Oh, Money! Money! Book Launch

Kolaj Institute supports 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

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In this forum, artists who took part in the Money Money Collage Residency talk about collaboratively illustrating a hundred year old book.

In June 2021, Kolaj Institute held a four-week, project-driven residency, where ten collage artists worked together to create sixty-three collages that illustrate Eleanor H. Porter’s 1918 novel, Oh, Money! Money!. The artists met weekly to discuss the book and worked through virtual platforms to exchange ideas and works-in-progress.“The Money Money Collage Residency was an exhilarating experience embracing virtual collaboration to make analog and digital collages to illustrate a story,” writes Susan Silva. Mary Johnson writes “This residency gave me time and space, as well as direction, to breath new life into my practice and relationship with collage. I learned quite a bit from both the lectures and my fellow resident artists: working with imagery in direct response to a text, and strengthening my digital skills. Additionally, our discussions as a group regarding our culture's response to money, late stage capitalism and commercialism gave me quite a bit of food for thought. The residency has actually inspired a few new projects in my own practice."“I think the residency was a unique reimagining of what artistic community means in the globalized, virtualized, pandemic present,” writes Elijah Guerra. “On the surface, we collaborated to interpret and illustrate a novel, but beneath the surface, we reconfigured the layers of our individual and collective processes of creativity. We collaged each other into a cohesive and sometimes chaotic set of images, a self-portrait of the residency.”mateo desant succinctly sums up the residency as "Zoom, money, collage, Slack, repeat."In Eleanor H. Porter’s 1918 novel, Oh, Money! Money!, a Chicago multi-millionaire struggles to decide to whom he should leave his money. As an eccentric experiment, he schemes to give his three distant cousins one hundred thousand dollars each to see how they handle the windfall. The book is a time capsule of early 20th century American life with a strong focus on the lives of women and observations about material culture and communities before the rampant consumerism of the 1920s and the Great Depression. In telling this story, Porter gives us a look at the role of and attitudes about money that remain relevant today. The book raises important questions about the role of money in our lives: What good is money? Is money cruel? How should one handle money? How does money change us?ARTIST BIOSAmanda Lynch holds a BA in Fine Art and an MA in Arts from De Montfort University. Lynch works with mixed media, from sculptural forms to 2d works. Lynch’s work explores social engagement and practice, within community-based projects. Lynch’s work is held in international and national private collections, as well as CloseLTD gallery collection. She has exhibited throughout the United Kingdom, including the Somerset Arts Festival 2019 and abroad, exhibiting in Canada as part of the Gushul residency in Alberta (2016). Her work has appeared in group shows in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. She was artist-in-residence at Gulshul in Blairmore, Alberta (2016) and at CEDA in the United Kingdom (2020, 2021). The artist splits her time between Somerset and London. <a href="http://www.amandalynchart.com" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">www.amandalynchart.com</a> and on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/Amanda_lynch_art/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Instagram</a>.Elijah Guerra is a genderqueer Latino artist who makes analog and digital collages. His work explores themes such as environmental crisis, the search for home, and humanity’s place in the universe. His collages have appeared in WashU’s The Spectacle magazine. He lives in Columbia, Missouri, and is a literature PhD student at University of Missouri. Instagram. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/deercrossingthesea/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Instagram</a>.G. E. Vogt‘s original training was as a performance art­ist and director. Her perfor­mance pieces evolved into living collages of the materi­als gathered to create viscer­al stories for the audience. Collage is now Ms Vogt’s pri­mary medium, with a focus on political and social work. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in California, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Washington. Her first solo show was at Fresh Paint Gallery in La Jolla, California in 2019. She was also a panelist on the “Women in Collage” panel at Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2019. Most recently, she has begun curating the SoPoCollage page on Instagram to showcase other artists who specialize in social and political collage. The artist lives and works in San Diego, California. <a href="http://www.aworldinpieces.com" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">www.aworldinpieces.com</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/gretty_vee/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Instagram</a>Mary A. Johnson holds an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She has shown her work globally including the New York Hall of Science, the Nekrasov Library in Moscow, and multiple art centers and museums in China. Her work has been in group exhibitions juried by Jerry Saltz and Chang Fang; and collected by the Shanghai Art Collections Museum. Additionally, her work has been included in multiple international publications, including Rebeka Elizegi’s book Collage by Women: 50 Essential Contemporary Artists. Her studio practice emphasizes the unstable and unreliable. The artist lives and works in Denton, Texas. <a href="http://www.maryajohnson.com" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">www.maryajohnson.com</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/maryjohnson.studio/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Instagram</a>.mateo desant was born and raised in Mexico City under the name of Luis Avalos Trujillo. Luis is a PhD student in Economics at the University of California, Davis. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship. Prior to arriving in California, he worked in finance for the Mexican government and holds a degree with honors in Applied Mathematics from ITAM. mateo was born in 2003 as an exercise in art therapy. Over time, mateo has taken a more definite form. He is a self-taught poet, photographer and collagist. A handful of his poems have appeared in magazines in Mexico and Spain. <a href="http://www.mateodesant.com" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">www.mateodesant.com</a>Susan Silva is an artist and a proud public school art teacher currently residing in Northern Virginia. Her analogue collages are constructed as a response to current events and social issues. She has a prolific studio practice and shows her work frequently. In the past year Susan had a collage featured in Kolaj 32 about the international TELEPHONE web-based interactive project, a piece of mail art in the online exhibition “Pushing the Envelope: A Mail Art Gallery Show” by the Frank Juarez Gallery and SchoolArts Magazine as well as mail art in Jason Brown’s “VOTE!! A Mail Art Project”, which is now housed in Special Collections at the Vanderbilt University Library. Visit her blog at <a href="http://pseudonym-for-silva.blogspot.com" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">pseudonym-for-silva.blogspot.com</a> or find her on social media @sillysusansilva.ABOUT KOLAJ LIVE ONLINEKolaj LIVE Online is a series of virtual programs in the form of forums, panels, workshops, artist talks, studio visits, and other activities that allow people to come together, learn and talk about collage, and connect in real time to the collage community. Our goal is to bring the community together in a spirit of mutual support and fellowship.Kolaj LIVE Online manifests Kolaj Magazine and Kolaj Institute by bringing together artists, curators, and writers to share ideas that deepen our understanding of collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century movement. Learn more at the <a href="http://www.kolajinstitute.org/kolaj-live-online/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">SERIES WEBSITE</a>.

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Oh, Money! Money! Book Launch

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