May 10 - June 8, 2025
Opening reception on Saturday, May 10th 6-10pm.
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm. & by appointment
Programming This Month
Opening Night 5/10
Second Saturdays
Rooms 1 & 2
Lily Brooks, Untitled (family on a beach), From the series Letter from a Bellwether, Archival Pigment Print, 32 x 40 inches, 2021.
Kathryn Agnes Baczeski, Tumultuous Bayous Revisited: You Only Want Someplace Who Wants You Too, 2025.
Elliott Stokes, Lake Salvador Defunct Pump Station, 2023.
Christopher Givens, Tino at the Crosswalk, Day 72, From the seriesTino Park's Migrational Pilgrimage: Day 72, Early Morning -- Crescent Beach, Florida, 2025
Marie Bannerot McInerney, Deep Water 01, Plaster, newspaper, encaustic, ink, 5 x 5 x 3 inches, 2021
Hannah Chalew, Buoyancy Factor, Handmade ink from iron, oak galls, coal pollution runoff, found sheetrock, goldenrod, copper, indigo on paper made from sugarcane and shredded disposable plastic waste (“plasticane”), thread, metal. 75 x 50 x 14 inches, 2022.
Sadie Sheldon, Under Certain Conditions, canvas drop cloth, acrylic paint, 68.5 x 48.5 inches, 2025.
Overtones of Extraction: Art in the Wake of Change
Curated by Elliott Stokes
Katie Baczeski, Lily Brooks, Hannah Chalew, Christopher Givens, Marie Bannerot McInerney, Sadie Sheldon, Elliott Stokes
Set in the heart of New Orleans’ Bywater neighborhood, Overtones of Extraction examines the profound and far-reaching consequences of climate change, particularly those rooted in industrial and agricultural systems. This exhibition gathers works from across disciplines that confront the environmental, social, and political transformations currently reshaping life on Earth.
Against a backdrop of rising sea levels, extreme wildfires, catastrophic flooding, prolonged droughts, and growing food insecurity, the exhibition reflects on a world in flux. It considers the personal and collective dimensions of survival in a time when once-habitable spaces are becoming increasingly uninhabitable—and where escalating disparities dictate who will endure and who will be left behind.
The works on view wrestle with urgent questions: How do we make sense of a future defined by instability? What does it mean to live with dignity in the midst of ecological collapse? How do histories of resource extraction, systemic inequity, and forced migration shape the present—and what possibilities remain for resilience?
Through a range of media including installation, performance, video, sound, and immersive environments, Overtones of Extraction creates space for both critical inquiry and imaginative speculation. The exhibition centers not only human survival, but also amplifies the often-silenced perspectives of non-human life forms and marginalized communities most impacted by environmental degradation.
Rather than offering a singular narrative, the works collectively engage with overlapping crises and explore the role of art in navigating and resisting collapse. They ask us to confront uncomfortable truths, envision alternate futures, and consider how art can contribute to the reimagining of a more just and sustainable world.
At this pivotal moment, Overtones of Extraction positions art as a vital force in addressing the most pressing challenges of our time—challenging viewers to reflect, respond, and remain attentive to the wake of change we are all now living through.
Kathryn Agnes Baczeski is a clay-based artist and Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. Her teaching and creative practices encompass sculpture, installation, performance art, and experiential immersive experiences. She earned her BFA in Sculpture at the University of Connecticut in 2009, and MFA in Ceramics from Indiana University in 2016. Recently, she has co-founded the ceramic and clay studio, Crescent City Clayworks, in New Orleans. kathrynagnesbaczeski.com
Lily Brooks holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art + Design. Her lens-based practice is rooted in long-term research projects that examine the ways power and vulnerability define our experience of the climate crisis. Her work has been featured in publications such as the Oxford American, NPR’s Weekend Edition, and the Los Angeles Times. Lily is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Southeastern Louisiana University, where she was named an Edward Schlieder Endowed Professor in Environmental and Sustainability Studies for 2022-2025. Her recent editorial clients include the New York Times and the Financial Times. She lives and works in Baton Rouge. lilybrooks.net
Hannah Chalew is an artist, educator, and environmental activist raised and currently based in New Orleans. She received her BA from Brandeis University in 2009 and her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016. Chalew has exhibited widely in New Orleans and across the country, including at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Laumeier Sculpture Park (St. Louis, MO), Dieu Donné (New York, NY), Asheville Museum of Art (Asheville, NC), Minnesota Center for the Book Arts (Minneapolis, MN), among other venues. Her work has been featured in publications such as Frieze, The Art Newspaper, Art Review, The New York Times, American Craft, Hand Papermaking, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, and more. Her work is included in the collections of the City of New Orleans and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Chalew’s work is also featured in two creative atlases by writer and activist Rebecca Solnit: Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (co-authored with Rebecca Snedeker) and Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (co-authored with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro). In 2021, she received the Monroe Fellowship Research Grant to create ink from fossil fuel pollution in collaboration with fence-line communities in Southern Louisiana. In 2022, she was awarded both a Platforms Fund grant and a Puffin Foundation grant to support this project. That same year, Chalew was named the South Arts Southern Prize winner and the South Arts Louisiana State Fellow. hannahchalew.com
Christopher Givens was born in Monroe, Louisiana, and raised by choir teachers on Baptist hymns, books, and Blockbuster rentals. After studying film at the University of New Orleans, he worked in Hollywood South productions and various odd jobs that enabled long stretches of travel and reflection. In 2014, he co-founded an underground cinema inside a gutted shotgun house where during a period of four years 21 original plays and 200+ films were presented. While completing his MFA in Theatre Design at Tulane, he became a Mellon Fellow and co-founded the Beaubourg School, a tuition-free platform for public knowledge sharing. He has a book concern Uptown called Cricket Books. christophergivens.com
Marie Bannerot McInerney is a multidisciplinary studio artist and educator. Her site-responsive installations and discrete works in concrete, silk, handmade paper and canvas consider human agency within the framework of ecological systems, mystical thinking, and natural phenomena. She is a 2018 Charlotte Street Artist Award Fellow, a 2024 recipient of the Stone and DeGuire Contemporary Art Award and participated in residencies at Studios Inc and The Luminary. McInerney has exhibited across the United States and abroad including shows at the Bellevue Arts Museum (Bellevue, WA), Mildred Lane Kemper Museum (Saint Louis, MO) Friedrich Schiller University (Jena, Germany), and Han Tianheng Art Museum Shanghai (Shanghai City, China) as well as solo exhibitions at The Tarble Arts Center (Charleston, IL), Studios Inc. (Kansas City, MO), and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonvill, AR). McInerney co-authored an essay in the book, Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of our Contact Zone and was awarded a Cultural Exchange Grant from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin to present work. Her formative years were spent in Houston, TX before she earned a BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA at Washington University in Saint Louis.mbmcinerney.com
Sadie Sheldon is a multimedia artist whose work responds to the specificities of place. With a background in sculpture, she holds an MFA from Tulane University and has been a member of Staple Goods, Majaks Theater, and a board member of the Beaubourg Free School. Her semi-nomadic lifestyle has shaped her creative practice, allowing her to connect with diverse communities through numerous artist residencies and fellowships, including at the Joan Mitchell Center, Stove Works, Elsewhere Museum, Vermont Studio Center, and Sculpture Space. Her solo exhibition Briefly is currently on view at Sibyl Gallery in New Orleans through June 29.sadiesheldon.com
Elliott Stokes (B. 1990, New Orleans, LA.) Stokes received his Studio MFA from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign with a concentration in painting, sculpture and new media. His artwork exists within the gray area of necessity and critique of industrial and agricultural processes and how they reflect past histories and infer future trajectories. Positioning his artwork between reverence and contempt of industry, specifically petrochemicals, Stokes uses this tension as a launching point for cultural examination and introspection. He has exhibited nationally, including Zhou B. Arts Center in Chicago, Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. He is currently a member of The Front gallery and collective in New Orleans elliottstokes.com
Room 3
lex clara jacquet, yesterday remains beyond our grasp, Acrylic on mixed media, 80 x 80 inches, 2025.
yesterday remains beyond our grasp
lex clara jacquet
The classroom has long functioned as a site of indoctrination and contested knowledge, increasingly shaped by right-wing Christian ideology and the logics of racial capitalism. This installation reimagines the classroom as a space formed by gestures, silences, and inherited memory. Like the body, the classroom remembers. The work returns intimacy and remembrance to a space that has historically excluded both. Here, knowing emerges through touch, through quiet repetition. Through the familial dynamics that precede and exceed formal education. The project asks what kinds of knowledge are granted legitimacy, what forms of care are policed, and how pedagogy molds the body. This work offers an invitation: sit, look, listen to what the classroom could never hold. It is not instruction but inheritance that speaks.
lex clara jacquet is a Louisiana Creole artist-curator and cultural producer based in New Orleans and Brooklyn. Their multidisciplinary practice explores how artistic production can interrogate notions of banality, care, gender, personhood, racialized otherness, and the body, while fostering community-building and intercultural dialogue. They hold degrees from New York University and Borough of Manhattan Community College with a focus on Black Studies, Contemporary Art, Cultural Anthropology, and Economics.
Room 4
Danielle Fauth In Studio, 2025
Without Ceremony, Dusk –
Danielle Fauth
The resonance of mundane instances plucked from backyards I’ve known travel to meet me here, conjuring a scene of something familiar but not fully correct as in a dream, or echo. Without Ceremony, Dusk – explores tension between feelings of peace and unrest, freedom and captivity, desire and completeness in the context of a suburban backyard approaching dusk. In this space, a landscape is surfaced with loads of potential energy, and simultaneously a lack of urgency - rejecting us as the center. Quiet moments of alchemy are in no hurry to prove their presence, or significance. Through this assemblage of work I am interested in chiseling away at a shared sense of normal - a fragile sense of stability, security, and permanence built from the shiny & new; the perfectly curated. What is truly the core of our longing?
Danielle Fauth is an interdisciplinary sculptor born and raised in Long Island, New York. She received an MFA in Sculpture from Tulane University in 2022. Fauth was a 2022 RedLine CAC Satellite Studio Artist in Denver, Colorado, a 2023 Volland Foundation Artist in Residence, and was selected as an AIR at Anderson Ranch in 2023. She currently lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana. Using personal effects, found objects & patterns in the landscape as points of departure, Fauth aims to open a dialogue around the poetics of material by reinterpreting the ordinary & inanimate as resonant beings that constellate a map of human experience.