Program

Making Meaning is a three-day symposium exploring new perspectives on collage history and current approaches to curating, publishing, and making. Through presentations, workshops, and exhibitions, the symposium brings together artists, curators, publishers, and historians to examine how collage functions not only as a creative practice, but also as a method for constructing, disrupting, and reimagining meaning.

The full program schedule will be available closer to the symposium dates.

Keynote Speaker
Freya Gowrley

Author of Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage

This keynote will explore the history of collage as a practice of fragmentation and recomposition, focusing on its cultural and material significance across history and culture. Drawing on research from Freya’s book Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage, it will consider how collage operates as a mode of making meaning through disruption, juxtaposition, and the interplay of image and text.

  • Dr. Freya Gowrley is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol. She writes about the relationship between art and identity from the early modern period to the present day, and is an internationally recognised expert in the history of collage. She received her PhD in the History of Art from the University of Edinburgh in 2016. Her work has explored the role of emotions in the decoration of the eighteenth-century home, the relationship between art and the body, and, most recently, the importance of collage as an art form that can express our most intimate relationships, worries, and desires. She is the author of Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840: Materiality, Sociability, and Emotion (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Publishing as Personal Perspective & Collective Care

allison anne

Artist, independent publisher & Twin Cities Collage Collective founding member allison anne will discuss publishing as an expression of personal perspective & expansive inclusion. How do we communicate our experiences and design publishing projects that prioritize diverse and underrepresented perspectives? By looking at their own independent publications as a vital part of creative practice, alongside larger community-based projects, including North Star Collage, Cut Loose and Colour into Focus: Queer + Trans Collagists, allison will share perspectives about zinemaking and independent publishing from the perspective of inclusion, representation, and care.

  • allison anne is a queer, nonbinary artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (unceded Očhéthi Šakówiŋ land). allison works in a variety of mediums including book arts, graphic design and publishing, but the core of their practice is paper collage — a constantly evolving exploration of experience and emotion through the reconstitution of various printed media and ephemera. By recontextualizing images and materials, allison creates textural abstractions which explore the intersections and interactions between context, materiality and creativity. 

    Their professional background includes design work for a wide range of clients and contexts, and a background in cultural studies and gender studies (University of Minnesota) informs their interest in working on projects that are expansive and inclusive. allison is a founding member of Twin Cities Collage Collective, co-founder of the independent press & distributor NONMACHINABLE with the artist Jeremy P. Bushnell, and a volunteer at the Workshop for Independent Publishing (WIP) in Minneapolis.

    Work by allison has been widely published and exhibited around the world, and can be found in the collections of the Scandinavian Collage Museum, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Hennepin County Libraries, and the Barnard College Zine Library. In 2024, allison was awarded Bronze in the Contemporary Collage Magazine Awards Portfolio category.

Piecing It Together: Collage Thinking in Curating

Craig Auge

Auge will explore the intersection of artist and curator through the lens of collage, drawing on examples from his curatorial work and collaborative projects at the Kansas City Public Library, PLUG Projects, and Lodger Art Space. He will also reference artist-run initiatives in the Midwest and beyond, framing them through collage process and collage thinking. Throughout the talk, Auge will trace the reciprocal relationship between his curatorial and collage practices, highlighting shared acts of gathering, arranging, and recontextualizing.

  • Craig Auge is a multidisciplinary artist and curator whose art toggles abstract collage and ephemeral salvage assemblage. Works are improvisational, intuitive, and responsive, emphasizing process over product, regenerating materials and entire artworks. He has exhibited throughout the U.S. and been featured in many publications including Cut Me Up, The Hand Magazine, and New American Paintings. 

    Auge has independently curated and organized artists since the late 1990s. He has worked professionally supporting artists with disabilities, developing exhibition programming at public libraries, co-directing artist-run nonprofits, and operating a roaming and online curatorial project called Lodger. He is based in Kansas City, Missouri.

Uncollage—Seamless Unison & Intellectual Coupling

Todd Bartel

Todd Bartel presents his neologism, Uncollage, and his accounting of material and immaterial glues. Bartel's talk presents historical and contemporary examples of the ever-expanding breadth of collage that enhance viewer appreciation of the world premiere exhibition of his concept, Uncollage—Seamless Unison & Intellectual Coupling, on view at the Mildred I. Washington Gallery, Dutchess Community College.

  • Todd Bartel is an artist, writer, curator, and historian of collage. He founded the Thompson Gallery at The Cambridge School of Weston (CSW) in 2007—a teaching gallery dedicated to thematic inquiry—curating over 50 exhibitions until it closed in 2021. Bartel has worked with museum collections, including the Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville, TN), the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, LO), the Art Complex Museum (Duxbury, MA), and the Henry Sheldon Museum (Middlebury, VT). He has published six articles on his “Uncollage” concept in Kolaj magazine, including Defining Uncollage (Kolaj #25), Before It’s An Uncollage(Kolaj #26), Uncollage In Photography and Filmography (Kolaj #27), Collection Is Cohesion (Kolaj #28), The Third Thing is Immaterial (Kolaj # 34), and Currents—Uncollage Premieres at the KMA (Kolaj #35). Bartel teaches drawing, painting, collage, and conceptual art at CSW, where he has taught for over 25 years. His collage-based studio practice examines the roles of landscape and nature in contemporary culture.

Jessica Brier

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College will present a small rotation of collage-based works from the permanent collection, with a gallery talk led by Loeb's curator of photography Jessica D. Brier and guest curator Adrian Sudhalter.

  • Jessica D. Brier is a curator and historian of art with a focus on modernism and the intersecting histories of photography, print, and design. She serves as curator of photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, where she co-organized the exhibitions Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna (2024) and On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print (2022), both accompanied by catalogs co-published by Vassar College and Scala Arts Publishers. Her first book Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography was published in 2025 by University of Minnesota Press. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Southern California and an MA in curatorial practice from the California College of the Arts. 

Photo credit: Karl Rabe

Knowledge is for Cutting

Rowan Buffington

Rowan Buffington will discuss the exhibition they are currently curating of 12 contemporary queer collagists whose practices explore the underside of knowledge production, a community of outcast makers who revive what French philosopher Michel Foucault describes as "subjugated knowledges." The exhibition title Knowledge is for Cutting is also borrowed from Foucault, who reminds us that, while knowledge may serve power, it can also be used for "cutting"; that is, as a means of interrogating dominant narratives, exposing covert power structures, and promoting new ways of being, thinking, making, and doing. Knowledge is for Cutting will open February 2027 at Chattanooga, TN's Stove Works.

  • Rowan Buffington teaches Painting and Drawing at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, TN. Buffington’s work has been featured in numerous curated exhibitions, including: The Shadow’s Body: Painting’s Allegorical Impulse at Watkins College of Art, Nashville, TN; Aloe Vera at Gray Contemporary, Houston, TX; and Tennessee Abstract Painting at the Cheekwood Museum, Nashville, TN. Buffington has been awarded residencies at: the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Banff, Canada; Mudhouse in Agios Ioannis, Crete; SÍM in Reykjavík, Iceland; Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT; and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY. As a collagist Buffington is interested in the image’s affective dimension, in its agency, in its capacity to differ from itself. By reanimating traces of social, cultural, historical, and semiotic frameworks latent within images, Buffington restores their convulsive potential, guiding them towards new and unexpected affiliations.

Black Collage: Aesthetic Legacies

Teri Henderson

Drawing from her book Black Collagists (2021) and recent curatorial work—including LAYERS: The Art of Contemporary Collage (2025) and Black Collage: Aesthetic Legacies (2026)—Teri Henderson presents the work of Black artists from around the globe who employ a collage aesthetic to argue that collage has become the 21st century’s preeminent mode of expression for Black artists. She examines these works as art objects that are simultaneously part of a diasporic visual language: a coded system of communication that connects communities and transcends Western concepts of linear time. This presentation highlights how collage functions as a gesture inherent to Black life, reflecting the improvisational necessity of making something out of nothing in order to survive the unforeseen. Ultimately, she posits that collaging serves as a cosmic blueprint for accessing ancestral memory, making artwork, and reclaiming histories.

  • Teri Henderson (b.1990) is a Baltimore-based independent curator, author, and Operations Manager of Charm City Cultural Cultivation. She was previously the Arts and Culture Editor of the Baltimore Beat, and her critical writing has appeared in Artforum and The Washington Post. In 2020, she founded the global platform @blackcollagists, leading to her acclaimed book, Black Collagists: The Book (2021).

    Henderson’s curatorial work includes consulting for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ "New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024" and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). She also served on the jury for the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Histories Collide: Jackie Milad x Fred Wilson x Nekisha Durrett. Recent and upcoming projects include co-curating "LAYERS: The Art of Contemporary Collage" at MICA, the inaugural Scout Affordable Art Fair with Derrick Adams in 2025, and "Black Collage Aesthetic Legacies" at The Delaware Contemporary, opening in February 2026. She is a 2024 fellow of both the Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism program and the Maynard Institute, and Momus Emerging Critics Fellow.

Adrian Sudhalter

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College will present a small rotation of collage-based works from the permanent collection, with a gallery talk led by Loeb's curator of photography Jessica D. Brier and guest curator Adrian Sudhalter.

  • Adrian Sudhalter is an historian of early twentieth century art, specializing in Germany and Dada. She holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and has held curatorial positions at Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum and at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Since 2017, has served as Research Curator at the Merrill C. Berman Collection. Her books include Dada in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA 2008), Photomontage Between the Wars (FJM 2012), Dadaglobe Reconstructed (Scheidegger & Spiess 2016), Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented (MoMA 2020), and Carl Grossberg: New Forms in the World of Technology (Hirmer 2025). She has held fellowships at The Clark, Dedalus Foundation, Getty, and the Met’s Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled ‘The Dislocations of War’ Margaret Miller and Collage at Mid-Twentieth Century.

Photo credit: Jolie Simpson

Title

Mario Zoots

Zoots will discuss the ways curating and publishing build community around collage through his work with Collé. Describing Collé's editorial and curatorial methods, Zoots will discuss how they establish collage beyond a medium, and how artists’ processes and philosophies are translated into clear context through their own words and artworks. His presentation will also address forms of support offered by Collé’s platform, including visibility, long term relationship-building, curated group shows, and in-person events that take us offline and bring our community together.

  • Mario Zoots (b. 1981) is a mixed-media artist based between Los Angeles and Denver. His collage-based practice considers how visual culture and discarded materials shape belief, memory, and value. Working across collage, assemblage, and rephotography, he reconfigures mass-produced images, found photographs, and material from popular culture through analog and digital processes.

    Zoots received his MFA from the University of Denver. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including presentations at The Aspen Art Fair (2024), the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (2013), K Contemporary (Denver), the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2023), the Museum of Image + Sound (São Paulo), Preteen Gallery (Mexico City), and Straat Museum (Amsterdam). His collages have been featured in The Age of Collage and Cutting Edges (Gestalten, Berlin). He is also the Curator of Collé and Curatorial Manager for the Pardon Collection.