“heirloom”

@virg________

Virgina Walcott is an artist, designer, and filmmaker from the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Her work ranges from conceptual pieces and solo projects to deep collaborations as a Production Designer and Director. She runs a creative studio called Superhumid that offers services across design and multimedia production, along with a small retail line of objects and prints. Her work has been exhibited in film festivals and galleries across the United States and abroad. Originally trained in journalism, she began her career as a designer for The Atlantic, and today writes occasional arts reviews for publications like Burnaway and Scalawag. She lives in New Orleans and is an active member of Staple Goods, a cooperatively-run gallery in St. Roch. In 2025, she will be starting an MFA program at Hunter College in New York, concentrating in New Genres.

Statement

Using video, installation, and multidisciplinary applications, I play with and reframe the realities of modern life. Informed by my background in journalism and my identity as a Southern woman, I collaborate with the semiotics of recognizable objects and language using tools like humor and time. From the deeply personal to the widely universal and the ways in which they intertwine, my work critiques, grapples with, and bears witness to the ubiquity and uncanniness of the everyday. Whether the subject is marketing, gender, healthcare, or the more sentimental mysteries of individuality, belonging, and anxiety, my work flows from an incessant curiosity about the world we live in and how one could possibly navigate it with a straight face.

Website

IG

Ashly Veronica Griffith is a representational oil painter living in New Orleans. Originally from Arizona, she received formal training in the traditional methods of oil painting at the Vitruvian Fine Arts Studio, Chicago and Gage Academy of Art, Seattle.  She moved to New Orleans in 2017 where she began working in theatrical production and became fascinated with the history and culture of the city.  She finds inspiration in exploring themes of memory, silence, and her experience of motherhood. Her hope is to preserve the sense of a moment.  Process is an ever-growing importance in her studio practice. A balance between spontaneous movement and stillness is of particular interest. She finds painting to be a practice of joy and contemplation that helps in the development of patience and self-reflection. Her work has received awards, been featured in various group shows and has been published in Manifest Exhibition Annual (season 15).  She is currently studying the intersections of History, Anthropology and Fine Art at the University of New Orleans.

@tee_thee_artist

Teneille Prosper is a native of New Orleans, a proud mother of three daughters and a visual artist.  She is a product of the former New Orleans public school system. She studied Fine Arts at Xavier University under the tutelage of renowned Artist John T. Scott and Ron Bechet, as well as New Orleans artist and educator Richard C. Thomas. Despite her collegiate accolades, instead of pursuing art professionally she ultimately chose to marry and raise a family in Atlanta for the past 20 years. Life changes have recently led her back to her hometown where she has reassumed her role as an artist and her responsibility as a culture bearer for her community. She aims to use her unique perspective and skills to engage with the community and create works that serve as a bridge between the past and present, encouraging dialogue and reflection on issues of identity, sexism, and social justice. Since her return to her hometown, her work was featured at the Ashè Cultural Arts Center’s “The Black Experience” exhibition in 2021, the Creative Arts Center’s “Who Lit the Fire” exhibit 2023 and has work currently hanging in City Hall. She was most recently a 2024 Artist in Resident at the Joan Mitchell Art Center. 

Statement

Teneille is an African American female artist, storyteller and activist whose creations connect the experiences of African Americans, specifically African American women, to their ancestral past while simultaneously demonstrating their significance in contemporary society. As an artist, her work explores themes such as misogynior, cultural identity, historical trauma, and the struggle for social justice through various mediums, including acrylic painting and mixed media. She believes that histories can be forgotten in one generation if stories aren’t told. That’s where her works’ purpose become relevant. By employing motifs and symbols from African American history and mythology, she seeks to foster a sense of pride and empowerment within her audience while challenging them to confront the ongoing legacy of racism and oppression. Teneille wants her creations to provoke and educate in a moment. Ultimately, her work aims to inspire a greater understanding and appreciation of the complex intersections of race, gender, and culture that define the African American experience.

@jaclyn_bethany

Is an Emmy award winning filmmaker, artist, writer and actor based in New Orleans, Louisiana, originally from Mississippi. She has written, directed and produced numerous feature films, digital series and short films which have played festivals worldwide and received distribution in the US and beyond. She is the Co-Artistic Director of The Fire Weeds, a female driven immersive theater company based in New Orleans. As an artist and filmmaker, she is committed to creating art and telling stories rooted in her Southern upbringing - specifically exploring complex women, the intimacy of female friendship, queerness from the female perspective and women's mental health. She is greatly inspired by the female characters of Tennessee Williams, the photography and writing of Eudora Welty, her mother, grandmother, aunt, and all the Southern women before her. She graduated from the American Film Institute with an M.F.A. in Directing and holds an M.A. in Screenwriting from the London Film School. She teaches in the film department at Loyola University, New Orleans.

STATEMENT

The Yellow Bird explores a woman in transition. I made this film to signify a moment of transition. A moment of transition for myself, as a Southern woman, as an artist. I had recently moved to New Orleans and was going through a divorce. I was breaking away from society's expectations of me and discovering my freedom again. I was brought up in a society that glorifies antiquated traditions in regards to women. My brevity is in my art, and over time I have realized that there is nothing wrong with exploring the beauty of a woman's body and her sexaulity, her femininity. I am constantly pushing against the marginalized confines in which I and so many others were brought up. Although this film is beautifully aesthetically, it explores something darker and deeper than what meets the eye, and this is reflected throughout the narrative up until her final scream. This film is a poetic look into who a young woman becomes alone with nature and in a house alone with no outside pressures on her mind or body. She discovers the beauty in the everyday, creating her dream world where she is safe and inspired. In the short story that inspired it, the woman, a Preacher's daughter - at the end of the story, after becoming a wife, a mother, and then running away to New Orleans where she gives birth, becomes a bird. I loved this metaphor. I took these ideas and made them concise visually. The dark and the light to me is one of the most complexing things about being a woman in the American South and the world. Our character in the film version of The Yellow Bird is more mysterious, we do not know what happens to her or her background, but feel her discovery of the world around her for maybe the first and with her scream, last time.

WEBSITE

@patchoulibigbird

Greta Koshenina is a cyanotypist, documentarian, poet, and curator based in Oxford and Water Valley, Mississippi. Koshenina is currently pursuing her MFA in Southern Studies Documentary Expression at the University of Mississippi. Her preferred medium, cyanotype photography, provides a natural method of producing images that embody an antiquated aesthetic and convey a transient quality found in dreams, childhood memories, and mythology. Koshenina’s work combines archival family photos with contemporary photographs and mythic iconography to create surrealistic photographic collages that show motifs of motherhood. She uses antique laces and wildflowers to create photograms that document delicate objects using an ephemeral medium. Koshenina’s work is an excavation and curation of the compost heap of stories, iconography, plants, and beliefs that shaped her. Koshenina is inspired by ancient mythology and the symbology of the subconscious. She bores into the mythology of self and society, depicting a timeless tale using cyanotypes and poetry. Koshenina is interested in the intersection of Spirit and the subconscious, and her work explores womanhood, biophilia, and belonging.

Who Am I When You’re Not Looking?

Growing up, I saw femininity as a performative act. In the rural, Southern town of Water Valley, Mississippi, my friends couldn’t understand why I never participated in the yearly Watermelon Carnival Pageant. Finally, in sixth grade, I acquiesced, but only to show my friends that I would not win. I felt like an imposter. In a small act of defiance, I wore a short dress and gaudy jewelry. I did not win. I did not even place. But I had made my point.

Southern women have a nuanced meaning to me. My Nana and her sister, Aunt Dudu, grew up in the mountains of Tennessee in a traditional, wealthy family. Their southern drawls do not match their hippie personae and adventurous young adulthood, but they have maintained a Southern identity. Aunt Dudu marches around in Doc Martens and mechanics coveralls, cursing and complaining. Nana floats angelically through life, avoiding reality and convening with the moon. These Southern Sisters taught me distinct life lessons. Aunt Dudu: don’t give a fuck. Nana: Spirit is everywhere. Both have a deep reverence for the earth, and this sentiment is held within our ancestral memory.

Nana had five children, all boys; Aunt Dudu had none. As the eldest grandchild and only daughter born to Nana’s children, I am tasked with the keeping of material possessions and familial knowledge. These days, the sisters are in their 70s and don’t speak often. Their differences are drastic. I travel to North Carolina to see Aunt Dudu yearly, in a sort of pilgrimage. She gives me clothes and advice to which I cling desperately. I am plagued by the question of whether I will have children or not. Nana’s life was consumed by motherhood; her eldest, my father, was 18 when she had her youngest son. Aunt Dudu spent her time creating art and successful businesses, but now she and her husband have no one to care for them—except for me.

I am torn between these two forces: my great-aunt and my grandmother. I have decided I will wind up somewhere in the middle. Their extremes shaped me as a woman and a Southerner.

the1andonly_rosie

Rose is a recent graduate from the Alabama School of Fine Arts currently attending the University of Alabama. She specializes in printmaking, a combination of monoprinting and etching, and then works with painted elements. Her work focuses on the layers and emotions of lost or abandoned homes, towns or neighborhoods that make up Rural Alabama. Her achievements include 2nd place in the 2024 7th District Congressional Art Competition, participation in a group exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art, inclusion in the 2023 Shelby County Juried Exhibition, a Senior Exhibit entitled “Neighboorhood Watch” in the Vulcan Materials Gallery at ASFA, a piece in collaboration with Sloss Metal Arts shown in their annual Summer Exhibit, Kansas City Institute of Art pre-college Exhibit, work in private collections in the south east and work on loan at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.

Statement

My work depicts common scenes from out in the small rural areas surrounding Birmingham. Those small abandoned one-story homes were built cheaply, with square symmetrical walls and sloped roofs. I’ve seen them left, ruined by mildew and the hot southern sun that strips the colors and leaves them washed out. Old Baptist churches on roads emptied for miles. Tangling picket fences. Roads with grass growing through the cracks, gradually changing back into land. These symbols, which represent feelings of curiosity, trepidation, and the abandonment of creation, still stand in Alabaster, Odenville, Springville, Trussville, and even Slidell in Louisiana. All of these places I’ve lived in and they’ve all affected the course of my life. There's something hazy in those places, still in my mind, where I can see the lingering impressions of life and the implications of forgottenness and abandonment. I find a part of myself laid in the broken floors of those homes, the Alabama soil that holds my feet and buries them in the land. The work is layers of impressions, using the same pre-etched plates’, I create a composition, one that I feel familiar with in some way. Then I use an untouched plate to add color, which leads to the atmosphere. Building on that with details added by hand or fine-tipped paint brush to create the final piece. It reflects the way I grew up and the way I live today, all highly instinctual and fast-paced, just going and going until it eventually finds its end.

Website

@clairemucollection

Claire grew up in Carlisle, Kentucky and moved to New Orleans to attend college. She received a BA in Design and Sociology from Tulane University in 2023. With her photography, she intends to highlight the dreamlike qualities of everyday life and the emotionality found in moments of stillness.

Statement:

To me, Southern femininity is a constant reckoning with what to carry on and what to leave behind. It’s honoring the experiences of the women who came before you while at the same time choosing to shed the traditions and values that don’t serve us anymore. It’s knowing that our matriarchs are powerful but were often confined to expressing that power in quiet ways, held to the standard of being a “proper Southern woman.” It’s being patient with the complexities of past generations holding us to their same standards while at the same time hoping for more for us.

These photographs were taken in Georgia, at a friend’s grandparents’ house, and New Orleans.

website

@katie___kut

I am a self-taught artist that mostly focuses on oil painting.  I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and have been residing in New Orleans, Louisiana since 2008.  My work is colorful and eclectic, brought to life through various techniques, media, and thematic explorations.  

Statement
The land in New Orleans is fertile, and the sun is ever-present.  Growth is inevitable, yet there is so much inequality, poverty and cement. 

What is wealth? 

The history of colonized America is present today.   The dominant cultural motivation has been, and still is about exploitation of people and land for personal financial gain and material acquisition.  
What is true wealth?  
As I seek to redefine my own sense of self worth (separate from colonized American values), I look to the abundant fruit and medicinal bearing botanicals New Orleans' nature has to offer.  I look to her to give me clues of the who that I am, and the value I contain.    

@art.kshanks

I am a nonbinary trans-disciplinary artist originally hailing from Southern California, currently pursuing my MFA in Sculpture through Tulane University. My interests have long traversed intersections of the natural world and embodied performance exploring how society conceptualizes, structures, and imposes gender. Having been deeply rooted within both my queer and artistic communities back in Los Angeles, I am still in the process of finding and establishing those relationships after my transplantation to New Orleans.

STATEMENT

ECDYSIS (Shedding what no longer serves) involves garments, photographs, writing, and objects that represent who they once were—or who others thought them to be. These are empty objects that contain history and hold the past, or things that feel constrictive, may have never fit, or no longer serve a previous purpose. The forms will suggest a human presence—but will noticeably lack embodiment. I’ve begun these layers, meticulously deconstructing my own clothing from previous modes of presentation, representing periods of my personal history in which I felt compelled to put on a daily drag performance of femininity. These garments become their own looms, made anew as they are interwoven into one another, assembled into a snakeskin, inhabited, peeled off, and left behind.

A new set of explorations birthed from the process of a careful stripping down has turned these meditations back on the institutions, cultural expectations, and structures of power that construct and uphold these normative ideals. What happens when the fabric that “holds our society together” has been cut away? By painstakingly stitching wire along the exposed edges of these seams, I highlight just how fragile these constructions are when they are no longer mutually reinforced, and we are allowed to consider the vast potential unlocked in the interstitial spaces when those boundaries become mutable.

@sarabahatart

Through sorts of southern genesis, I sprouted.

Born and raised New Orleanian. Bloomed, even.

I moved to study in Baltimore. These new roots hold. Blossoming, even.

My name is Sara Bahat, I was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. After finishing school at the Maryland Institute College of Art, I stayed to live and grow in Baltimore. I like to explore painterly drawing with regards to the figure. I have a fascination for anatomy, connection, growth and entropy. This became evident to me after a trial and error approach of making lots of “good” and “bad” art; through persistently creating the Accidental Triumphs naturally came along. I found that gestural and organic artwork was where I could scratch the itch for making, as well as learn about myself and the world around me.

The Material is simply a tool. Art is the way that I am able to make sense of the things in my orbit, both physically and emotionally. The Work becomes a visual translation.

Statement

These works are evidence of my experiments, an attempt to convey a sort of Patience in Observation. I find that Patterns arise through figurative analysis and subsequent abstraction. With my work, I navigate and learn about interactions of nature and humanity, which reflect a type of intimacy and power I'm not sure how to define in words. (this is where the Art becomes a Necessity!) Southern women are a direct reflection of embracing the strength of Mother Nature. Conditioned to thrive through the mud, allowing for easy growth and connection. There is a learned patience in this relationship. Like the ever-shifting sediment across southern shores, how we relate to our environment and how we relate to each other, to family, to home; is all an evolving process. I try to analyze the bridge between temporal and spiritual relationships; similar to the way the brainstem is a bridge for our nervous system, connecting the spine and the brain.

@kanehuynhofficial

My name is Kane Huynh and I am a painter raised in New Orleans, based in New Orleans and New York. Being a trans woman from the South, the topic of this show was super exciting to me and I hope that my practice and body of work aligns with and/or can add further discourse to subject matter. The work I am proposing is very personal, relating to the combination of my Vietnamese ancestry along with my upbringing in New Orleans and the clashing heads and emotions that grappled me as a young trans person specifically in the South. As a young kid, my stepfather, on babysitting duty, would bring me along with him to this small plot of land in New Orleans East where there was a chicken farm. I would help him raise the chickens, which I loved, their warm bodies and innocence was so pure to me, being trans and thinking back now I feel as though I’ve always had a softness and desire to tend to things like raising the small creatures. However, the chickens were being raised to be cockfighting roosters:

“Cockfighting is a blood sport in which two roosters specifically bred for aggression are placed

beak to beak in a small ring and encouraged to fight to the death.”

The notion of loving something into its adolescence for it to become a violent weapon, the themes of childhood in the south, my identity as a trans woman, and this personal mythology and recurring theme of the “cockfight” as it has played out literally and metaphorically in my life is what influences this work.

Statement

This autobiographical work discusses my childhood bonding activity with my father being brought to his cockfighting farm. The practice of assisting my father in cockfighting “the sport (illegal in certain countries) of setting two gamecocks as a queer child influenced me formatively as my desire to raise and give love to pure creatures in infancy, the baby chicks, was juxtaposed with the reality that they were born and bred  to fight and ultimately kill. This innocence warped, through the desire to understand the life of my father and his affections, was formative to my understanding of life and death, the nuance between good and evil, and the navigation of my childhood as a precocious mind both yearning for love but also for self realization.

@cornchips_forever

Using the traditional block pattern 'Grandmother's Garden' the artist's maternal grandmother and mother are depicted in an embroidery method called 'thread painting' which uses only thread and fabric. Like all pieces, all elements of this were solely created by the artist while using upcycled and significant fabrics.