Open Studio with Kolaj Institute Artist-in-Residence Meg Whelan

During her solo residency, Lexington, Kentucky-based artist Meg Whelan is developing new collages for her hybrid poetry and collage manuscript, Hand Me Down. This work is firmly planted in Kentucky and asks questions about what our bodies know, how we can access the knowledge of the natural world, how we remember. This collection honors grief, challenges religion, documents sexual violence, reckons with intergenerational abuse, witnesses queer discovery, and upholds a healing love. Here, Whelan is trying to understand what has been handed down to her, how she has been handed down, what her hands might do with what they hold, and what she might hand down in her lifetime. The residency will provide space and time for creating collage and as a time to enrich her knowledge of collage as community, as expression, as ritual.

On Friday, July 25, 2025, 4-6PM, the public is invited to visit Kolaj Institute Gallery to meet the artist and see how the artwork is progressing.

ABOUT KOLAJ INSTITUTE'S SOLO RESIDENCIES

The mission of Kolaj Institute is to support artists, curators, and writers who seek to study, document, and disseminate ideas that deepen our understanding of collage as a medium, a genre, a community, and a 21st century movement. We operate a number of initiatives meant to bring together community, investigate critical issues, and raise collage’s standing in the art world. Kolaj Institute’s Solo Residencies are designed to provide artists, curators, and writers with dedicated time and space to work on a project, develop their practice, and make artwork.

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