The mission of Kolaj Institute is 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. 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’s Gallery in New Orleans presents exhibitions and connects Kolaj Institute and the artists we work with to the vibrant St. Claude Arts District. We produce 8-10 exhibitions a year and participate in Second Saturday, the neighborhood’s monthly art walk, putting the collage art, books and exhibitions in front of New Orleanians and visitors.
The Gallery is 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.
Volunteers play a critical role at Kolaj Institute Gallery. We are looking for people who can help install exhibitions, staff the gallery during open hours, help with archiving, and lend a hand with opening receptions. If you’re interested or have questions send an email to gallery@kolajinstitute.org.
If you’d like to support Kolaj Institute’s mission, Make a Donation.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Big Orange Monster
10 September to 18 October 2025
Opening Reception during Second Saturday: 13 September 2025, 6-8PM
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.
“Big Orange Monster: An Emergency Collage Exhibtion”, takes place at Kolaj Institute Gallery from 10 September to 18 October 2025. A reception will take place 6PM to 8PM on 13 September 2025 as part of Second Saturday in the Bywater.
The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday from Noon to 6PM and by appointment.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
image: untitled from “colLABELage” by Ira Carter
11″x14″; label collage; 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Collage As Art Movement
14 June to 31 August 2025
Opening Reception during Second Saturday: 14 June 2025, 6-8PM
The art movement is a useful yet artificial categorization of cultural production. An art movement can be a visual style, a group of artists, a philosophical approach, and more often than not, a marketing ploy. At their center is a group of people who symbolize and often champion the moment, often by articulating for others what is happening. Historically, an Art Movement referred to changes in style or aesthetic. However, since the advent of Modernism, as artists have changed the technology of art from picture making to experience making, each identified shift in art theory, philosophy, or approach became a new Art Movement, often encased with neo- and post-movement siblings and then revivals. Forgotten in this evolving idea of an Art Movement was the important fact that movements are always about people, masses of people engaged in dialogue and doing things in the culture.
Kolaj Institute has long maintained that collage is a community that operates like an art movement. In this exhibition, we offer a number of examples of how International Collage Artists come together, make art, and diffuse that art into the larger culture. The exhibition also explores how Kolaj Institute works to support that movement and the artists who participate in it. Among the work on view are panels from Special Agent Collage Collective’s exhibition, “colLABELage”; Frédéric Le ShoeShoe collages by Kolaj Institute Solo Artist in Residence Maria Turner; a collaborative scanograph made by artists from the Poetry & Collage Residency; selections from the Kolaj Institute folios, Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide and Frankenstein: 21st Century; an assemblage sculpture by Amite, Louisiana artist Julie Glass; a selection of art curated by Carol Lynch from the Collage Class at People Program NOLA, a non-profit organization that fosters lifelong learning and creativity in a vibrant community of seniors. Each of these exhibits is a starting point to explore how the International Collage Community operates as a 21st century art movement, a subject that Kolaj Institute will explore more deeply in the coming years.
“Collage as Art Movement”, takes place at Kolaj Institute Gallery from 14 June to 31 August 2025. A reception will take place 6PM to 8PM on 14 June 2025 as part of Second Saturday in the Bywater.
The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday from Noon to 6PM and by appointment.
Joy & Grief
12 April to 31 May 2025
Opening Reception during Second Saturday: 12 April 2025, 6-8PM
Joy and Grief: These two deeply human experiences are deeply connected. In New Orleans, our funerals start with grief, the somber second line’s somber dirge, and end in celebratory joy as we shake our asses and march down the street. On Mardi Gras, the Krewe of Saint Anne parades to the Mississippi River, a joyous occasion to pour the ashes of our lost loved ones into the water. In this city, we know that joy and grief are two sides of the same coin. You cannot fully understand one without the other. In this exhibition, fourteen International Collage Artists explore the obversity of Joy and Grief.
“Joy and Grief are complicated states of being and often contain a multitude of emotions,” said exhibition curator and Kolaj Institute Director, Ric Kasini Kadour. “We don’t choose grief. Loss is thrust on us and we are compelled to make sense of it. Happiness is fleeting and joy is something we must choose to cultivate in our lives. Both of these things operate in irrational ways, prompted by historical events but experienced in ahistorical ways. Memory, nostalgia, life experience, past trauma…all of these things provide context to the feelings we are having at any given moment. That statement also explains how collage works in the world. In this exhibition, the artists draw upon their personal experiences and invite us to consider the complexity of grief and joy.”
“Joy & Grief: An Exhibition of Collage”, takes place at Kolaj Institute Gallery from 12 April to 31 May 2025. A reception will take place 6PM to 8PM on 12 April 2025 as part of Second Saturday in the Bywater.
The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday from Noon to 6PM and by appointment.
Camera & Collage
29 November 2024 to 25 January 2025
as part of PhotoNOLA 2024
Opening Reception during Second Saturday: 14 December 2024, 6-9PM
The mediums of collage and photography are bound together in an ongoing dialogue. The photographer makes pictures of the world. The collagist remixes those pictures to tell a story about the world we live in. What happens when the photographer begins collaging their own work? What happens when the collage artist picks up the camera?
“Camera & Collage” brings together artists from Australia, Kuwait, Mexico, Canada, and the United States each of whom have developed a practice that sits at the intersection of collage and photography. The artwork demonstrates a variety of techniques and approaches. The artists are engaged in collage as process; making art with family archives and found materials; exploring alternative processes; and challenging how we think about images in a world flooded with them. In doing this, the artists invite viewers to consider questions of identity and gender; family and memory; the materiality of photography; and history and artist process.
The exhibition, “Camera & Collage”, takes place at Kolaj Institute Gallery from 29 November 2024 to 25 January 2025 as part of PhotoNOLA 2024, an annual celebration of photography in New Orleans, produced by the New Orleans Photo Alliance in partnership with museums, galleries, and alternative venues citywide. A reception will take place 6PM to 8PM on December 14, 2024 as part of Second Saturday in the Bywater. The exhibition is the third in a series in which Kolaj Institute is exploring the intersection of Photography & Collage.
The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday from Noon to 6PM and by appointment.
Temporal Geolocation: How Place & History Inform Identity in Collage
11 October to 24 November 2024
Paula Mans, T. Owens Union, Candace Caston, & Jeanna Penn
In Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippart wrote, “When we know where we are, we’re in a far better position to understand what other cultural groups are experiencing within a time and place we all share.” How do we temporally geolocate ourselves? How does the history of that place inform who we are in that place? How do we bring our own histories into a place that has a history of its own. North American modern life is fundamentally diasporic in nature. So many of us are from somewhere else and yet, where we are and when we are shapes who we are at any given point in time. How do we reconcile disparate identities and nurture a whole sense of self? In the exhibition, “Temporal Geolocation,” Paula Mans, T. Owens Union, Candace Caston, and Jeanna Penn draw on history and a sense of place to make collage art that speaks to identity. The exhibition runs 11 October to 24 November 2024 at Kolaj Institute Gallery.
Advanced Wound Healing Techniques
Collage by Robbie Morgan
16 August to 6 October 2024
Made in the months leading up to the artist’s 40th birthday, “Advanced Wound Healing Techniques” is a collection of collage made with personal photographs that were destroyed in a series of fires that took place when artist Robbie Morgan was 24 years old. In the intervening sixteen years, the artist carted around these photographs, moving them from home to home, storing them, occasionally reflecting on them. The collages speak to trauma, destruction, memory and how, as we age, we make sense of things. The artist wrote, “The collective assemblage allowed me to connect to these memories in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to if I hadn’t made this work. “
Magic in the Modern World
1 June-11 August 2024
In Fall 2023, Kolaj Institute invited collage artists to visit New Orleans and explore magic as a cultural idea, an ancestral tradition, a construct used by power to subjugate, and as a practice used by others to resist colonization and capitalism. Writer Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While Clarke was looking backwards, the artwork in this exhibition considers the role of magic in our contemporary, modern communities and what role it may play in the future.
Artwork in this exhibition speaks to honoring ancestors; tapping cultural magic; cosmology and life building; the power of womanhood; the quietude of modern magic; the practice of offerings and rituals; magical colors; spirit animals; magic in the diaspora; punishment of magic and the persecution of witches; and care for spiritual beings.
Also included in this exhibition is Jennifer Evans’ A Memorial to Witches of Dumfries located in the New Orleans Healing Center next door, to the left of the front entrance, across from Island of Salvation Botanica.
This exhibition was curated by Ric Kasini Kadour. Artists in the exhibition are Caroline Alterman, Rodney Boone, Lela Goldstein, Alexandra Montclair, Johanna Merfeld, Bridgette Bramlage, Ariya Aladjem Wolf, Vanessa L Moore, Debi A Barton Haverly, Jennifer Lai, Ihosvany Plasencia, Alicia Zapata, Jennifer Evans, and LaVonna Varnado Brown.
Collage the Planet: Environmentalism in Art
19 April-26 May 2024
The premise of the exhibition “Collage the Planet: Environmentalism in Art” is that science has the capacity to tell us how to care for the planet, but those solutions are meaningless if humanity doesn’t care enough to evolve and change. Art is a unique technology that can distill complexity into simple human gestures that, when experienced, facilitate a deeper understanding of our world. The exhibition shows examples of artwork that speaks to environmental issues and offers us an opportunity to intellectually and emotionally foster a healthy relationship with the natural world.
Artworks from invited artists will be joined by collage made during the Collage the Planet: Environmentalism in Art Artist Residency where artists from across North America spend five days in New Orleans exploring how they adapt their artist practice to speak to the complexities of environmental issues and contribute to a broader dialogue on sustainability and ecological consciousness.
The exhibition and artist residency, “Collage the Planet: Environmentalism in Art” is part of Kolaj Institute’s project, Politics in Collage, 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.
Kolaj Institute Grand Opening Exhibition and Reception
9 March-14 April 2024
Grand Opening Reception: 9 March 2024, 6-9PM
As part of the grand opening celebration for Kolaj Institute’s new home, Kolaj Institute is mounting an exhibition of artwork that is part of Kolaj Institute’s collection. This includes New Orleans artists such as Michael Pajón, Bianca Walker, and Kolaj Institute Director Ric Kasini Kadour. Members of the Mystic Krewe of Scissors and Glue will exhibit a collection of collaborative artworks. Artwork from Kolaj Institute’s past projects will also be on view, including from Artists in the Archives, Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream, Folklore & Collage, and Politics in Collage. Also on view will be Standard Processes in Dressmaking, a collaged altered book by nine members of the International Collage Community. Other artwork from Kolaj Institute’s collection in the exhibition is being curated by participants in the Curating Collage Workshop. A display of Kolaj Institute’s books will be on view and for sale.
The exhibition tells the story of Kolaj Institute and how the organization works with the International Collage Community to champion this fascinating medium.