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FROM THE PRINT MAGAZINE
Barrio Otoya, San José, Costa Rica. "When making collage, one treats images with humanity. When we cut, rip, isolate, transform, reorder, overlap, put out of context existing images, we heal and redefine our ideas we have with those images." A portfolio of his artwork appears in Kolaj #42. Since 2011, Kolaj Magazine has documented, reported on, and explored the amazing artists who make up the international collage community. We hope you enjoy the articles and images in the magazine, but also, we hope it leads you to asking great questions and ultimately to great artwork. LEARN MORE & GET YOUR COPY
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COLLAGE ON VIEW
At Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA through 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. Join Curator Ric Kasini Kadour for an exhibition talk and tour, Sunday, 14 December, 11AM at Kolaj Institute Gallery. MORE
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SOLO ARTIST IN RESIDENCE
through 14 December 2025. During her Solo Residency, Georgia-based artist Ré Phillips will expand her collage practice by exploring the intersection of power, politics, and resistance. Building on her PhD research on post-independence Kenya, where artists use visual storytelling to critique political regimes and imagine alternative futures, Phillips wants to create a series of collages that juxtapose archival materials, political imagery, and found objects. This project will examine how power is wielded, challenged, and represented, while drawing connections between Kenya’s histories and the socio-political dynamics of China’s growing presence in the country. On Saturday, 13 December, 6-8PM, the artist will be hosting an Open Studio at Kolaj Institute. MORE
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COLLAGE ON VIEW
Konstantinos Patsios & Marios Fournaris at the Herakleidon Museum in Athens, Greece through 18 January 2026. “Nature inside the Walls” explores urban biodiversity (plants, animals, etc. in the urban environment) through interaction with the city, the machine, and human perception. In addition, it brings the artists’ works into dialogue with the achievements of ancient Greek technology from the Museum’s collection. The exhibition was curated by independent curator Nina Fragopoulou, Ph.D. (Marine Biology). MORE
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FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA. Judith Ide is drawn to the spontaneity of collage, the cutting, tearing, and gluing of diverse materials, and the arrangement of the selected pieces into unique pieces of art. Allowing the shapes, colors, and textures to inform placement on the page yields unique visual narratives, some whimsical images, and some surreal narratives with unexpected subtexts. The process of selecting pieces, cutting/tearing, and arranging images and motifs to create a wholly new image is transformative, epistemically and personally. MORE
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FROM THE PRINT ISSUE
In Kolaj 42, Karen Hirsch reflects on her mother's decades of collage making in "Mother, Sister, Artist." She wrote, "So much about dementia is terrible. It chips away parts of the self, bit by bit, but with scissors in hand, she was always content. For a creative person like my mother, the illness unleashed five years of fierce self-expression." LEARN MORE & GET YOUR COPY
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COLLAGE ON VIEW
at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Houston, Texas, USA through 31 January 2026. “CraftTexas 2025” is the twelfth in a series of juried exhibitions highlighting the best in Texas-made contemporary craft. Juried by Abraham Thomas, the Daniel Brodsky Curator of Modern Architecture, Design, and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the exhibit includes 50 pieces by 49 artists, highlighting works that speak to diverse themes, including caregiving and expanded approaches to quilting and landscape exploration, while challenging craft boundaries through the innovative use of found and repurposed materials. Texas collagist Selena Dixon's large collage work, Forest Trees, is featured in the exhibition. MORE
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FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Lynchburg, Virginia, USA. In Erica Trabold’s series “Nourishing Flourishes,” florals and food playfully exaggerate the tension between homemaking and artmaking. While the viral tradwives of the internet serve their families only the best, Trabold is interested in preparing food on the page instead of in the kitchen. Since becoming a mother, collage has become her primary creative outlet and a natural extension of her writing practice. Trabold is interested in text-image combinations and the novel ways their fusion allows interplay between her old standbys: repetition, juxtaposition, gaps, and silences. MORE
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SUBSCRIBE TO KOLAJ MAGAZINE TODAY
Kolaj Magazine exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one's thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present. 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.
DON'T MISS OUT!
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CALL TO ARTISTS
Early Deadline to Apply: 14 December 2025. Carnival as Folklore is a five-day, in-person collage artist residency at Kolaj Institute in New Orleans, 25-30 January 2026. Carnival’s traditions are rooted in ancient European festivals. Its 19th-century revival in the Americas parallels a time when people were rediscovering and reveling in Greek and Roman Mythology. As such, carnival is dripping with folklore. No place does Carnival like New Orleans, where the city comes alive in a mass display of collective effervescence. During this in-person Artist Residency, collage artists will be invited to spend a week in New Orleans investigating Carnival as folklore and making art about it. Taking a broad view of collage and rooted in an understanding of Artist Practice, artists will hear a working theory of folklore; what it is; how it functions in communities; and the role artists can play in activating, transmitting, and celebrating folklore in communities as a form of cultural expression and a strategy for community resilience. MORE
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CALL TO ARTISTS
Next deadline: Tuesday, 23 December 2025. The practice of collage takes on many forms and is shaped by the artist’s goals and what they want to achieve with their artwork, how they want to diffuse their artwork in the broader ecosystem of art. The Collage in Practice Workshop is designed to give artists a working understanding of artist practice and how this understanding informs approaches to professional and artistic development. Participants will explore critical concepts and collage taxonomies as a way to develop and refine the language they use to talk about their own practice and to develop a broad view of the creative landscape in which they operate. 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 artwork (or a plan to make one); and tools for growing or developing their practice. MORE
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CALL TO ARTISTS
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. MORE
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CALL TO ARTISTS
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. LEARN MORE
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NEW PUBLICATION
Folklore Collage Society is a printed journal dedicated to artwork and artists who activate, transmit, and celebrate folklore as a form of cultural expression and a strategy for community resilience. In its pages, stories, statements, essays, field notes, poetry, and song lyrics mingle with collage art that shows how collage artists are thinking about the folklore. In Folklore Collage Society, Volume 1, editor Ric Kasini Kadour lays out the inspiration behind the project. Kate Sutherland and Bella LaMontagne share Irish and Celtic folklore. Indira Govindan considers the story of Lakshmibai. Jennifer Lentfer offers an example of counter folklore. Jacoub Reyes explores Taíno oral histories. We share Field Notes about crows and witches turning into hares. Sarah Cowling and Eli Craven makes art of their own family folklore Leanne Poellinger explores the symbolism and community of apple pie. Dean Reynolds offers us photographic evidence of gateways between realms. Natalie Vestin shares stories of Swedish smallfolk. And Verónica Poblete Villanueva takes us to Algeria and shows us the dance of Ouled Nail Tribe. MORE
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NEW PUBLICATION
Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide
Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide is a collage. The book combines the text of a Polish human rights activist Martin Mycielski with the artwork of seven collage artists to create a space in which we can think about the rise of authoritarianism and how to navigate the troubling, difficult times in which we find ourselves. Organized as a series of lists, the book illustrates what to expect under authoritarianism and offers rules for surviving authoritarian regimes and engaging their supporters. The introduction traces how the text came into existence and how the artists came together to make collage about it. Ric Kasini Kadour shares historical examples of artists responding to authoritarianism; John Heartfield’s anti-fascist collage and a 1979 exhibition in East Germany that was described as a “victory over false consciousness.” Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide is a testament to the role art can play in our communities.
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NEW PUBLICATION
This project led by Cape Girardeau, Missouri, USA-based artist Emily Denlinger speaks to the role of art, ritual, and resilience. Building on her own work, Denlinger engaged with thirty-nine artists at the 2025 edition of Kolaj Fest New Orleans to make locative collage photographs in an artist-created landscape inspired by global masking traditions. The resulting artworks are presented in this zine published by Kolaj Institute. "The project functions as 21st century folklore with each character potentially representing a magical creature or masked performer in some yet-to-be-imagined ritual," wrote Kolaj Institute Director Ric Kasini Kadour. "Like the odd, creature-like figures of early 20th century Surrealists, they, too, are a response to deeply troubled times and offer us the opportunity to find a collective effervescence to see us through them."
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PRINT MAGAZINE
Since 2011, Kolaj Magazine has documented, reported on, and explored the amazing artists who make up the international collage community.
In Kolaj #42, you'll discover "Little Beasts" at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Warsaw, Poland-based collagist Marta Janik; animated collage at the Glastonbury Festival; the radiating collage of Dana Hart-Stone; anti-authoritarian political collage projects from San Diego, California and Barcelona, Spain; contemporary challenges of doing Mail Art; a daughter reflecting on her mother's collage practice; a collaborative scanograph collage poem; collage book reviews; “Selections from the Collection” and 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. MORE
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JOURNAL
PoetryXCollage is a printed journal of artwork and writing that 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.
PoetryXCollage, Volume Seven includes artwork and writing by Pablo Cabrera Ferralis (Leipzig, Germany); Natalie W Schorr (Greenville, North Carolina, USA); Hanna Madej (Wroclaw, Poland); Dianalog (Palm Springs, Florida, USA); Christy Sheffield Sanford (Saint Augustine, Florida, USA); and a selection of Asemic Writing Collage Poems from Anthony D Kelly, Laura Tafe, Thomas Mayer, and Janice McDonald, with commentary by Ric Kasini Kadour. On the Cover is a detail of BY CHANCE/LA DÉRIVE by Pablo Cabrera Ferralis. MORE
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NEW PUBLICATION
Frankenstein
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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.
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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, 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.
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ARTSHOP
"I Cut Therefore I Kolaj" T-shirt
Since we started Kolaj Magazine in 2011, people have been asking about t-shirts. Well, we finally made one. We are pleased to announce the "I Cut Therefore I Kolaj" T-shirt. We hope you like it and wear it with pride.
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TRADING CARDS
Kasini House Artshop works with the Kolaj Magazine Artist Directory to produce curated packs of the Collage Artist Trading Cards. Each card is a full color, 5.5” x 3.5” postcard with rounded corners. An example of an artist’s work is on the front of the card and the artist’s public contact information is on the back. Collage Artist Trading Cards come in packs of 15.
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About Kolaj Magazine
Kolaj Magazine is a quarterly, printed, art magazine 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. Kolaj is published in Montreal, Quebec by Maison Kasini. Visit Kolaj Magazine online.
WEBSITE | ARTIST DIRECTORY | SHOP
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.
WEBSITE | CALLS TO ARTISTS | SUPPORT
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