three core workshops for self-motivated artists, at any stage in their career, who want to develop and expand their collage-based artist practice and work towards professional goals, particularly in the areas of exhibitions and publishing.
Collage Publishing Workshop
In this four-week workshop, artists will turn a body of work or a project into a zine, art catalog, monograph, or book. We will explore different models of publishing and types of book projects. We will walk through the steps and support one another as we create publishing projects and prepare to put them out into the world. Participants will present and receive feedback on page spreads. Presentations will speak to issues around copyright and appropriation, getting the book printed, and launching and marketing the book.
Curating Collage Workshop
Curating is a vital part of art’s function: a curator creates a bridge between artwork and audience. For artists, this process can be confusing and mysterious. The goal of the Curating Collage Workshop is to equip artists with the tools to curate their own work, to work with curators, and build exhibitions that connect with diverse audiences.
Collage in Practice Workshop
Intended as a clinic for working artists at any level, participants in this workshop will explore how they go about making art and putting it out into the world. Participants will finish the workshop with a deeper understanding of their practice; a strong statement of practice that can be used to communicate with curators, editors, and art professionals; a portfolio of consistent artwork (or a plan to make one); and tools for growing or developing their practice.
EVENTS
Kolaj Institute in New OrleansKolaj Institute Gallery is an exhibition gallery, residency center, artist studio, library and archive. Located at 2374 Saint Claude Avenue, Suite 230, at the corner with St. Roch Avenue. Kolaj Institute also manifests in other locations and art institutions around New Orleans with the intent to activate community centered around collage.
ABOUT KOLAJ INSTITUTE
The mission of Kolaj Institute is to support artists, curators, and writers who seek to study, document, & disseminate ideas that deepen our understanding of collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century movement. We operate a number of initiatives meant to bring together community, investigate critical issues, and raise collage’s standing in the art world.
Kolaj Institute works in partnership with Kolaj Magazine to communicate, market, promote, publish, and distribute the work of the Institute. Kolaj Institute is the recipient of Kolaj Magazine‘s archives and collections.
Kolaj Institute is decentralized and works in partnership with a number of art venues and other organizations around the world to manifest its programs.
What’s New at Kolaj Magazine
COLLAGE ON VIEW Duncan Richards: Chimerical Skies: The Heavens Becoming New at Bushwick Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, USA18 September-25 September 2025 Trans interdisciplinary artist Duncan Richards (she/they) fuses sculptural [...]
COLLAGE ON VIEW Big Orange Monster: An Emergency Collage Exhibition at Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA10 September-18 October 2025 Opening Reception: 13 September 2025, 6-8PMduring Second Saturday [...]
COLLAGE ON VIEW Jaclyn McCabe: Unspoken Fragments at Burnt Canoe Studio in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA20-27 September 2025 Exploring grief and longing through hand-cut collage, using unexpected juxtapositions, negative space, [...]
