THE WEEKENDER 24 | 2025
Collage News & Inspiration
WORDS TO LIVE BY
“Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever.”
― Kevin Smith
The latest collage news and inspiration!
Enjoy!
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NEWS
OPEN CALL: WHO IS YOUR POP ICON? From cartoons to cinema, advertising, music, painting, and even video games, the visual arts have given rise to characters that have become iconic. These figures span eras and genres, nourishing our collective imagination and leaving an indelible mark on popular culture. In this spirit, we invite collage artists from around the globe to reinterpret one of these cult characters through their unique collage work. Whether you choose a hero from fiction, a music star, or a defining figure of an era, we encourage you to breathe new life into your pop culture icon, offering them a fresh look and perspective. Grab your scissors and your images: bring together a passion for collage and collective memory! All info here
At first glance, contemporary urban life may seem incongruous with classical art. How can scenes pulled from Greek mythology possibly interact with those of a morning commute on the subway? For Ukrainian artist Alexey Kondakov, it turns out that these time periods are actually quite compatible. The bridge between them, he’s found, is digital collage. - Artist Masterfully Merges Classical Art and Scenes of Urban Life in Digital Collages - via My Modern Met
It’s been a constant evolution over the last decade. I’ve shifted from only wanting to be associated with painting to wanting to further the association with other work in my lexicon. Starting in 2010, my paintings were collages and assemblages with painted paper. Later, I tried to distance myself from collage and just be a painter who used paint. My paintings always had a sculptural look to them with things hanging off the side or jettisoning outward toward the viewer, and this eventually led to a focus on sculptures. At a certain point, I started embracing only sculpture, video, and performance. - Devin Troy Strother by Margaux Ogden - via Bomb
More proof is The Surrealist Collage, a wonderful show at Di Donna Galleries on Madison Avenue between 64th and 65th Streets. It’s a dealer show, of museum quality, done by specialists in Surrealism. It’s about 75 objects, arranged with panache and with economic interpretation. Surrealism is about individuality and eccentricity, on the parts of artist and viewer. No need for curators to put fingers, thumbs, and toes on the scale. - The Surrealist Collage Show in Sync with Our Freaky Times - via National Review
Collage can be a powerful means of creative protest. Involving the violent acts of ripping, cutting, and slicing, this rebellious art form sees images transformed to confront the strict cultural codes of their original making. The Rose, an expansive group show at CPW in Kingston, New York, brings fifty contemporary artists including Wangechi Mutu, Vija Celmins and Wendy Red Star together with 1960s and 70s trailblazers. - Inside Justine Kurland and Marina Chao’s Defiant Collage Exhibition - via AnOther
The new exhibition “Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention” at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, curated by Jared Ledesma, highlights how the painter’s connections with midcentury avant-garde poets like Daisy Aldan, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and others shaped her distinctive style and encouraged her to challenge prevailing methods. The show also emphasizes the strong bonds she developed with these writers, relationships that provided a sense of belonging in a downtown scene where she initially felt out of place. By collecting work from Hartigan’s most prolific period, historic photos, and rarely seen collages and prints, the show aims to fill in a chapter of Hartigan’s life that has, until now, only been loosely sketched out. It rounds out this narrative with new research undertaken by the curator and a devoted catalog containing a collection of illuminating essays. - Grace Hartigan’s Artistic Kinship with Midcentury Poets - via ARTnews
And last but not least, all 2025 open call catalogues are out and available via our website … and on that note, if you’re in Paris, the second edition of our COLLAGE NOTES exhibition is on display until June 21st, all information here
PCC
A selection of challenge submissions from last week is up on our website and can be seen here, the image prompt for next week is available to download here
Our 2025 Workbook is out and available for sale on our website. Our weekly creative challenge remains free and open to everyone and everything, digital or analog artists, French or not. The workbook is an optional add-on for those who prefer to work with paper and don’t want to print our images themselves. Like every year, the book is designed so that you can either take it apart or create your collages in the book itself. Week numbers and image sources are on the back of each image, so even if your books falls apart at one point, you will always know what’s what!
And last but not least, have a look at our second Instagram account Paris Collage Collective Unlimited where we showcase collages that have absolutely nothing to do with our weekly creative challenge.
If you have any news about exhibitions, publications or events you want so share with the community, please send an email with all relevant information and at least one link to a website or venue to: hello@pariscollagecollective.com
I create video collages, which sometimes incorporate hand made collages, is that something that you’d be interested in?