Kolaj Fest New Orleans—a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society—heads to the museum for a day full of conversations, tours, and more.

The event brings together collage artists and art professionals to elevate the status of collage through panel discussions, exhibitions, and activities. Attendees will meet, network, and share community, camaraderie, and fellowship, all while developing new ideas for artmaking, writing, and curatorial projects.

Get inspired to champion collage in the year to come. 

LEARN MORE ABOUT KOLAJ FEST

This event is free with museum admission. Museum visitors are invited to join in on the day’s programs. 

---

Schedule

Daily Collage Congress: Welcome to Kolaj Fest

Lapis Center for the Arts

10:15 am

Hear from a number of artists about projects and exhibitions taking place during the festival. Andrea Lewicki from the Special Agent Collage Collective will introduce the Locative Collage Project taking place during the festival. Nikola Janevski will present their collaboration with Andrea Burgay that looks to bring collage into the fashion world.

Sacred Mother Space Gallery Walk with Creative Assembly member LaVonna Varnado-Brown

First Floor, Ella West Freeman Galleries

11:15 am – 12:15 pm

LaVonna Varnado-Brown will lead a gallery walk of the museum  that “honors the Divine Mothers through visual spellcasting. The tour will include some works in the New African Masquerades exhibition as well as works in the Afropolitan: Contemporary African Arts at NOMA exhibition. Varnado-Brown is a 2024-2025 Creative Assembly artist-in-residence. “NOMA’s Creative Assembly residency promotes community engagement by welcoming artists to collaborate throughout the year with the museum’s permanent collection, special exhibitions, and programs.” During the Sacred Mother Space Gallery Walk, Varnado-Brown will share her experience as a resident artist. 

Preserving Family History workshop with Nayla Maaruf

Second Floor, Frederick R. Weisman Galleries

11:30 am –12:15 pm

Nayla Maaruf, NOMA’s Conservator of Photographs and Works of Art on Paper, will share her knowledge on disaster preparation at home for family photos and documents, which also applies to artists with a paper-based practice. Maaruf will also entertain questions from artists who have material concerns about their artwork.  

Victorian Scrapbook House for Paper Dolls with Beverly Gordon

Lapis Center for the Arts

1:00 pm –1:30 pm

During her thirty-year career in academia, Englewood, Florida artist, writer, and educator Beverly Gordon focused a global lens on art identified as domestic and “women’s work”. In this session, Gordon will present on collages found in late Victorian scrapbook houses. She writes: “These were collage book albums, ostensibly made as paper doll houses, which featured double-page spreads representing different rooms in a house. The cover of a given album served as the front door, the next pages represented the front hall, and so on into the inner rooms of the home and garden. The furnishings of the rooms consisted of images cut out from trade catalogs, newspapers and other visual material, which was ubiquitous in the late 19th century. Scrapbook houses are related to Victorian photocollage, but the genre stands alone as a particularized tradition.”

Gallery Tour of Nicolas Floc’h: Fleuves-Océan, Mississippi Watershed with Curator Brian Piper

Second Floor, Zita and Luther Templemann Galleries 

1:oo pm

Brian Piper, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings, will lead a gallery tour of the exhibition Nicolas Floc’h: Fleuves-Océan, Mississippi Watershed. French artist Nicolas Floc’h’s Fleuves-Océan project traces the movement of water across our planet, exploring its flow through varied habitats and representing the ways we are all connected by water cycles and systems. On display are vibrant monochromatic photographs of the color of water made under the surface paired with dramatic black-and-white landscape photographs made along the banks of the Mississippi and its tributaries—from Louisiana and across the country. Floc’h documented the entire span of the Mississippi during a 2022 Villa Albertine artist residency in the United States in collaboration with the Camargo Foundation and Artconnexion. This exhibition, organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art, illustrates the importance of a network of water that links people across the entire continent. Floc’h’s photography translates important scientific concerns—such as climate change and the looming water crisis—into an overwhelming aesthetic experience, without sacrificing any urgency or insistence.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

Symbols on a Cave Wall: Storytelling & Collage with Andrea Lewicki, Carolyn E. Oliver, Jordan Cerminara, Kirk Read, and Erica Trabold

Lapis Center for the Arts

1:45 pm – 2:45 pm

Storytelling is a fundamental part of the human experience. Every culture does it, sometimes in wildly different ways. From painted symbols on a cave wall to role playing video games, people are telling stories but also sharing vital information, conveying ethics and morality, or building a cosmology that explains the world in which we live. In this panel, we will hear from artists whose practice is deeply involved with storytelling and collage.

Docent guided Tour of New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations

First Floor, Ella West Freeman Galleries

2:00 pm

New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations is a major exhibition presenting the works of four contemporary artists working in cities across West Africa: Chief Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa, Sheku “Goldenfinger” Fofanah, David Sanou, and Hervé Youmbi. Learn more about the exhibition here.

For collage artists and enthusiasts, New African Masquerades is an opportunity to see artwork by contemporary African artists whose practice is rooted in ancestral traditions, embedded in communities, performed live for people in performances, processions, and other ceremonies. “Looking at these artworks through the lens of collage, we can see how the artists are creating a bridge between the past and the present, mixing contemporary media with a traditional visual language, and creating dynamic experiences for the viewers they encounter. What does it mean to think of art objects as living entities?” said Kolaj Institute Director Ric Kasini Kadour. “The exhibition also invites us to reflect on how we think about historical and contemporary art from Africa and how these objects make their way into European and North American institutions.”

Where are we?: Collage Artists & a Sense of Place

Lapis Center for the Arts

3:00 pm – 4:00 pm

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.” Where are we? Modern life is fundamentally diasporic in nature. Understanding place is critical to survival and resilience in the 21st century where hostile factors of climate change, late-stage capitalism, and rising authoritarianism threaten community cohesion already stressed by Modernity. 

Each of the four artists in the New African Masquerades exhibition contribute to a sense of place in their communities. They draw on traditions, folklore, and religious practices. They use symbols and imagery familiar to their communities. Their performances bring people together and offer the opportunity to connect with ancestral traditions and create shared memories for the future. All of these things foster a sense of place. And each of these artists operate from the now, putting that sense of place in conversation with the Modern lives in which their communities exist.  

 In this session, we will hear from four artists whose work also speaks to a sense of place.

---

About Kolaj Institute

Kolaj Institute is a 501c3 Louisiana-based, non-profit organization whose mission 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. The institute also publishes Kolaj Magazine, a quarterly, printed, art magazine reviewing and surveying contemporary collage with an international perspective.