September 12th - October 4, 2026

Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm & by appointment (reach out to an artist)

Programming This Month

Saturday September 12th, 6-10pm
Opening Reception, Second Saturday

Saturday September 19th, 3pm
Risky Play (Room 4)— Artist talk with Sara Nyquist and Ann Haley

Saturday September 26th, 3pm
phoneme, morpheme (Room 3) — A divination exercise with Patrick O'Connor

Room 1

Elizabeth Shannon, Completeness of Action (process), tin graveure plate, alligator skin, 16 x 20 x 2 inches, 2026.

Completeness of Action 

Elizabeth Shannon

A series of exercises utilizing common objects from my studio inventory placed on unusable photograveure tin plates from the Josephine Sacabo Studio.

The tin plates create a background that inspires the placement of stones, small wood planks, replica objects, moss, etc.

The ritual of placement - then rest - then re placement in building a dimensional collage is and has been part of my practice, whether large-scale installations or small-scale vignettes. 

In addition, I will present a photographic diptych originally titled Atchafalaya Basin from 1992, as it continues to comment on Louisiana's fragile coast and wetlands, especially with the looming SpaceX development.

Elizabeth Shannon was born in Louisiana on the Atchafalaya River at the foot of this vast basin wetlands, a waterway teaming with the activity of seafood and oil-related industries. Shannon continues to be fascinated by this landscape and the codependent relationship. The intersection presents cautionary allegories responding to the threats that befall the natural and urban environment. The patina of this small river town and the Mississippi River culture and its environs have influenced work constructed out of time-worn salvage found and selected objects, subjects of fabrication and photography in explorations about humanity and the environment. Shannon has been active for almost 50 years and is represented in museum, corporate, public, and private collections.

@liz.shannon.14

Room 2

Room 3

phoneme, morpheme

Patrick O'Connor

Each word, syllable, and letter in a sentence or story holds its own meaning separate from a constructed context. When those parts are put together, they enter a conversation that the reader deciphers. phoneme, morpheme is a visual representation of that concept and is an exercise in making meaning out of disparate parts.

Patrick O’Connor, originally from Cambridge, Mass., has lived and worked in New Orleans since 2019. He is a multidisciplinary artist, and has explored music, experimental photography, 3D rendering tools and machines, textiles, and installation. Patrick hopes to make spaces for others to learn and relate to each other. He is interested in the multiple identities of the natural world. Each thing is known to itself in ways that other things won’t know. With this guiding force in mind, Patrick has traversed many landscapes with a mind open to seeing the reflection of an accumulation of time in an instance. 

@patrickeverywhereigo

A divination exercise, September 26 at 3 pm

room 4

Ann Haley & Sara Nyquist, Cut yourself Out of yourself (detail), lace, liquid latex, red thread, 30 x 5 x 4 inches, 2026.

Risky Play

Sara Nyquist & Ann Haley

With surreal figurative painting, skin-like soft sculpture, and mixed-media installation, Sara Nyquist and Ann Haley explore the tension between danger and desire, control and surrender, violence and vitality. 

In Haley’s exposing and confrontational paintings, the act of eating is both violent and sensual. Obsessive and compulsive. The dichotomy of eating and hunting tells a story of what it means to be well-fed and unafraid to risk injury in the pursuit of reclaiming one’s body. The gutting of fruit and shedding of skin release the parts of oneself that have been contained or restricted for the sake of survival.  

Nyquist’s textile sculpture aims to give physical shape to early memories of vulnerability, isolation, and desire. Satin is used formally and conceptually for its plasticity, calling to the slippery and mutable nature of memory. Shellac is applied to create a supple and hidelike surface. The resulting structure exists somewhere between a body and its contents. Shellacked satin peeks through the papery shedding skin on bars, evoking soft tissue, fat, blood, puss: all the wet and messy byproducts of transformation.

The carnal delicacy of Haley’s soft sculptures explores the nuance of trusting the natural process of shedding one’s skin and considers how sometimes we must do something drastic to reach freedom. In their collaborative piece, “Cut yourself Out of yourself,” together, Haley and Nyquist honor the body’s ability to mend despite destruction. 

Risky Play is dangerous, seductive, and on the verge of unraveling. 

Sara Nyquist is a sculptor and production designer in New Orleans, LA. In 2015 she earned her MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research at The Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies, and her  BFA at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon in 2013. Working primarily with fiber, clay, and wood, her works often tease the softness of the body into rigid and non-figurative structures. Professionally, her creative direction has been showcased at independent film festivals in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Capri, and New Orleans, among others. She is proud to exhibit her latest sculptural works alongside her friend and collaborator, Ann Haley at the Front Gallery in New Orleans,  September 2026. 

@alwaysalreadyyours
saranyquist.com

Ann Haley (Atlanta, GA, b.1991) is a multimedia artist, curator, and educator in New Orleans, LA. She received a BFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2014, and is currently pursuing a Master's of Education in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of New Orleans. As a collective member of The Front Gallery since 2020, Haley has curated, collaborated, and solo-exhibited numerous art shows rooted in themes of identity, grief, and the body. In New Orleans, she has also exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center, SHED Gallery, Carroll Gallery, Antenna Gallery, Staple Goods Gallery, and Burnt Canoe Gallery. Outside of New Orleans, she has exhibited at Ashmore Gallery in Savannah, GA; Plug Gallery in Kansas City, MO; and Vernissage in Lacoste, France. Beyond her personal art practice, Haley has taught and developed Art Ed curricula for New Orleans youth since 2015, most prominently at Waldo Burton Boys Home.

@annhaleystudio
annhaleystudio.com

Nyquist and Haley have nearly a decade of creative endeavors together in New Orleans, but this will be their first time showing art together in a gallery.

Artist Talk: Saturday September, 19th at 3pm

BUILDING EXTERIOR

Fully Dressed

Christine Crook & Pete Fields

So here we are again. This is a house, and these are its clothes. If you are reading this, maybe you‘re paying attention and you’ve noticed the second installment of our adornment to this building we call The Front, an art gallery, an artist collective, a home. This time around, we got louder, more riotous, and decided to offer a full-throttle celebration of this special house, a house that welcomes everyone and offers a place to show and see the art we create in New Orleans.

Or maybe you didn’t notice this building enough before. Maybe the paint color isn’t bright enough, or maybe you just didn’t see a sign letting you know that this is The Front. The old sign had faded and peeled, and the new sign got painted over, and we wanted to make sure you saw this building again. So we dressed it up. And when I say dressed, I mean Fully Dressed, like a New Orleans po-boy, with everything on it, slathered in Duke’s, piled high with lettuce, pickles, and tomatoes. Because the secret ingredient is always more.

This work celebrates The Front, celebrates local art, and celebrates community. It was created by me, Christine Crook, and my husband, Pete Fields. This house has nurtured our creativity and our friendships. It has been a place where we have made things, seen things, met people, laughed, gathered, and become part of something bigger. The Front is a part of our story, and we want to give something back to this house that gave to us.

So here it is, wilder and more untamed. Visibly, it looks like us...our hands, our ideas, our stuff, our particular brand of excess...but it is for you, and it is for The Front. I hope on a Tuesday afternoon the sun catches it just right, throws a little sparkle in your eyes, and makes you stop in your tracks and say, “Hello there, house. You’re looking pretty fine all dressed up like that.” And then I hope you get curious about what’s happening behind those walls and think to yourself, “I better go find out.”

You might also be thinking, “Where’d all this shit come from?”
Well, I gathered the piles. The costumes that have been worn and worn again. The piles of artwork from exhibitions past, some of it already transformed, recycled, resurrected, and turned into countless new versions of itself. The bits and bobs that get tucked away into plastic tubs because surely, someday, I will need them again, and then somehow “someday” becomes years. And you start thinking, fuck… I need to get these things out of my house! They need to get out, stretch their legs, breathe a little, and have another life. So I gathered them up and put them to work on this house. I reused the patchwork panels that adorned The Front last September, which had already been made from recycled materials themselves. Much of what you see here has had a life before this one. Nothing is really new. It has just been rearranged, remixed, dressed up, and given another chance to be seen.
And it’s a party. It’s a celebration.

The images and drawings are Pete’s. They come from the iconic figures that have populated his countless sketchbooks — characters that seem to live somewhere between his imagination, this neighborhood, this gallery, and the particular buzzard that lives somewhere within his soul. They are also about this place: The Front, the Bywater, New Orleans, the people who make this community what it is. And they are the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all of it together on this house.
Everything has been gathered here for The Front to adorn it, to let it be seen, to let it shine and shout “I’m here! Come see me! Come gather. Come drink. Come sing. Come marvel at the work that pours off my walls. Come recognize that you need me. I am a house that celebrates art. A house that welcomes artists and people who love art and people who are just curious about what the hell is going on. I am unpretentious and unjudgmental. I am not concerned with price tags or prestige, with what is fashionable or marketable, or with making art behave. I am here for the making of it. The showing of it. The seeing of it. The talking about it. The drinking and gathering and arguing and laughing and making something new because somebody saw something here that made them want to make something, too. I am The Front. Come on in.”

Christine Crook is a costume, installation, and performance artist based in New Orleans. Her wildly strange creations emerge as she diverges from a long-established career in costume design for theatre, opera, and dance. Through this divergence, she experiments with abstract costumes, textures, structures, and installations that draw on and reimagine her practice in stage design and the world-building traditions of the theatre. Crook uses her art to offer poetic interpretations of emotion, story, and place through costume and other visual forms. Her studio work is inspired by traditions in drag, folk art, the occult, and global masquerade. These influences are often blended through an eccentric, campy visual language that playfully embraces transformation, theatricality, and the absurd. @christineandthecrook

Pete Fields is a musician, visual artist, and educator currently living in New Orleans, Louisiana.  He considers himself a community-based artist, interpreting and recycling the sights and sounds of his environment through simple & cheap art forms such as comics, graffiti, and folk music. Growing up in San Francisco's Mission district neighborhood in the 80's and 90's Pete's world was shaped heavily by the vibrant street culture, ethnic diversity, and political action of his parents and friends.  Most transformational to him at this time was the cross pollination of creative forces at play in the neighborhood around him. Punk rock music, soap box derbies, old time fiddle, underground comix, sign painting, latin jazz, bernal hill...all stimulated his artistic nature and showed him the possibilities of forming a strong community through art. Pete’s natural curiosity about people and the world around him continues to fuel his creative practice. Since making New Orleans his home, he has embraced the city and its communities, using music and art to connect with others, explore new ideas, and bring people together. @slowmocowboys