Southeastern Contemporary Art Gallery to exhibit artwork by three artists
Thursday, October 21, 2021
by: Tonya Lowentritt
HAMMOND – The Department of Visual Art + Design at Southeastern Louisiana University
will host a photography exhibit by three artists - Jeremiah Ariaz, Jill Frank, and
L. Kasimu Harris - titled “Vanishing Black Bars, Celestials, + Louisiana Trail Riders”
at the university’s Contemporary Art Gallery, located at 100 East Strawberry Stadium.
The exhibition is free and open to the public until Nov. 15. Contemporary Art
Gallery hours are Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with extended
hours until 8 p.m. on Wednesdays, and Friday 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Works featured in the exhibition demonstrate the artists’ shared interest in
documenting Southern communities that may often go unseen or undocumented, said Gallery
Director Cristina Molina.
“On view are series by L. Kasimu Harris, who has created an index of once prevalent
but now disappearing Black bars and lounges in New Orleans and the patrons who commune
and celebrate in these spaces,” Molina explained. “Jeremiah Ariaz shares monochromatic
images of the Black trail riding clubs in Southwest Louisiana, a subculture that is
rich in history and activity, but one that remains largely unknown. And Jill Frank
exhibits large scale images and video of youth culture with all of its adolescent
growing pains.”
Ariaz was raised in Kansas and is now a professor of art at Louisiana State University.
He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from the State University
in New York at Buffalo. His artworks explore the West as both a physical space and
a terrain for the imagination, Molina said. For his most recently completed project
Louisiana Trail Riders, he was the recipient of a 2018 ATLAS grant, the Michael P.
Smith Award for Documentary Photography from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities,
the Southern Arts Finalist Prize from South Arts, as well as being named the 2018
Louisiana State Fellow.
Frank lives in Atlanta and teaches photography at Georgia State University. She
studied photography at Bard College and received an MFA from The School of the Art
Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and featured
in Art Papers. Selected solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia
and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Reviews of her work have appeared in
Art Forum, The Paris Review and Bad at Sports.
Harris is a New Orleans based artist whose practice deposits a number of different
strategic and conceptual devices in order to push narratives, and he strives to tell
stories of underrepresented communities in New Orleans and beyond, Molina explained.
Harris has shown in numerous group exhibitions across the US and two international
exhibitions and has had six solo photography exhibitions. Last year he was among 60
artists selected nationwide for State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of
American Art and had a solo exhibition at the August Wilson African American Cultural
Center in Pittsburg.
For more information, contact Molina at cmolina@southeastern.edu or 985-549-5080.