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.




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