August 8th - September 6th, 2026
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm & by appointment (reach out to an artist)
Programming This Month
Saturday August 8th, 6-10pm
Opening Reception, Second Saturday
Youth Podcast Fundraiser at The Front Gallery
August 29th, 2:00pm-5:00pm
Room 1
Signal + Ground: Drawings from an Oyster Mushroom
Rachel Gorman
Signal + Ground: Drawings from an Oyster Mushroom explores the creative potential that emerges when systems with different forms of intelligence, agency, and perception are intentionally brought into interaction. The work centers on a system in which a living oyster mushroom colony, computational processes, mechanical systems, chance, and human interpretation converge to generate gestural, abstract ink drawings on paper. The resulting artworks are not the expression of a single author, but traces of a process involving radically different ways of sensing and responding to the world.
At the center of Signal + Ground is an interest in translation: the space between receiving a signal and understanding what it means. The drawings do not reveal a direct message from the substrate, but rather a measurement whose meaning is continually shaped as it moves through processes of translation, transformation, and interpretation. By challenging conventional definitions of artistic creation, Signal + Ground asks us to reconsider where we have traditionally located creative potential, intelligence, and agency, and how those assumptions shape our relationships with the countless forms of nonhuman life with which we share the planet.
Rachel Gorman is an award-winning artist and speculative designer whose interdisciplinary practice bridges art, science, and technology. Combining research, imagination, computational tools, biological materials, and experimental design processes, her work explores the evolving relationships between humans and the living world amid rapid technological and ecological change.
Instagram: @RachelGMakes
Room 2
Introduction: Black Spiritual Ecologies
Ingrid Raphaël, Darryl DeAngelo Terrell, Anthony Peyton Young, Installation by Déja Jones, curated by Spiritual is Political
In conversation with Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, spiritual in form and political in tone, the exhibition asks a question the novel poses in its opening line: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”. Like the material and rememory of salt, Black Spiritual Ecologies as a framework layers Black spiritual meaning-making across past, present, and future ecologies. It invites artists and audiences alike into collaboration with materiality, placemaking, storytelling, and the global political conditions of Black life.
Focusing on the pillar of place, each artist converses with the history and spiritual making of a place/places; whether on the ground or in the air. All places that refuse to be forgotten. As a collective story, the artists represent the layering of mediums as a methodology for meaning making. Individually, each artist’s work represents methods for getting well; through flying, portals, or community remembrance, Black life is honored.
- Cheyenne Wyzzard-Jones @cheyennewj
Artists:
Ingrid Raphaël / @movingbodyofwork
Darryl DeAngelo Terrell / @blkboyshine
Anthony Peyton Young / @anthonypeytonyoung
Installation by Déja Jones / @creating.dejamojo
Curation by @sipcurationco__
Ingrid Raphaël is an award-winning filmmaker, educator, and multidisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia. Born to Cameroonian, Togolese-German, and Moroccan-French parents, they draw on their experience of migration to explore memory, cartography, belonging, and the poetics of ecology. They are the co-founder of NO EVIL EYE CINEMA, a nomadic microcinema, and founder of NSISIM Studio, a slow-burn study of ecological embodiment. Their films and installations weave ecology, image, and landscape as objects of memory, temporality, and Blackness.
Darryl DeAngelo Terrell is a Brooklyn-based, Detroit-born lens-based artist, curator, DJ, and organizer. They received their BFA from Wayne State University and their MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Working across photography, video, performance, and sound, Terrell explores how Black people might be removed from the now and placed elsewhere, and how ritual and folklore can guide the journey toward liberated Black space. Their ongoing series A Way to Get Gone renders shimmering, gold-clad figures as "portals" to freedom, each sited at a set of coordinates marking a place of historical or present violence. Their work is held in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Anthony Peyton Young is a Boston-based artist born and raised in Charleston, West Virginia. Working across painting, drawing, ceramics, and collage, Young's work explores memorializing, healing, family traditions, Black and Black queer intimacy, and the spaces used to activate these acts, with heavy influences from Black Americana, film, and his home state. He earned his BA from West Virginia State University and his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, and his work is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Juliette Art Museum.
Spiritual is Political (SIP) is an independent curatorial studio whose practice centers art, education, organizing for resistance, and world-building. SIP produces, examines, and builds alongside contemporary artists and their communities. www.sipproduction.som
Déja M. Jones is a self-taught Black and Indigenous Creole artist from New Orleans, Louisiana. Jones began their career in 2017, at the intersection of advocacy and art, focusing on themes of spirituality, community wellness, land, culture, and governance. Through community organizing, curating, and their studio practice, Jones creates spaces that celebrate Black joy and wellbeing.
“The story of Black and Indigenous Creoles resonates with the struggles and aspirations of marginalized communities globally. Sharing these stories unites us in our diversity and strength and catalyzes change.”
In 2021, Jones participated in the Museum Professionals Fellowship at The Studio Museum in Harlem, which established the ethical foundation for their role as a curator. In 2024, with funding from the National Performance Network’s Take Notice Fund and the Louisiana Division of the Arts Project, Jones's commitment to uplifting voices from the Global South led to a series of community development-focused exhibitions across Louisiana. In 2023, Jones joined The Front, where they launched the "We See You" Residency Program, providing a creative platform for BIPOC organizers, advocates, and grassroots initiatives in New Orleans. Currently, they serve as the Youth Development Specialist with the New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board (CYPB), focusing on positive youth development through intergenerational collaboration and art.
Room 3
Our Garden, The BLUEPRINT: More than a Dream, It's a Plan
curated by Déja M Jones, group show with local youth from The New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board, The Junior Civic Safety Council, and Ubuntu Village
Our Garden, The Blueprint is more than the art you see. It's a strategy, a success story, and a vision- cultivated by the young leaders of New Orleans. A seed planted in 2020, with the launch of the New Orleans Youth Master Plan, has since sprouted into an intergenerational collaborative force aiming to create a true community where everyone succeeds.
The core of this exhibition is the true identity of New Orleans youth while honoring their monumental contributions to our city’s safety, culture, and well-being! Around the exhibition, you will find contributions from our community of partners, peers, and allies whose initiatives set out to support and engage youth from a place of partnership, respect, and power-sharing.
Guided by the Youth Advisory Board (YAB) of the New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board (CYPB), system leaders, nonprofit organizations, advocates, and the community at large have established a system of care to support our city’s youth and families. Focusing on themes of Health & Well-Being, Space & Place, Safety & Justice, Learning, Economic Stability, and Youth Voice, our collaborative efforts have resulted in youth-centered initiatives, programs, public and philanthropic investments, and shifts in practices.
Thanks to our city’s amazing youth, the vision is clear, and the fruits of their plan consistently nourish us all.
Our youth deserve to be honored. Let’s honor them by matching our efforts, dollars, and resources to the fulfillment of their vision.
Déja M. Jones
Déja M. Jones is a self-taught Black and Indigenous Creole artist from New Orleans, Louisiana. Jones began their career in 2017, at the intersection of advocacy and art, focusing on themes of spirituality, community wellness, land, culture, and governance. Through community organizing, curating, and their studio practice, Jones creates spaces that celebrate Black joy and wellbeing.
In 2021, Jones participated in the Museum Professionals Fellowship at The Studio Museum in Harlem, which established the ethical foundation for their role as a curator. In 2024, with funding from the National Performance Network’s Take Notice Fund and the Louisiana Division of the Arts Project, Jones's commitment to uplifting voices from the Global South led to a series of community development-focused exhibitions across Louisiana. In 2023, Jones joined The Front, where they launched the "We See You" Residency Program, providing a creative platform for BIPOC organizers, advocates, and grassroots initiatives in New Orleans. Currently, they serve as the Youth Development Specialist with the New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board (CYPB), focusing on positive youth development through intergenerational collaboration and art.
NOLA CYPB
The New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board (CYPB) is a planning board made up of 11 to 25 thoughtful, committed members; a Youth Advisory Board of 40 members; and five staff members who plan and move together to deliver change that improves outcomes for children and youth in Orleans Parish. CYPB comprehensive plans promote coordinated efforts in development, implementation, and operation of services and programs, which encourages positive youth development of young people from birth to 24 years old.
Center for Youth Equity
The Center for Youth Equity (CYE) is a culturally responsive youth violence prevention research center embedded within the ongoing community partnerships and existing infrastructure of the Violence Prevention Institute (VPI) of Tulane University to build and strengthen the network for youth violence prevention in New Orleans and across the Gulf South.
Junior Civic Safety Council (JCSC) is a youth-led group in partnership with CYE and VPI that platforms young people's voices in shaping programs, policies and projects that create safer, stronger communities
Ubuntu Village
Ubuntu Village is a Black-led, multi-racial group made up of parents, young people, and community members. Our mission is to make New Orleans a safer, healthier, more equitable place to call home.
We support and build power with those most impacted by systemic racism, violence, and mass incarceration. Instead of replicating systems of oppression, “we keep us safe” by mediating conflicts in our neighborhoods, offering alternatives to prosecution and incarceration, and directly supporting families in the legal system. We prioritize healing and mutual aid to meet our community’s immediate needs, while building power for long-term racial and economic justice.
Exhibition Curation and Art Installation:
Déja M. Jones, Artist and CYPB Youth Development Specialist
Exhibition Co-Creators and Artists:
New Orleans Children and Youth Planning Board (CYPB) Youth Advisory Board; Center for Youth Equity (CYE) Junior Civic Safety Council, Ubuntu Village
@creating.dejamojo dejamjones.com
@nolacypb nolacypb.org
@ubuntuvillagenola ubuntuvillagenola.org
@tulanevpi violenceprevention.tulane.edu
room 4
Ulrika Matthiessen, The Lonely Thistle, acrylic on Arches Cover paper, 64 x 34 inches,2026 Ulrika Matthiessen, Flowering (detail), acrylic on Arches Cover paper, 62 x 42 inches,2026 Ulrika Matthiessen, Gardener of Ashes, colored pencil on paper mounted to board,24 x 18 inches, 2026
Second Nature
Ulrika Matthiessen
What if, in response to climate change and widespread human-driven plant extinctions, plants found a way to ensure their own survival by merging with humans? Second Nature imagines a speculative future in which surviving plants initiate a radical adaptation to merge with humans and create a new form of life. The resulting botanical beings dissolve the boundaries between human and non-human, familiar and alien. Humanity is no longer the dominant force but becomes part of a new evolutionary alliance.
Ulrika Matthiessen is a visual artist based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Drawing on backgrounds in both Fine Arts and Architecture, she creates figurative work that imagines the body not as something fixed, but as something continually adapting to the forces that shape it. Her projects range from expressive prosthetic forms and speculative futures to environmental narratives that challenge conventional ideas about nature, identity, and resilience.
@ulrikamatthiessen www.ulrikamatthiessen.com