Mending Kit
February 17, 2026
Kathy Randels’ and my Mending Kit along with Mel Chin’s Safehouse Door Installation will be on view through May 4th. Note: there will be a conversation with Mel Tuesday, April 14th.
Mending Kit
And upcoming April 3-June 29 The Festival of New Works kicks off the CAC’s 50th year celebrations.
“Established visual artists who help found, cultivate, imbue the CACNO with a rich legacy now nominate forward-thinking contemporary artists that inspire these iconic artists today. These rising contemporary artists are celebrated by established artists allowing a conversation generationally that seldom is intersecting in contemporary society in visual art.”
Second Line in the Sky December through mid- January
“Suspended across the 100–300 blocks of Bourbon Street, nearly 1,000 hand-crafted flags and illuminated Second Line–inspired elements form a glowing canopy overhead—inviting visitors to pause, look upward, and remember. Developed in close partnership with families and survivors, the installation transforms grief into light and celebrates the resilience, strength, and spirit that define New Orleans.”
See link provided for more details re: team and press.
Second Line in the Sky
Second Line in the Sky
Performing Resilience by Stuart Andrews and Patrick Duggan
“Andrews and Duggan bring together ideas from art and architecture, cultural geography, hazard mitigation, resilience theory, sustainability, theater, and water management to explore ‘performances’ of the city to radically expand our understanding of urban adaptability. Performing New Orleans argues that a truly resilient city is one that recognizes art and culture professionals as crucial, critical innovators.”
Frenchmen Street Books or LSU Press have copies for you!
Performing New Orleans
Performing New Orleans
Restoration and Rehabilitation
August 28, 2025
“This is not just a symbolic gesture, it is a vital recognition that the voices of artists and the communities they represent are essential for meaningful restoration and rehabilitation. Art not only reflects on shared experiences but also empowers to envision new possibilities and take collective action.” Sally Painter
Please take a moment to read Patrick Duggan’s excellent and succinct summary of our participation at this significant Prague forum:
On the Cultural Frontlines: GLOBSEC 2025 which included reflections (ours!) on and from the arts for the very first time. He includes the online address to view the video recording of our panel (with thanks to Kevin for the image loop playing behind us!).
GLOBSEC
GLOBSEC
This adventure was followed by a long time coming reunion with our collaborators in life and many art & healing adventures, Monica & Jacques Arpin, occurring in Bordeaux – our first visit there, which did not disappoint. The trip finale was our “delight-full” return/respite with the krewe at the Maison Gai Saber Pressoir (See Instagram: le_pressoir_residence_artistes).
Coming right up:
Poetic Gaps: Opacity in the Photographic Imprint at Newcomb Art Museum which includes their newly acquired 11 Chart Chapter Diana and the Dead Bird. This recent and generous donation which NAM used to acquire this body of work is in memory of Mr. & Mrs. Ernest Barrios. There will be a reception September 19 and program(s) in October and more.
Poetic Gaps
Poetic Gaps
Tale of Two Cities
The New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts joins with Asheville-based ARTSvilleUSA, River Arts District Artists, and the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area to produce and showcase “A Tale of Two Cities,” an exhibition exploring the role of art in the wake of environmental disaster, on display at NOAFA, September 13 through November 8, 2025. Thank you ARTSvilleUSA for the great article.
Babette Beaullieu and I will have a shrine installation (a sneak peak below) with our Louisiana Prayer Flags out front on Magazine Street. If you are around, please swing by and participate in our ritual adding your wishes or prayers to the shrine and see the show or come to one or more of the lectures!
sneak peak
Louisiana Prayer Flags
The virtual showcase of A Tale of Two Cities will be available on ArtsvilleUSA.com starting September 1, 2025, and can be viewed through the end of the calendar year.
K20: When the Water Met the Door is at the Contemporary Arts Center and opens Friday, August 29 and closes Halloween evening.
Kathy Randels of ArtSpot Productions and I are doing a video installation Mending Kit with a fine cast of other artists and their works in the CAC second floor galleries. It will be open for Art for Art’s Sake October 4th as will Tale of Two Cities. If you are in town, I hope to see you at one or more of these events! Otherwise, please check them out online!
The Mending Kit
Today I’m also closing with a quote from 9th Ward resident Yuri Herrera, in a NYTimes review of his new book “Season of the Swamp.”
As a character in his novel says, “Could there be any place more interesting than the one where all the chaff gets tossed?” No wonder Herrera has made New Orleans his home.
Season of the Swamp
“It makes me think of the limits of domesticity and what the powers that be decide is the way you have to live,” Herrera said. “It’s difficult to go some other places, once you have lived here.”
“Art is the highest form of hope.” – Gerhardt Richter
May 26, 2025
Always thrilled to have my work appear in stellar publications – Volt! The super VOLT literary magazine Issue #28 includes a dedication (centerfold of sorts) of a pair of Light in the Head pages to Jamie Burks. This past November 7th was 30 years since his passing. We remember and celebrate you, Jamie, always.
VOLT
And just out:
George Valentine Dureau: Life & Art in New Orleans by Howard Philips Smith at 500+ pages is a steal! Howard does a fantastic job.
“Painter and photographer George Dureau deserves national recognition, as does the Bohemian art world that flourished in New Orleans in the late twentieth century. With Howard Philips Smith’s comprehensive study, this will no longer be an underappreciated chapter in the history of contemporary art in America.“
– E. John Bullard, director emeritus of the New Orleans Museum of Art
George Valentine Dureau
In Minding Chaos exhibition at Gryder Gallery this past fall 5 October – 30 November, 2024, artworks of native and long time New Orleanian artists were gathered together in community and displayed their varied yet linked concerns, fears, appreciations, and yearnings creating a wider sense of place and hope. Layers of looking at home surrounded by its flora and fauna, wildlife, and life in the “wilds” generated a glimpse into an amalgam of artistic practices calling into question modes of thriving and surviving.
Minding Chaos
Minding Chaos
I’m about to embark on an uber busy few months and will tell you all about it mid Summer! Thank you for being part of our NOLA art world and wishing you well! Enjoy your summer! Onwards!
Ritual
February 28, 2024
It is a joy to be showing again with Gryder and to be joining Babette Beaullieu and Elizabeth Shannon in this exciting endeavor! This exhibition will be up through Saturday, April 27. We would be delighted if you can visit the show in person if you are here and virtually if not. I will be posting regularly both via Fb and Instagram in an effort to revisit and update spinoffs of projects.
(further extended on Instagram, whose little-known ancestor is perhaps the scrapbook).
If the films are a form of the present, the scrapbook is both their past (where they were drafted) and their future (as archive).
– Matthieu Orléan, curator at the Cinémathèque Française
Babette Beaullieu
Jan Gilbert
Elizabeth Shannon
RITUAL presents work of three artists who merge their lives with their art making rituals and tools, to ruminate, to recognize, to collect, to re-collect, to highlight, to honor.
Here are idiosyncratic, playful, yet serious displays of obsessive observing and compulsive producing of offerings to the public domain.
These artists while displaying quite distinctive modes of practice, possess common veins of mining a sense and since of history.
A Life in Art: The Steven and Kathleen Sidwell Collection
The Cape Cod Museum of Art, October 19 – January 14, 2023.
Two recent exhibitions were celebrations I was so pleased to be a part of:
The Steven and Kate Sidwell Collection at the Cape Cod Museum of Art presented their extensive collection resulting from their itinerant life together and became a memorial moment shortly after Steve’s passing.
From October 7, 2023–January 6, 2024, the stellar 45th Anniversary show at the Arthur Roger Gallery, was evidence of what a tour de force Arthur and his gallery are and have been for all these years.
On Portraiture and More
March 01, 2023
Super excited to be part of Gryder Gallery’s new exhibition On Portraiture, 5 artists: Mark Bercier, Jan Gilbert, Eddie Ralph Hébert, Jana Napoli and Keith Perelli (link), fellow artists – all part of the art community for decades!
Opening Reception this Saturday, March 4, 2023, 5-8pm up through April 30. Hope you will stop by the gallery if you are in town!
My series Call to DisArm continues to find its way out into the public realm in various virtual and even AR modes. Thanks to Susan Tucker for her continued collaboration including this work (link) in the new online compilation Keeping (and Telling) the Past. Nancy Baker Cahill’s augmented reality (AR) Battlegrounds routes New Orleans real time viewers via her 4th Wall App to a variety of layered artworks. They can be accessed and experienced through the free 4thWall app, a public art platform for users to explore resistance by hosting curated, geo-located public art exhibitions such as Battlegrounds. Here’s a peek (link) at what you would see and hear on the app when arriving at St. Anna’s Church, 1313 Esplanade Avenue in Treme. Note a new and more permanent Murder Wall installation has recently been installed at the site. Lastly, in solidarity with St. Anna’s and Battlegrounds, we have reinstalled the Call to DisArm curtain on our 511 Royal St. studios to garner close encounters of visitors and passersby of all kinds. For an online overview of the Battlegrounds project, let your fingers do the walking online (link).
With all this virtual and AR news, it feels necessary to recommend a real book:
Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars by Kay Turner (which includes some of the Light in the Head artworks included in the Gryder exhibition)
and a couple of others by Susan Tucker: City of Remembering and Mending for Memory, Sewing in Louisiana, Essays, Stories, and Poems (authored by Susan along with Lee Meitzen Grue).
Getting a Jump on Fall News
September 02, 2022
Pleased to see The Vestiges Project’s Flood Lines triptych including images by Debra Howell, Krista Jurisich, and me with text by Michele White on view in time for yet another Katrina anniversary (the 17th!) and another hurricane season. It is featured in Metamorphoses: Highlights from the Permanent Collection of Newcomb Art Museum. This Fall 2022 exhibition (8/16-12/10/22) curated by Maurita N. Poole and Laura Blereau with support of NAM Staff includes a reception on 9/17 Noon-5 with food, music, and a tour with artists 2-3 pm.
Also happy to be invited by British scholars Stuart Andrews and Patrick Duggan to join in their American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) Plenary Panel Resisting Catastrophe: Performances of the Crescent City Conference while the group meets in New Orleans this fall.
For more info about their project/research Performing City Resilience which began with New Orleans and has been ongoing since 2018.
Here’s a link to a short video of extracts from a conversation last summer at Gryder Gallery with Babette Beaullieu and me and installation views from our AMEN! show.
Can we get another AMEN?
July 08, 2021
As promised, here’s the update to the Gryder Gallery AMEN upcoming events and extension of the show:
This Saturday 7/10 at 2pm Babette Beaullieu and I hope you will join us in conversation at the gallery, 615 Julia Street (it’s also the Art Walk Saturday delayed due to last week’s holiday weekend).
Closing Reception Thursday 7/15 5-7 and final day of the show is Saturday, July 17.
The website is full of great installation shots and lots more on my work and other gallery artists. We also have more exciting news coming soon. Watch for another exhibition opening in early October and running through November! Come and visit while Prospect 5 is on view, jazz and book festivals and holidays abound!
Babette Beaullieu, Stick & Stones II, 2018
Jan Gilbert, Beuys of Summer Continuum, 1989
Don’t miss John Clemmer: A Legacy in Art on view at The Historic New Orleans Collection from July 21 to November 7, 2021. This exhibition and accompany book mark the occasion of the artist’s centennial with a survey of his life, work, and enduring influence, showcases his work alongside that of his artistic circle—mentors, peers, and protégés. Very pleased to be counted within his circle and to have a work on view.
Opening Reception Fri. July 30 6-8 reservations required
AMEN!
May 25, 2021
I’m excited to have several artworks on view May 22 – July 10, 2021 at Gryder Gallery (615 Julia Street) in its AMEN Exhibition. It will be open during New Orleans Arts District first Saturday openings on June 5th and there will be scheduled events (Babette Beaullieu and I will be doing a gallery walk through) on dates TBD.
My best intention is to write again soon to give details on these dates along with JOHN CLEMMER’S CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION: HIS ART CIRCLE: His Teachers, His Students and Colleagues, Curated by Judith Bonner, at The Historic New Orleans Collection. I am so touched to be a part of this celebration of John, a dear friend. He was my mentor while in grad school at Tulane (and long after) as he was to so many. Please watch for the show and publication opening near what would be his centennial birthday July 22, 2021.
THE URBAN LANDSCAPE: A SENSE OF PLACE BOTH HERE AND THERE
March 28, 2019
I’m delighted to announce The Historic New Orleans Collection’s (THNOC) ART OF THE CITY: Postmodern to Post-Katrina, presented by The Helis Foundation, premieres on April 6 and runs through October 6th, 2019 christening the exciting redo of the Seignoret-Brulatour Building, 520 Royal Street. Invited as guest curator and working with the assistance of its Executive Director Priscilla Lawrence and in collaboration with her superb staff, it is my pleasure to invite you to visit the show and to participate in its multidisciplinary programs. Check hnoc.org for details that will be updated regularly. This exhibition is opening on the heels of the tricentennial of New Orleans after a year of ART OF THE CITY programs and a preview exhibition. Address: 520 Royal Street. Admission is free.
Coincidental to the New Orleans Tricentennial, was a quite differently-themed tricentennial public art project in the Netherlands, the northern Holland Groningen Province. This art route titled Kerstvloed (Christmas Flood) 1717-2017 was curated by Merijn Vrij and featured Biography of a House and Vestiges/Trinitas, as well works by fellow Orleanians Jana Napoli and Rontherin Ratliff, among public artworks by 16 artists representing other flood plains around the world as Japan, Indonesia, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. View a video of the project here.
Christmas Flood 1717-2017 Art Route Video
most of the installations
Babette Beaullieu and I have further developed Cajun Prayer Flags, also known as the Louisiana Prayer Flag Project, which has traveled to several locations across Louisiana and extended beyond the State to communities via New York State schools and Maison Gai Saber artist residency in the Poitiers Region of France.
Since Spring 2012 we have collaborated working with communities conducting workshops with all ages gathering stories and valuing heritage and the resilience which arises therefrom. We aim to foster awareness and appreciation for these cultural assets/qualities/tools the culture of Louisiana has to give to the world.
Through workshops and installations in elementary schools, high schools, universities and at festivals, we guide participants in creating original prayer flag designs representing their own personal culture: what they are truly embracing in their religion, food, music, family traditions. Each person produces a flag design from photography/written stories /small objects/fabric /paper.
LOUISIANA PRAYER FLAGS – PORCH STORIES is an installation which was on view at Urban Sidewalk/Installation Space for the whole of 2017 including as a Prospect New Orleans, P.S. satellite program venue also appearing as part of an interactive installation at Goat in the Road’s Get Your Art On (2017) at the Contemporary Arts Center and the Music Box Village (2018). It is an invitation to celebrate, look with deeper appreciation, and reflect on who we are today in Louisiana –this lively layering of many racial/cultural backgrounds – and to share this reflection in dialogue with a wider audience.
P3+ and then some: Last Call!
January 06, 2015
P3 and P.3+ Close on Saturday, January 25, 2015.
January 2015 Happy New Year!
P.3+ PUBLIC PROGRAMMING
PROSPECT.3, the international exhibition has abundant and powerful offerings all about town that are not to be missed! Three P.3+ events that my works are a part of are:
At New Orleans Museum of Art: there’s REPARATION: Contemporary Artists from New Orleans with works by 180 New Orleans artists, part of the larger project, Imago Mundi, a ten-year old initiative of Luciano Benetton and the Treviso, Italy, Benetton Foundation Museum Collection. The aim of the project is to create a vast inclusive tapestry of international art. REPARATION is a document of the city’s artistic condition. Click HERE to see the beautiful catalog and information about the overall project.
Reparations contribution: Remembering Allen Eskew
Then in the Central Business District, Click HERE for a map of the P.3 and 3.+ offerings. Our US.IS (Urban Sidewalk Installation Space) venue is featuring VESTIGES/Trinitas (described more fully in my last post) along with works by Bureau of Change, Jimmy Descant and Ross Lunz. Though this is a P.3 Satellite, Trinitas will remain on 24 hour view indefinitely.
Night view of VESTIGES/Trinitas at US/IS
Arti(fiction) of the Battle of New Orleans Exhibition is on view at Studio Inferno now located at
6601 Saint Claude Avenue, Arabi, Louisiana, January 3 through February 7. This 200th Anniversary celebration showcases faux relics, artistic ephemera and kitsch souvenirs in the spirit of this historic struggle.
Second Battle of New Orleans – Imprint: A Call to DisArm
Also, it is exciting to beckon you to two evolving multidisciplinary and web-connected projects including my work:
Emancipation: Challenges at the intersection of American and European philosophy was
curated by Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz and Rebecca L Farinas. This website is a collaborative project joining philosophical research and artistic investigations on the topic of “emancipation.” Stemming from American and European perspectives and using practical tools, such as pragmatic philosophy, sound and imagery, the website offers a platform where contributors present and debate their work. With views and critique from you who are visiting the site, the research will continue to develop. Your input connects people, ideas and activism. Please join us by participating with the blog and attending some of the online events.
Southern Rep Theatre’s Spring offering BOUDIN: The New Orleans Music Project, is an exhilarating theatre production that celebrates the music, art, magic, and history of our city.
Presented in partnership with WWOZ 90.7 FM, BOUDIN is a mash-up of local visual art, storytelling, live New Orleans music, and real stories from people like you!
Thanks for stopping by! Please come out – for real and/or virtually and join us!
