5 New Orleans Artists You Should Know
Artists across mediums and backgrounds draw inspiration from New Orleans's landscape and culture—here are 5 of many worth following.
Willie Birch
Willie Birch is regarded as a highly-respected elder of the New Orleans arts community, with a career spanning nearly fifty years. He returned to his birth city in 1994 after living in New York City for several years after earning his MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. In New York he became known particularly for his paper maché sculptures, and upon his return to New Orleans, Birch began drawing a series of portraits of his neighbors.
“What inspires me is just to create the need to tell my story…that's what inspires me to do what I do. And being African American, in the situation where we don't have many people who tell our stories, particularly outside of music in terms of New Orleans. That's an important role that I play. And I honor that role. So I'm hoping you remember this again, so that you get it down to where it really takes the cover off of what I'm trying to do, and just hopefully inspire young people to understand that. The art making process is probably the easiest part of this whole experience. But it’s having the courage to put down your story, which is really different than anybody else's.” —Willie Birch
His intent was to push back against the stereotypical images of African Americans displayed in popular media, and he continues to use his artistic practice to explore the everyday individuals and scenes of New Orleans, and thereby what it means to present life from his own perspective, rather than through the Euro-centric lens that has dominated the art world. He continues to find inspiration in his city’s architecture, music, cultural traditions like Black Masking Indians, and community.
“New Orleans, it has a culture. And it's out there to be shared and participated in and enjoyed by whoever chooses to take whatever piece of that they need. And so that the reality of is it's something that I don't have to think about…because I walk out my door and architecturally, it's different. Musically, it's different. The way we dress, the way we talk, the way we just, we relate to each other as human beings. All of those things are just things that inspire me and gives me food for thought.” —Willie Birch
As of 2000, Birch works exclusively in black-and-white. His large-scale paintings were featured in the original iteration of Prospect.1, and his works have been included in exhibitions across the United States. Birch’s works are also included in many private and museum collections, including those at The Ogden, NOMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Learn more about Birch and his work at williebirch.com.
Ruth Owens
Today Ruth Owens’ paintings are fixtures of the New Orleans art world, where she is represented by the Ferrara Showman Gallery and has been selected as a featured artist in the upcoming Prospect.6 triennial. She is also a member of the artist collective The Front, which has an artist-led, nonprofit exhibition space that regularly hosts exhibitions and other innovative programming. But, her presence on the New Orleans art scene is relatively recent: Before getting her MFA at the University of New Orleans in 2018 and establishing herself as a successful artist, Owens spent twenty-five years working as a cosmetic surgeon.
Owens was born in Bavaria to a German mother and African-American father in the military. Impacted by her experience of growing up in Germany and sporadically returning to various parts of the United States when her father was transferred, Owens’ work often grapples with identity, and the physical as well as spiritual relationships between bodies and the natural world that surrounds them. Frequently making a Black or mixed-race figure the focal point of her paintings, Owens’ work considers the possibilities for creating “a spiritual Black ecology,” while considering the complicated and fraught relationship between Black individuals and nature.
Learn more about Owens and her work at ruthowensart.com or ferrarashowman.com.
Katrina Andry
Katrina Andry, who was born in New Orleans and earned her MFA in Printmaking at LSU, creates works in a variety of mediums including woodcut prints, monotype, linocut, acrylic, and mylar. While layers of imagery are evident in her works—some of which have been described as pushing “the medium of printmaking to the point of multimedia,” Andry’s pieces contain complex layers of meaning, too.
Her work calls into question our cultural emphasis on individualism, challenging the notion that success is based solely on individual merit by assessing the ways racial prejudices disproportionately disadvantage people of color. Andry often lends new interpretations to Southern history in her works—her recent solo exhibition Afro-what-if-ism: Reimagining One Night in 1811 at Ibis Contemporary Gallery considers what might have happened during and following the 1811 German Coast Uprising, the largest slave revolt in U.S. history, which began at the Andry Plantation—the artist's namesake. The result is simultaneously whimsical and powerful, as scenes of Black leisure and childhood joy are juxtaposed with images of plantations—which are symbolic of Black enslavement—burning to the ground.
"I'm imagining had that part of the revolt been successful—the burning down of every plantation along River Road—if what these places, these plantations have come to represent (people cosplaying antebellum overlordship on the day of their vows or telling wildly inaccurate accounts of history at these sites, such as 'soft slavery' and 'good masters') wouldn't be possible." —Katrina Andry
Andry was among the artists included in Prospect.5, and her works are included in permanent collections at The Ogden, NOMA, and other art institutions nationwide.
Learn more about Andry and her work at katrina-andry.com.
L. Kasimu Harris
L. Kasimu Harris utilizes his photographic lens to tell the stories of underrepresented communities and the spaces they inhabit. His work has been included in countless group exhibitions across the country, as well as two international exhibitions and eight solo shows. His photographs are included in collections at The Ogden, NOMA, Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane, and other art institutions internationally.
[Read our 2022 "Perspectives" column on L. Kasimu Harris's Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges project.]
“The catalyst for my inspiration is usually being curious or being pissed off, and that leads me to examine, contend, and to reimagine various topics. To me, my art is situated firmly in the ladder of abstraction and the foundation is very local—New Orleans and the top rung, is always in conversation with the global community. New Orleans has always been an international influencer.” —L. Kasimu Harris
His ongoing Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges series documents the Black cultural epicenters in New Orleans that are swiftly being lost to gentrification, and has been shown at the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette and the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. New photographs for the series are set to debut as part of the upcoming Prospect.6 triennial this fall.
Learn more about Harris and his work at lkasimuharris.com.
Hannah Chalew
Hannah Chalew’s unique multimedia sculptures and installations turn over the daunting questions posed by our changing climate, particularly their implications for those of us living in South Louisiana. Through her works, the environmental activist and educator assesses the events of the past that resulted in the current crisis, and envisions what future life may look like.
[Read our 2019 feature on Chalew and her work, here.]
Chalew has said that she didn’t realize her deep personal and artistic connections with her home in New Orleans until she left for college in Boston, and Hurricane Katrina hit shortly thereafter. She was inspired by the first Prospect in 2008 to create art in and for the city; now she will be one of the forty-nine artists whose work is featured in Prospect.6. She was also selected as a South Arts Prize Winner and Louisiana State Fellow in 2022.
Learn more about Chalew and her practice at hannahchalew.com.