April 12 - May 5, 2025
Opening reception on Saturday, April 12th 6-10pm.
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm. & by appointment
Programming This Month
Opening Night 4/12
Second Saturdays
Room 1
The Revival of Us, Stardust
Curator: Déja Jones
Featured Artists: Kennedy Timmons, Andre Lebone, Von Ayé
The Revival of Us, Stardust recites ancient knowledge through poetry, multimedia installation, portraiture, and glass sculptural work. Curated by Déja M. Jones, this vibrant garden of artwork embraces the cycles of life that mirror the seasonal transitions with intention, grace, and understanding. Featuring work by Kennedy Timmons, Andre Lebone, Von Ayé, and Déja M. Jones.
May your Spring be sweetened with more than just watermelon juice and snowballs.
How was your death this winter? Did you transition well?
Tell me about your Spring! What’s new with you? How’s your mama n’em?
Tell’em I said, W E L C O M E!
Welcome to The Revival of Us, Stardust.
Déja M. Jones
Déja M. Jones, a self-taught Black/Indigenous Creole from New Orleans, began their career at the intersection of advocacy and art. Jones’s paintings, sculptures, and installations tell their ancestral stories and advocate for preserving cultural legacies. Jones's introduction to the local art scene in 2017, "Grandmama's House," was a devoted love letter, made of multimedia sculptures and archival media, to the advocacy of southern Black communities during the Civil Rights Era. Since then, Jones has showcased artwork in Scotland, the U.K., New York, Louisiana, and Missouri. In 2023, they were selected to become a member of the artist-led exhibition space, The Front Gallery, where Jones exhibits emerging projects. Jones's love for their community inspired them to explore community development through art further. In 2019, Jones joined Imagine Water Works (IWW), where they became Programs Director until 2024 and now serve as a member of the board. In 2020, Jones completed their fellowship with the New Orleans Youth Alliance and now works as a Youth Development Specialist with the Children and Youth Planning Board (CYPB), focusing on positive youth development within New Orleans through collaboration, art, and youth voice.
Jones’s practice is rooted in connecting communities, objects, cultures, and governance. Their installations and archival spaces consist of sculptures, paintings, and archival media from their studio practice and are grounded in their advocacy and community organizing. Jones pulls from their lived experiences growing up in New Orleans communities of spiritual healers, Black educators, and Black Indigenous legacy builders. Their community role is to organize movements and build objects and spaces that are sites of celebration, honor, healing, and revolution. As Jones unveils their story, they begin to connect similar struggles, enemies, strengths, desires, and goals of marginalized communities worldwide. “We are a diverse, one people, and that is where our power lies.”
Andre Lebone
Hey! Its Dre! I’m a multidisciplinary artist, in other words, a dabbler. I explore mediums based on my passion, accessibility, identity, and the preservation of history and culture. Been a little like that since a kid, I’m an East Beast fa real, but I’m in Waggaman now. I like to think of myself as an optimistic and positive person. I try to embody hope.
My earliest raw work of art was a poem titled “Stress” paired with an actually good self-portrait in middle school. I like to think that was my first time creating out of response to strong emotion. As I got older, I joined collectives like Eternal Seeds and studied in studios like Glassworks. The gifts these organizations gave me influenced my maturity when exposing me to research topics about Blackness, New Orleans culture, history, social justice, and newer forms of art.
My ethos is that family is foundation. I take a lot of Inspiration from my loved ones, their loves, lives, stories, vices, and how it all relates to my own. My greatest inspiration is also my greatest opportunity to be vulnerable. It’s a challenge to explore creativity for your family- to heal everyone, if not then yourself. It’s my passion, really, and what I’m loving is the current shift of finding purpose in yearning to be a conduit and keeper of the culture my family derives from. I love my city, yeah.
Kennedy Timmons
Kennedy Timmons is an African American painter born in Houston, Texas, in 2004. Growing up in a big family, most of her childhood was spent playing outside with her siblings or in front of a TV screen. Inspired by the highly stylized cartoons of the early 2000s and 2010s, where each show had a distinct style, color palette, and feel, Timmons sets out to create her own stylistic world with her art. Often referencing childhood memories, family, and personal experience, Timmons reimagines these events through the lens of the fictional world she’s creating. She initially lets these events get distorted by nostalgia, her current worldview, and other lived experiences. The result is an artistic world that explores youth, black joy, her environment, and the spectrum of blackness. Timmons is currently based in Central Texas and New Orleans, working on her BA in Visual Arts and minor in Business Administration from Dillard University. In the years to come, Timmons hopes to continue exploring who she is as an artist, the narrative she wants to tell, and the world she wants to create with her art.
Von Ayé
Christopher Dyvonne Burton, also known as Von Ayé, is a New Orleans-based visual artist whose work melds the past and future. Born and raised in Alexandria, Louisiana, Von Ayé began his artistic journey by sketching scenes inspired by comic books, Japanese manga, and anime. However, his move to New Orleans to study at Dillard University led him to refine his style through traditional mediums. As a self-described colorist, Von uses the language of color to convey unique messages to the viewer.
Von now focuses on painting to meld historical and traditional African-American concepts with strikingly vivid color palettes. The figures in Von’s work, often African deities, encourage viewers’ curiosity about themselves and their own cultural roots and divinity in their heritage.
Von’s art is a channel to express his African-American heritage. The pieces he creates depict a divine form of indigenous African and African American concepts through paintings, sculpture, and mixed media work. Often, Afrocentric traditions are viewed from a perspective of fear and spookism, but Von offers the viewer an optimistic perspective of these traditional concepts. He intends for observers to see divine aspects of themselves through his art. Using vivid imagery, my craft creates surreal spaces and figures for the viewer to explore and enjoy.
Room 2
Ulrika Matthiessen, Detail of The Progenitors Zbt b16, acrylic on paper, 72 x 42 inches, 2025
Ulrika Matthiessen, Detail of The Progenitors Lin 28a, acrylic on paper, 72 x 42 inches, 2025
Ulrika Matthiessen, Detail of The Progenitors Prd m16, acrylic on paper, 72 x 42 inches, 2025
Ulrika Matthiessen, Detail of the Progenitors Prd m16, acrylic on paper, 72 x 42 inches, 2025
Ulrika Matthiessen, Detail of Infinite Dance, acrylic on paper, 72 x 42 inches, 2025
Ulrika Matthiessen, Detail of Infinite Dance, acrylic on Paper, 72 x 42 inches, 2025
The All Parts Body
Ulrika Matthiessen and T.N. Francis
For their second collaboration, mother and son artists Ulrika Matthiessen and T.N. Francis explore human bodies merging with tools and technology. Through paintings and a mixed-media installation, we envision a reflection of beings that create a broader, more inclusive definition of what it means to be human.
Our artwork has grown out of the innumerable conversations we’ve had about the body, the phantom pains of limb loss, transformations due to aging, and the existential questions that arise when our bodies undergo life-altering changes. Do we need to redefine ourselves when our bodies become fragmented, altered, or reshaped? We acknowledge that, in many ways, we are already fused with our technology and unable to live without it. We choose to see technology as an offering to us for new possibilities of transformation and empowerment.
New Orleans native T.N. Francis studied art and interaction design in Sweden. He describes himself as an “abstract concept manager”. He is interested in exploring the intersection of art and technology in design.
Ulrika Matthiessen is a visual artist based in New Orleans. She was born in Sweden and raised in the American Deep South. With a background in Fine Arts and Architecture, Matthiessen's art is a fusion of observation, imagination, analysis, and chance. www.ulrikamatthiessen.com
Room 3
Rachel Gorman, Money and Politics #6, Digital illustration co-created with machine learning models, ink on cardstock, 6.5 x 6.5 inches, 2022
Rachel Gorman, Biotechnology #7, Digital illustration co-created with machine learning models, ink on cardstock, 6.5 x 6.5 inches, 2022
Rachel Gorman, Biotechnology #15, Digital illustration co-created with machine learning models, ink on cardstock, 6.5 x 6.5 inches, 2022
Rachel Gorman, Environmental Instability #8, Digital illustration co-created with machine learning models, ink on cardstock, 6.5 x 6.5 inches, 2022
Rachel Gorman, Environmental Instability #16, Digital illustration co-created with machine learning models, ink on cardstock, 6.5 x 6.5 inches, 2022
Images of a Generation
Rachel Gorman
Images of a Generation is a series of video and print works created using early machine learning models in 2022. Developed through experimental training techniques that interrupted the generative process and combined conceptually linked but visually diverse datasets, the project captures the unpredictable and often surreal outputs of AI during a formative moment in its development. The resulting images—ranging from poetic to absurd—reveal the raw, dreamlike aesthetics that emerged before generative technologies became more refined and uniform. Each piece functions as both a visual artifact and a reflection on the cultural and technological conditions that shaped it. Together, they offer a glimpse into a fleeting era when algorithmic “hallucinations” invited new forms of interpretation and meaning.
Rachel Gorman is an award-winning artist and speculative designer working between New Orleans and New York. Her practice explores the embodied experience of possible futures, blending research with imagination, living and sustainable materials, bodily sensations, and creative technology to create installations and artifacts that transport audiences and spark meaningful dialogue. She holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design (2023) and is the co-founder of through studio, a design lab and consultancy that applies speculative frameworks and emerging biotechnology to address global environmental challenges and envision more sustainable futures. She is an active member of The Front and will be a featured artist at the NYCxDESIGN Festival in May 2025.6. Rachelgorman.online
Room 4
OBSERVER: Figurative Group Show
Curated by Emre Karaoglu
Artists:
Sean G. Clark
Piki Mendizabal
Ben Hamburger
Carey Lamprecht
Ben Markus
Jen Karaoglu
Eddie Ralph Hebert
Hoàng Huệ Phương
Kathleen Turner
Amy James
This exhibition explores the dynamic tension between observer and observed through figurative painting and self-portraiture. In these works, the act of looking—whether at others or oneself—becomes a central theme, revealing the complexities of identity, perception, and presence
The participating artists incorporate painting, sculpture, photography, and drawings utilizing various media and figure approaches to initiate a new conversation about what portraits and figures mean to us.
ABOUT CURATOR:
Emre Karaoglu, a contemporary figurative artist from Turkey now based in New Orleans, uses oil, pastel, and charcoal portraits to capture the profound layers of human experience in everyday life.
'Emotion, connection, and culture are infused within my paintings. I meticulously focus on silhouettes and the changing states of the human experience. I am an observer and an archivist of modern-day culture. The body of artworks that I am creating “up close and personal.” They are intimate moments with people around me and strangers in physical proximity. I am a witness to other people's lives.'
Emre’s painting was selected for the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition 2024, at the Mall Galleries, London, UK. Three of Emre’s artworks are in the permanent ‘How You Doin’, New Orleans?’ & "Art of the Black Experience" collection of the City of New Orleans. His artworks were selected as a part of "the State of the Art: Record Zine Project" at the LSU Museum of Art, Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge in 2022.
Emre's paintings were selected for the 16th and 17th Annual Louisiana Fine Arts Showcase at the President's residence at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond in 2023 and 2024. Emre’s artworks were selected for the New Orleans Art Association (NOAA) 2023 and 2024 National Show and received the Merit Award. www.emrekaraogluart.com