October 10th - November 1st, 2026

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

Programming This Month

Saturday October 10th, 6-10pm
Opening Reception, Second Saturday

Sunday October 11, 6-8pm,
performance activation by paris cian followed by an artist gathering

Saturday, October 17th, 2 pm
Rooms 3 + 4, Sarah Cancienne and Augustus Hoffman

Wednesday, October 28, 6-7pm, virtual artist panel with Sarah Jane Cervenak, Professor of Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies at University of North Carolina, Greensboro (Link coming soon)

Saturday November 7th, 7pm
Back to the Front Fundraiser Soiree (Link coming soon)

Rooms 1 & 2

paris cian, audacity is found while swimming in the Mississippi, mixed media, Mississippi red clay, and cyanotype print on window panel, 2026

Ruth Owens, Beyond the Field, oil on canvas, 60" x 60', 2026

erotics of flight 

paris cian and Ruth Owens (Curated by Allison K. Young)

erotics of flight presents a constellation of works by paris cian and Ruth Owens that imagine the coastal landscapes of Louisiana, the circum-Caribbean, and the Black Atlantic as spaces of fugitivity, ancestral memory, and eco-feminist erotics. Across painting, drawing, and sculpture, the artists invoke histories of marronage, or escape from enslavement on New World plantations. They envision the more-than-human ecologies of swamps, bayous, and mangrove forests as vital sites of refuge and spiritual communion.

cian and Owens take seriously Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic as central to the “lifeforce of women.” Lorde connects the erotic to a capacity for feeling deeply and thinking otherwise, through creativity, joy, and embodied self-knowledge. Owens’ paintings imagine speculative futures in which Black femme figures traverse intertidal landscapes, while cian visually disrupts the gallery space through installations of oyster shells, soil, and salvaged material. In their respective offerings, each artist invokes ephemeral ecologies and spatial practices of fugitivity. 

erotics of flight honors the gestures of love, courage, and resistance found across maroon histories and their contemporary resonances.

paris cian is an interdisciplinary artist and curator native to and living in New Orleans, LA. Working across installation, sculpture, and performance art, her practice mobilizes embodied memory, sustainability, and devotion. Through processes of the poetic, she composes with impermanence, the weather, and Black memory. Informed by Black girlhood, cian’s practice lives within the choreography of worldmaking, repetition, and the non-linear. Her obsessions offer inquiry to transformation and questions of urgency. 

Ruth Owens is a figurative painter and video artist represented by the Ferrara Showman Gallery. Foundationally, her practice lies in the relationships between humans and nature. Exhibitions include the Prospect.6 Triennial (2024), and a solo show at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art. Artist residencies include the Joan Mitchell Center, the Studios at MASS MoCA, NARS, and the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in NY. Her work is in the permanent collections of the 21c Museums, Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Addison Gallery of American Art, Beth Rudin DeWoody, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Dr. Allison K. Young is associate professor of contemporary art history at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Her research centers the role of art in social justice movements, with focus on African and African Diaspora artists and art histories. Young’s first book, Freedom as Form: Gavin Jantjes, Anti-Apartheid, and the Transnational Avant-Garde is forthcoming with Duke University Press in early 2027, and she is currently at work on a book about art, material culture, and public history in Louisiana at the intersection of climate crisis and racial injustice. In addition to her scholarship, Young maintains active practices as an arts writer and curator.

pariscian.com / @paris.cian / @theshore.co
ruthowensart.com / @ruthowensart
allisonkyoung.com

Rooms 3 & 4

Sarah Cancienne, Fishing Camp, Midday, Acrylic on panel, 10" x 10", 2026.
Augustus Hoffman, Tennis Court Dreamer, Flashe on panel, 12" x 8", 2026.

Unstable Atmospheres 

Sarah Cancienne and Augustus Hoffman

Unstable Atmospheres, as a series, originated through investigations of quotidian spaces. The landscapes and interior paintings explore how conscious attention can imbibe an ordinary place with a sense of something “more”; or how a familiar space can reveal something beyond the substrate of our perception.

Architecture provides a framework for these paintings, but they are less about describing places than capturing an experience, such as walking into an empty room after people have left. Whether it’s the blinding midday light in Cancienne’s exteriors or the sticky felt humidity in Hoffman’s landscapes, both artists are interested in letting their paintings settle into a tension between specificity and ambiguity. 

This process often becomes a question of balance without equilibrium. For both artists there is a feeling that there is no singular “correct” resolution. The act of looking and the act of creating are inherently unstable in nature. Things could still resolve themselves differently or even fall apart entirely. Unstable Atmospheres is concerned  with a type of transitional space where something that is often ordinary is discovered once again as something new.

Sarah Cancienne is an artist and architect based in New Orleans.  She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Louisiana State University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia.  She currently works at Waggonner and Ball Architects, and is represented by Ann Connelly Fine Art.

Augustus Hoffman is  an artist who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has studied at Bard College, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the New York Studio School. He has taught at Bard Early College, The New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, and The Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Augustus has shown his work all over the country most notably in New York City, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. He was recently an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center and the  Mount Gretna School of Art.  He has had several solo exhibitions at The Front in New Orleans where he is currently a member.

sarahcancienne.com
@sarahcancienne

augustushoffman.com
@augustushoffmanartwork

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