Through 26 September 2026

Is This Your Chicken?

19 August–26 September 2026

How are artists living in and around New Orleans using collage to interpret the folklore, absurdity, and everyday realities of the city? “Is This Your Chicken?” brings together work by twenty-seven artists who call the New Orleans area home. The exhibition’s title comes from a refrain frequently encountered on neighborhood message boards and social media groups, reflecting the wild chickens that roam the city’s streets and drugstore parking lots. Part folklore, part urban legend, and part daily reality, the phrase is immediately recognizable as something uniquely New Orleans. Like the city itself, collage can embrace nonsense, frivolity, and fun while also confronting serious issues and helping us make sense of a fragmented world. The exhibition also includes work by members of the Collage Class at People Program NOLA and a collaborative collage created during World Collage Day 2026.

EVENT

Cutting (Up) with the Ancestors

Saturday, 5 September 2026 at Kolaj Institute.
Kolaj Institute, 2374 Saint Claude Avenue, Suite 230, New Orleans
Cost: FREE

Documentation Clinic with Ric Kasini Kadour: Noon-2PM

Workshop with S. Erin Batiste: 2-4PM at Kolaj Institute

Do you have old photographs and letters from an aunty, parent or grandparent who has departed, now housed in boxes or forgotten albums? This workshop explores memory work and how we can use keepsakes to preserve and build our own personal, radical archives. We will discuss, learn, and play with how to honor and respectfully use the materials we’ve inherited and been left with to make powerful memorials and art works using photographs and documents from the past. Centering Black, Indigenous, and Queer communities whose lives and experiences are often excluded and erased from the archive at large, we invite you to join S. Erin, poet and artist-in-residence, bring your personal, family, and found artifacts, and together we will build out fuller memories, and make speculative histories or counterhistories for our ancestors and beloveds. With the generosity of Kolaj Institute, there will also be an imaging clinic onsite with appointments where participants will learn how to scan and digitally archive their items, and some printing will be available so that everyone can take home a new collage work that incorporates an archive. Come early to scan, stay to cut and play!

Questions? Send an EMAIL

EVENT

New Orleans Wooden Postcards

Tuesday, 15 September 2026, 7–9PM
Kolaj Institute, 2374 Saint Claude Avenue, Suite 230, New Orleans
Cost: $25 per workshop.

New Orleans is offbeat, unusual, vibrant, and alive—all part of the gumbo that has simmered for 300 years with Spanish, French, Caribbean, African, Cajun, and Southern ingredients. It is a colorful city, from its distinctive architecture and historic cemeteries to its music, performers, and visual artists. Each sunrise and sunset creates an unforgettable moment. Even the city’s discarded ephemera can become material for the creative collagist.

In this workshop, alongside facilitating artist Carol M. Lynch, participants will create an original 4″x6″ wooden postcard suitable for mailing. After a brief introduction and demonstration, participants will use analog collage techniques to explore their relationship with New Orleans and evoke a sense of connection and reflection on their time in the city. Participants will have access to color copies of New Orleans imagery, magazines and books containing small pictures, symbols, and words, and Kolaj Institute’s collection of collage materials. Each completed postcard will be sealed with Mod Podge. Participants are also invited to bring personal photographs or paper memories, such as ticket stubs, small pieces of found paper, or images from places they have visited.

No previous experience with collage is needed. Wooden postcards, glue sticks, scissors, X-Acto knives, brushes, and all other materials are provided. Participants will leave with an original wooden postcard reflecting their own experience of New Orleans. Participants are invited to BYOB.

Questions? Send an EMAIL

EVENT

Collage the Tarot

Second Wednesday of Each Month
NEXT: Wednesday, 9 September 2026, 7-9PM
Kolaj Institute, 2374 Saint Claude Avenue, Suite 230, New Orleans
Cost: $20 per workshop.

On the Second Wednesday of the month through 2026, Kolaj Institute invites you to Collage the Tarot, with visual artist Bethanie Mangigian. Participants will explore the rich imagery of the tarot through intuitive collage-making. Each session invites participants to pull a card (bring a deck or use one of ours), reflect on its meaning, and set a personal intention. From there, participants will create an original collage inspired by the symbols, themes, and messages that arise. This is a space to slow down, connect with inner wisdom, play, and express creativity. No experience with tarot or collage is needed, and participants are invited to bring a notebook if they’d like to journal as part of this practice All materials are provided, and gentle guidance is offered throughout. Participants will leave with a piece of art that reflects their journey.

No one would be turned away for lack of funds. If the fee poses a barrier to participation, send an email to Bethanie Mangigian at missmangigian@gmail.com to request a waiver.

Want to learn more? Watch Bethanie Mangigian speak about this project on Fox8Live. HERE

EVENT

Collage Artist Meet-Up

Last Tuesday of each month.
NEXT: To be determined
Kolaj Institute Gallery, Cost: Free

At Kolaj Institute, we reject the myth of the solitary artist and believe that artists are better in community with one another. In that spirit we invite working artists to join us for a monthly meet-up to get feedback on work, and network with one another. If you’re not a working artist, but utilize art as a healing modality, you are welcome. If you have curiosities about collage generally or want to include it in what you are passionate about, you are welcome. Find out who’s looking for folks to exhibit, meet other working artists, and share skills and techniques in intentional space.

May’s event is hosted by LaVonna Varnado Brown.

The entrance to the gallery space where the workshop is held is stairs-only access. This event is in-person only and will neither be recorded nor live-streamed.

Questions? Send an EMAIL.

Through 16 May 2026

Fragment as Verse

11 April-16 May 2026

How does work at the intersection of poetry and collage operate on the gallery wall? In the exhibition, “Fragment as Verse,” we brought together twelve artists, poets, and writers whose work provides us an answer to that question. Kolaj Institute’s PoetryXCollage project explores and documents the intersection of poetry and collage through a series of residencies, workshops, exhibitions, and PoetryXCollage, a printed journal of artwork and writing that operates at the intersection. In 2026, we hosted two artist residencies, the virtual “The Elusive X” hosted by Jennifer Roche and the in-person “Fragment as Verse”. Each brought together poets and collagists to make artwork and consider how artwork and writing situates itself at the medium. “Fragment as Verse” is the first exhibition of the PoetryXCollage project. 

Through 11 April 2026

Folklore on Parade

14 February-11 April 2026.

“Folklore on Parade,” the current exhibition at Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans, brings together the work of sixteen artists, each of whom are speaking to ideas about carnival and folklore and its role in our communities. “Carnival in New Orleans could be considered the largest, ongoing folklore festival in the world,” wrote curator Ric Kasini Kadour. “When we look at culture through the lens of Folklore, we see culture shaping our sense of place, our relationship to communities, and a framework for how we exist in the world around us.”

EVENT

Folklore on Parade Exhibition Tour & Curator Talk

Saturday, 14 March 2026, 5PM
Kolaj Institute Gallery. Free

“Folklore on Parade,” the current exhibition at Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans, brings together the work of sixteen artists, each of whom are speaking to ideas about carnival and folklore and its role in our communities. “Carnival in New Orleans could be considered the largest, ongoing folklore festival in the world,” wrote curator Ric Kasini Kadour. “When we look at culture through the lens of Folklore, we see culture shaping our sense of place, our relationship to communities, and a framework for how we exist in the world around us.” At this event, Kadour will present a tour of the exhibition and we will hear from some of the artists whose work is on view. 

Since 1998, Carol M. Lynch (Metairie, Louisiana, USA)has been “heavily involved with the Mardi Gras culture of New Orleans, designing and creating costumes, headpieces, queens’ collars and trains, sequined appliques, graphic arts, centerpieces and shadow boxes to commemorate events.” She currently serves as a Board Member for the Joan of Arc Project. The suite of three collages featured in this exhibition each present a different perspective on Carnival in New Orleans. She will speak about her three collages featured in the exhibition. 

Carnival is about making shared memories: among friends and family and among communities at large. Julie Glass (Amite, Louisiana, USA) describes herself as an “eternal tourist” to New Orleans, someone who frequents the city, but doesn’t make it their home. As such, her experience of the city and carnival is that of a person on the street. Her collection of collage sculpture figures reminds us that during Carnival, the paradegoers, the people on the street, the walkers and watchers are as much part of the spectacle as the parades and second lines themselves. In this sense, the Folklore of Carnival is as much about the seeing and hearing as it is about the performance. 

Free. RSVP Appreciated.

OPENING 13 December 2025, 6-8PM

Pictures at the Intersection of Photography & Collage

10 December 2025-24 January 2026.

Throughout 2024 and 2025, Kolaj Institute hosted virtual residencies during which artists made work at the intersection of photography and collage. The intersection of collage and photography is not like a simple crossroads where two streets meet,” wrote exhibition curator and Kolaj Institute Director Ric Kasini Kadour, “It’s more like a round-about where many paths come together before shooting off in different directions. The deeper one gets into this inquiry, the more road metaphors fail. It may be more helpful to think of the intersection of collage and photography as neuropathways or mycelium.” In the exhibition, artists use collage to disrupt the photograph in order to tell a more complex and layered story.

WORKSHOP

New Mutations: Carnival

Friday, 16 January 2026 from 4PM to 7PM
Kolaj Institute Gallery, Free

Cape Girardeau, Missouri, USA artist and Kolaj Institute Solo Artist in Residence Emily Denlinger invites members of the New Orleans community to bring throws and other Carnival ephemera to Kolaj Institute Gallery on Friday, 16 January from 4PM to 7PM and help build a miniature landscape that will be used in a locative collage reflecting on the New Orleans Carnival celebrations. The goal is to incorporate materials left over or left behind after the celebrations. Denlinger will give ideas on how to transform found elements to construct a dream-like landscape. The landscape will be used in locative collage photographs created during her residency. Analog collaged figures made of fragments from fashion and vintage National Geographic magazines will be photographed in the ethereal, amorphous, other-worldly landscape. LEARN MORE about the project.

KOLAJ INSTITUTE FUNDRAISER

Chewbacchus Parade Viewing Party

Saturday, January 24, 2026, 6-10PM
Kolaj Institute, 2374 Saint Claude Avenue, Suite 230 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

Join Kolaj Institute on our balcony overlooking the corner of St. Claude and St. Roch for the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus Parade. This is an ideal venue on a second story balcony overlooking the parade, two blocks from the start! At the Viewing Party, enjoy music, pulled pork sliders, king cake, and other munchies. Tickets are limited and will sell out fast! A limited number of tickets is available at $50, after which the price is $100. A ticket includes a wristband, two drink tickets, and food during the event. Bar service includes a selection of beer and wine, soft drinks, and liquor. The event is appropriate for ages 12 and up. Tickets are required for entry. This event supports the ongoing work of Kolaj Institute.