Collage & Illustration is a series of residencies, publications, discussions, and exhibitions that takes vintage, public domain stories and recontextualizes them for a 21st century audience with collaborative collage illustrations.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Throughout history, people have been making illustrations from early cave paintings to today’s digital designs. Ancient civilizations carved their mythology onto ceremonial vessels and in the Middle Ages, illustrated stories were depicted in illuminated manuscripts. Renaissance artists brought new forms of music, literature, art, and publications in the 14th century, which were widely available due to Johannes Gutenberg’s mechanical printing process in 1452. Woodcuts and engraved prints made art accessible to wider audiences, bringing beauty, ideas, and entertainment to the masses. Printing technology improved rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, leading to more widespread use of illustrations.
There are differences between a reader, an artist, and an illustrator. One major difference between artists and illustrators is their audience and purpose. Artists create works that can stand alone as objects, while illustrators create works that complement and interact with text, enhancing the reader’s literary experience.
Kolaj Institute engages in these projects and publishes these books because we feel that collage can help us make sense of these vintage texts for a 21st-century world. Collage artists are good at unpacking ideas and creating real-world anchors that allow viewers to access those ideas. We want to put these books out in the world in a way that gets people thinking about those ideas differently. By intervening with collage, we want to draw the reader’s attention to all the different themes that might reside in a book.