CALL TO ARTISTS

Montreal: City as Archive Artist Lab
A five-day, in-person Artist Lab at Atelier Galerie 2112 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Tuesday, 28 July to Sunday, 2 August 2026 with two virtual meetings on Zoom (dates to be determined)
Early Deadline to Apply: Sunday, 14 June 2026
Final Deadline to Apply: Sunday, 28 June 2026

Montreal: City as Archive Collage Artist Lab is a five-day intensive where collage artists use Place as a laboratory and spend a week making artwork; learning about the city, its people, and its history; and discussing how art can capture, share, reflect, comment, and otherwise engage with a sense of place. 

THESIS: Place as Archive 
Place as Archive takes as its premise that the landscape can be viewed as a sort of archive from which artists can draw, not unlike a material archive maintained in an institutional collection. When artists approach a place as an archive, they draw out a deeper, more complex understanding of that place that enriches our understanding of our communities, helps us be better citizens, and empowers us to take better care of our neighbors. Place as Archive intersects with other Kolaj Institute Projects around photography, folklore, trash as material, and history. 

To see the Place as Archive is to consider all the things that make up that place as holding a story. The shape of a building may speak to past economics. Trash on the ground may tell us what people are eating or how they feel about their community. Graffiti, Street Art, and signage become part of the public discourse. The shape of streets and sidewalks; the shape and placement of parks or green space; the markings on bricks or manhole covers; all of these things point to complex human systems of place making and belonging. Be they grand or mundane, they are opportunities for artists to tell us something about the world we live in. 

In The Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippard writes about the fragmented nature of contemporary life. “Most of us live such fragmented lives and have so many minicommunities that no one knows us as a whole. The incomplete self longs for the fragments to be brought together. This can’t be done without a context, a place.” Collage is the work of bringing fragments together into a whole. When artists approach a place as an archive, they draw out a deeper, more complex understanding of that place that enriches our understanding of our communities, helps us be better citizens, and empowers us to take better care of our neighbors. 

THESIS: Montreal
Centered on an island at the confluence of the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers, for nearly four centuries, Montreal has played a key role in the economic, political, and cultural life of Canada and played host to many important international events. Deeply cosmopolitan, Montreal is a quilt of many communities and identities. Its flag holds space for English, French, Irish, and Scottish people who built the city and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) who lived on the land before its colonization. Its patchwork of neighborhoods were shaped by Jewish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, and Chinese immigrants arriving in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and later by more recent arrivals from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Originally dominated by the Catholic Church, Quebec experienced the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s that led to the secular, pro-French language, progressive State which governs the city and the province today. Gavin Bloomberg wrote, “One of Montreal’s most striking features is its multiculturalism…Walking through the streets you hear French, English, Arabic, Italian, and Mandarin. It’s not just the languages, but this diversity is also reflected in the Montreal food scene…The city’s architectural landscape further represents my love for the city and its unique identity…Yet for all the beauty, Montreal also has some complexities.” Jake Pitre wrote, “Montreal is a hub of cultural contradictions, a home to many thousands of immigrants, an erotic city bursting with sensuality, a queer-friendly atmosphere set alongside deep religious roots, and a place of seasonal extremes: deadly hot in the summer (we read in parks), endlessly frigid in the winter (we read at home). There are characters around every corner, in every fresh bagel shop, independent bookstore, hip cinémathèque, and lush green park. In other words, Montreal certainly has a reputation, but it’s one that is so baroque and multifarious that it always comes back around feeling unexpected.”

Artist Lab: Montreal: City as Archive 
Artist Labs are an intensive series of workshops and discussions designed to develop proposals for multifaceted contemporary art projects. Through a series of presentations, site visits, walks, artists will explore the idea of archive, place, and the role of artist research; develop strategies of making, exhibiting, and publishing collage art that speaks to a sense of place and history; hear about Kolaj Institute Projects and how artists can make art for books and exhibitions around photography and collage, architecture, trash as materials, folklore, poetry, and place as archive. Artists will explore Montreal with a focus on Little Italy, Mile End, Plateau Mont-Royal, the Gay Village, Place des Arts, Downtown, Chinatown, and Old Montreal. Artists will reflect on Montreal’s history as held in the McCord Stewart Museum.

Designed with collage artists in mind, the Artist Lab considers how collagists find and use material culture in their work. The Lab will speak to issues of appropriation, copyright, and fair use and explore how the artist’s choice and understanding of material shapes the narrative of the artwork. Other topics include artist practice, approaches to research and play, building context for artwork, and diffusion into the ecosystem of art. 

Prior to traveling to Montreal, artists will participate in two virtual meetings that address questions around logistics and present the curatorial framework for the project. Artists will be provided a list of readings and resources they may use to prepare for their visit. While in Montreal, the Artist Lab will be based out of Atelier Galerie 2112 in Montreal’s Gay Village. A unique, independent, and self-managed space, since 2017 the gallery has provided artists who wish to take their careers into their own hands, with a professional space for creation, archiving, and the dissemination of their works. Warm, welcoming, unpretentious, and human-scaled Atelier Galerie 2112 will become a collage making studio for the week. Artists will have access to a printer, a library of collage materials and tools, as well as substrates. At the end of the week, artists will make brief presentations of their artwork and speak about their proposals to develop a larger body of work or project. After the Artist Lab, the cohort will reconvene virtually to discuss progress, share feedback with each other, and discuss next steps. 

The Lab is led by Ric Kasini Kadour, director of Kolaj Institute and editor of Kolaj Magazine, who as a 2020-2021 recipient of a Curatorial Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, spent a year investigating the intersection of art and history. 

OUTCOME
Artist Labs are designed to develop a proposal for a contemporary art project or body of artwork. Artwork made during and after the lab will be considered for exhibitions at Kolaj Institute Gallery in New Orleans and future publications on Place as Archive. By participating in the Montreal: City as Archive, artists will become members of Kolaj Institute’s Place as Archive Project and be invited to submit to exhibitions, contribute to programs at Kolaj Fest New Orleans or Kolaj LIVE Online, and receive curatorial and community support for their projects through one-on-one meetings and virtual meet-ups. 

WHO IS THIS FOR?
Collage Artist Labs are intended for self-motivated artists, at any stage in their career, who want to develop their practice while working in community with others. Artist Labs are open to any artist over the age of 21 from anywhere in the world.