Way Down In New Orleans Artist Bios
September 2008
Curated by Aubrey Edwards

Marc Bianchi and Heisuke Kitazawa teamed up to create So This is America, a collaboration between two US citizens who experienced the images of devestation brought on by Hurricane Katrina while traveling and living abroad. Tokyo-based illustrator Heisuke Kitazawa, also known as pcp draws, previously has designed CD covers, hotel murals, and perfume boxes among many other fun things, while Marc Bianchi is in the band Her Space Holiday. The visual interpretation for the piece came from the media coverage that Kitazawa witnessed while living in Tokyo, Japan, and the written portion came from Bianchi’s experiences as he watched European news reports in a tiny hotel room in Paris, France.

Brice Bischoff recently relocated from New Orleans, LA to San Francisco, CA and completed an M.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007. In 2006 he received a Murphy and Cadogen Fellowship in the Fine Arts from the San Francisco Foundation, and he participated in GEN ART’s annual Emerge exhibition. However, Bischoff has strong ties to the New Orleans’ area. He has work in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and in 2005 his photographs were included in the Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Photography Exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Jake Borndal is a New York-based artist making sculpture, videos, and photos who believes that his work is “teetering uncertainty between knowing and not knowing, the intuitive and somatic process of constructing resolutely handmade objects and systems; private realms of the anxious, the intuitive, the fallible and the absurd, armed with an optimistic trust in material intelligence and an openness to the risk of embarrassment or failure. Focusing on the hope of an unlikely pop star, out of focus with the city itself having never been there. After you back it up then stop, drop it like its-drop it like its-drop it like its hot.”

Lauren Castle was born in Lafayette, LA in 1983. While always creatively inclined, Castle began to seriously pursue art in high school. In 2001, her painting abilities landed her an art talent scholarship to the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico, where, four years later, Castle graduated with a BFA in mixed media and a minor in art history. She made her first art sales while still in college, from various buyers including collectors from New York City and Santa Fe. At this time, Castle began introducing the use of found objects and oversaturated color schemes in her artwork. Upon completion of her degree, Castle’s artwork grew beyond the guidelines of traditional painting into work of more mixed media. Having always had a deep love for New Orleans since a child and finding inspiration in the history and feel of the city, Castle relocated to New Orleans following college. After a brief hiatus from creating artwork after the hurricane season of 2005, she began to work again using her curiosity of experimental painting to start a new body of work, one in which she tears images and reconfigures them to take on a new life.

Lisa Choinacky was born in South Bend, Indiana. She attended Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and received her M.F.A. from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. It was there that Choinacky founded the art group, Tricycle Shop. Tricycle Shop was a community arts group that focused on mail art and audience participation art happenings. Choinacky later moved to Austin, Texas where she now lives and works. She currently manages the gallery: Women & Their Work. She exhibits her work nationally.

Michael Combs is a self-taught artist living in Austin, TX. Combs has an "anything you can reach for" approach to the mediums he works with, and he draws from a broad range of influences and styles, including photo realism, cartoons, illustration, graphic design, graffiti, and abstract art. Previous pieces have utilized a wide variety of media pencil, pen and ink, markers, acrylic, spray paint, found objects, and collage. His works have been described as humorous commentary on music, religion, politics, media and everyday life experiences. His website is currently under construction.

Beth Dary is a visual artist exploring the natural world in a precarious moment of balance/imbalance through her work in sculpture, painting, and mixed media. Most recently, Dary was awarded a 2008 Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant to create a temporary public art installation for New York City. In the past, her work has been supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation and has been featured in exhibits at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Bronx River Art Center, and the R & F Encaustic International Biennial. Dary has participated in artists’ residency programs including the Johnson Atelier and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work is in several private and corporate collections, including the Whitney National Bank and the New Orleans Museum of Art. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University and a Master of Fine Arts from Memphis College of Art. Originally from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Dary currently lives and works in New York City.

Aubrey Edwards is a Brooklyn-based arts educator, videographer, and freelance shooter who began her career as a commercial rock and roll/portrait photographer while living in Austin, TX and Wellington, New Zealand. Her client list includes the likes of Comedy Central, Fender Guitars, XXL, Spin, Volcom, Texas Refugee Services, and FilmAidInternational. Aubrey has been working intimately in New Orleans since the storm, teaching with the New Orleans Kid Camera Project, guest lecturing at University of New Orleans, shooting program sites for Catholic Charities, and providing free portraits to New Orleans rebuilders, community organizers and families. Through her years working within the population of the Southern city, she has developed amazing relationships with 9th Ward Mardi Gras Indians, Old Arabi elderly, Treme school teachers and young Uptown artists, all of whom fueled her mission to bring the slow and saddening state of the recovery process to larger attention. She has exhibited her work nationwide, and is presently working on a children's book that therapeutically addresses little ones’ post-disaster stress, as well as a series of Roxy Music album cover renditions. She dedicates this show to the children who bore the weight of the storm, the tenacity of the Cajun spirit, and to her brother-in-law, Chris Roberts, who loved his city, and whose murder in Post-Katrina New Orleans still goes unsolved.

Courtney Egan mucks in the swampy terrain between the psyche and the mass media with digitally-created short films and video collages. Her imagery straddles the worlds of “special effects” and art, exploring the increasingly blurry boundaries between mental states, interactive digital worlds, and outward reality. Her current work is a series of video installations that contrast organic and urban processes. Heriard-Cimino Gallery in New Orleans presents her video installations. Egan holds an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art, and lives and works in New Orleans.

Skylar Fein’s artist biography in 6-year increments:

Abigail Gitlitz started to make glass art in her hometown of Bloomington, IN in the late 1980s, but did not become a full time artist until 2002. In 2003, Gitlitz collaborated with the public works installation team of Helmick and Schechter of Newton, MA to create a nineteen-piece stained glass installation for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St Paul, MN. She moved to New Orleans in 2004 to work as the manager of Conti Glass, a glass blowing studio in Mid-City. When Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, she found refuge on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, where she worked for a variety of glass blowers including Richard Marquis and Sean Albert. By 2006, Gitlitz realized that she wanted to push herself creatively, and entered the graduate program in glass at Southern Illinois University Carbondale where she will receive an MFA in glass in 2009. Gitlitz’s work has traditionally focused on loose movement, visual puns, and a sense of whimsy. It is important to her to keep this sense of play when dealing with such a serious subject, for she believes that it is through humor and joy that the people of New Orleans can finally heal. When she is not making glass, Abby can usually be found in her kitchen cooking up a mess of food for whomever drops by.

Kevin Golden, born in 1981, grew up in Westchester, NY. He received a BFA in Illustration from the Pratt Institute. In Brooklyn, where he now resides, Golden currently divides his time between working as an arts education specialist at a South Bronx charter school and art-making. When faced with creating a children's book illustration that deals with a topic as devastating as Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, it would be foolish to assume, as an outsider, one could truly tap into the emotions felt by the people of New Orleans. That assumption becomes infinitely more absurd when dealing with the emotions of their children. Because of this, all The Giggling Custodians offers is a fantasized, sugar-coated version of the epic struggle to not only survive from day-to-day but to keep one’s head up in the process.

David Grant is an artist and designer who was born in New Orleans, LA, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Though he often works in political art collectives, his individual work of late has addressed micro-chapters of labor history through video, animation, and installation.

Jenny Hart, born in 1972, is an artist based in Austin, TX whose works in embroidery have been published and exhibited internationally. Hart is the founder Sublime Stitching, a pioneering design company launched in 2001 to revitalize the craft of hand embroidery. Her work has appeared in publications such as Spin, Bust, Nylon, Venus, Stretching Canvas, The Face, Rolling Stone, and Juxtapoz. She is the author of three titles for Chronicle Books (San Francisco) and her design work won PRINT Magazine's Regional Design Annual award (2005). Hart has worked with many bands such as The Flaming Lips, The Decemberists, and The Octopus Project, and her work is in the collections of Carrie Fisher, Tracey Ullman, and Elizabeth Taylor. Jenny has also collaborated with other artists, such as Dame Darcy, Mitch O’Connell, Peter Bagge and Kurt Halsey, to interpret their art into embroidery.

Brad Jensen is a freelance graphic designer and illustrator. He likes to make posters, t-shirts, and tasteful vandalism, and ride BMX bikes too. His website is www.iconvisuals.com.

Jenny Leblanc and Kyle Bravo live together in the upper 9th Ward of New Orleans, running the Hot Iron Press, a letterpress and silkscreen print shop and hub they co-founded in 2002 for support and promotion of grassroots’ arts activities in New Orleans. A New Orleans native, artist, and educator, Jenny LeBlanc holds degrees from the Alabama School of Fine Arts, Louisiana State University, where she received her B.F.A. in Sculpture, and Virginia Commonwealth University, where she received her M.F.A. in Sculpture. Via the Press, LeBlanc has worked to implement projects such as The Rebuild Fund, the New Orleans Bookfair, and recently a printmaking artist residency program. LeBlanc also coordinates and curates Babylon Lexicon, the annual exhibition of artists’ books that opens in conjunction with, and constitutes the fine art leg of, the New Orleans Bookfair. Her work has been exhibited widely in the US and in Canada, Italy, and Japan. Leblanc would like to express deep gratitude to the Joan Mitchell Foundation, whose generous and well-timed support made this work possible. For other images of her work, please visit www.hotironpress.com/jennyleblanc.htm. For the past 3 years, Kyle Bravo has organized the New Orleans Bookfair, an annual celebration of independent publishing and alternative media. Additionally, Kyle teaches art through various non-profit organizations throughout the area. While evacuated from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Kyle taught printmaking and design at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX. He is the editor of the book Making Stuff and Doing Things: A Collection of DIY Guides to Doing Just About Everything. Kyle’s artwork has been shown in a multitude of exhibitions both nationally and internationally from New Orleans to New York to Tokyo and is in permanent collections such as the ABC No Rio zine library in New York and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Miranda Lake received her B.A. in Art History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1991. Since then, she has studied a wide variety of media at schools in the United States, such as Parson’s School of Design, as well as internationally, such as London College of Fashion. Lake’s first solo exhibition was in Chapel Hill in 1997, but since then she has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions in New Orleans, where she now lives. In addition to her work as an artist, Lake has also dabbled in instructing, having lectured at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center and at Artspeak in New Orleans. Lake is currently represented by five galleries across the United States.

Kristin Littwin makes art charged with the energies and effervescence of life intensely lived. According to the artist, her work is made of “faces and places flash and flower in the dark or crest in waves of cosmic color. The life of the streets, of voodoo in the cities of the dead, of jungle and jugglers, of sloths or soft shoe, of orange trees or trombones, of masks and music, of dance and dream, all come together in visions of quirky love, healthful humor, of holy hedonism and courageous joy.” Littwin carries the cares of New Orleans in her heart and art, and she swirls them here in colored dreams for you.

Leo McGovern grew up just outside of New Orleans, but moved to Lakeview in 2004. Since 2005, McGovern has lived with his wife and two dogs in the Mid-City, except for the nine months after Katrina during which his apartment was rebuilt. His media career began in 2002 with the homemade ‘zine Imbibe, and it continued in 2003 with his creation of the annual multimedia event, The Alternative Media Expo, before it expanded with the self-published monthly music and culture magazine Antigravity (antigravitymagazine.com) in 2004. As a lifelong fan of comic books, it was a dream come true to become a comic book character. Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After The Deluge tells the Katrina stories of six New Orleanians, including McGovern’s. McGovern’s story weaves between the others’ as you learn of his post-K trip across the country and his return home in September 2005, where he discovers his comic book collection and other possessions destroyed by the flood. A.D. currently appears on the web-magazine SMITH (smithmag.net/afterthedeluge) and will be released in hardcover format by Pantheon Books in the summer of 2009. “Re-Dwelling” offers McGovern’s point of view on the cyclical nature of rebuilding homes in New Orleans: even when the work is finally finished, there will always be the next storm to worry about.

Jason Reeves was born and raised in 'The Big Easy', and has been drawing since he was three years old. He graduated at 16 from Mcdonogh35 and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Reeves has been a fan of comic books, but he is fairly new to the Comics industry. Reeves is best known for his Concept Design and Illustration, with clients such as Devil's Due Publishing, Arcana Studios, Angel Gate Press, AEG, Wizards of the Coast, and Hasbro. His website continues to evolve at: 133art.com.

Neighborhood Story Project is a community documentary organization in New Orleans. Through writing, interviews, and photography, neighborhood writers create portraits of their places, then edit the stories with the neighborhoods to make sure that they get all of the details right. They publish books and have block parties to celebrate. “Seventh Ward Speaks” is a series of posters created under the umbrella of Neighborhood Story Project, in collaboration with the Porch Seventh Ward Cultural Organization, by Rachel Breunlin, Helen Regis, and Garth Breunlin. Rachel Breunlin, M.S.U.S., is the co-founder and director of the Neighborhood Story Project, an instructor of anthropology at the University of New Orleans, and founding member of the Porch. She has worked with public schools, social and pleasure clubs, cultural organizations, galleries, and a neighborhood museum to create books and exhibits about neighborhoods in New Orleans. A Bridge Project Resident at the Headland Center for Arts in 2006, she spent the summer of 2008 in the Kimberley, Western Australia working on a collaborative ethnography with the Jalaris Aboriginal Corporation. Helen A. Regis, Ph.D. is a cultural anthropologist at Louisiana State University who works in Northern Cameroon, Marseille, France, and New Orleans. The author of Charitable Choices: Religion, Race, and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era and Fulbe Voices: Marriage, Islam, and Medicine in Northern Cameroon, she has also published extensively on second line parades in New Orleans. A founding member of the Porch, her interest in performance, politics, and public space has led her to work with other cultural organizations in the city including the Neighborhood Story Project, CUBANOLA, and the House of Dance & Feathers Museum and Cultural Center. Gareth Breunlin has been working in New Orleans for the last five years. He is the graphic designer at the Neighborhood Story Project, and has collaborated with a wide range of other organizations, including the Porch Seventh Ward Cultural Organization, the 6t9 Social Aid and Pleasure Club, and Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research. In Chicago, he has worked at the Newberry Library and Firebelly Design, and is now the art director for the Chicago White Sox.

Royce Osborn is a New Orleans-born writer and producer. Osborn grew up in the rich environment of the city’s Seventh Ward, and later attended the American Film Institute. After several years working in network television (including the NAACP Image Awards program), he returned to his hometown in 1997 with the purpose of “telling New Orleans stories” in both documentary and feature films. In 2003, he created the popular documentary “All on a Mardi Gras Day,” which explores New Orleans’ black carnival traditions in a historical context. The program was broadcast nationally on PBS stations, and was awarded at the New Orleans Film Festival. It has been called one of the best documentaries ever made on New Orleans history, and has been used as a teaching tool in both elementary schools and universities. He is currently at work on the documentary “Walking to New Orleans,” about the city’s cultural recovery, post-Katrina.

Marlowe Parker is an inmate at Angola Prison. As he told the curator when she purchased this painting from him at the craft fair during the rodeo, "I am a self taught artist, I'm working on getting out of here soon. I love to paint, and if I didn't have to, I wouldn't sell any of them." If you are interested in writing to Mr. Parker, please contact Aubrey Edwards for his information.

J.R. Portman is a photographer living and working in New Orleans. He graduated from Tulane University in 2001 and proceeded to work as a professional photographer in London and Los Angeles. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, J.R. decided to move back to New Orleans and help rebuild the city by learning the construction trades and fixing his favorite place one edifice at a time, all the while photographing the city and people around him. J.R. continues to work as an electrician in New Orleans while photographing New Orleans as it rises again.

Matthew Bonifacio Rodriguez is an Austin, TX based artist that works with collages, paintings, objects, and photographs to combine the sweetness of a grade schooler’s homemade Valentine’s Day card with the diary doodles of a playground bully between shake downs. In Rodriguez’s work for "Way Down in New Orleans," he paints and collages fabric, Styrofoam, vintage wood, and miniature dollhouse furniture to depict a scene of the rescue operations of stray pets in a flood zone. His bearded and rainbowed creature goes about carrying little dogs and cats across the deep waters.

Megan Roniger is a native New Orleanian. In high school she attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, studying the visual arts. She received her B.F.A. form the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005, and she promptly returned to the city she loves, where she is living and loving it still. Her work looks at the New Orleans condition in a playful yet sober way, drawing on her surroundings and a sense of the city's self-endowed magic and mythology. Elements of the urban landscape find their way into her work, such as skylines of Creole cottages, flocks of green parrots over Bayou St. John, and telephone poles planted askew in the silty earth. For Roniger, these things are symbolic remnants of New Orleans' past, yet they currently suggest a pulse that is faint but steady, subtle, and hopeful.

Beth Schindler and Summer Bethea currently live in Austin, TX. They both use art as a means of expression and fun. They are currently collaborating on several projects together, ranging from wheat pasting, radio, and redecorating the world outside. New Orleans and its people are a huge inspiration to both artists. According to Schindler and Bethea, “this hopefully lets people feel connected to the celebration of life and death from the storm. It is an interactive piece. Feel free to climb inside.”

Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. He first received national attention in 1989 when his art became the center of controversy over its use of the American flag. President Bush (the first) declared his artwork “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced it as they passed legislation to “protect the flag.” His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and at the DeBeyerd Center for Contemporary Art in the Netherlands. He was awarded a Mid-Atlantic\NEA Regional Fellowship in Photography, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Sculpture in 2001, a Performance Art/Multidisciplinary Art in 2005, and a Creative Capital grant. His work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Arkon Art Museum. He works in a range of media including installation, photography, screen-printing, video, and performance.

Tabitha Soren received her B.A. from New York University in journalism and has studied photography at Stanford University and the California College of Art. Soren is exhibiting work locally at many venues including San Francisco’s Southern Exposure Gallery, the Oakland Art Gallery and the Oakland Museum of California. Her photographs of Hurricane Katrina were included in “Katrina Exposed” at the New Orleans Museum of Art as well as the traveling show organized by NOMA, and are now in the museum’s permanent collection. Soren also shoots editorial assignments for magazines. Her images have ended up on the cover of the New York Times Magazine three times. Her work has also appeared in Reader’s Digest, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, San Francisco Magazine, Forbes, Gourmet, Travel & Leisure, Planet and New York. Soren wants people to feel drenched in time when they look at her pictures. Each of her projects explores peoples’ inner sanctums, both private tragedies and utopias. She has been photographing New Orleans for over 10 years and lived there for the first half of 2008. Sent in by the New York Times Magazine to cover Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005, Soren started photographing the same lots every few months to document the massive transition the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas have been undergoing since the storm. Soren currently lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and three children.

Elizabeth Underwood’s identity has been defined by a life-long experience of exile. As the daughter of a Russian mother and Cherokee/Irish father, both at odds and in denial of each other’s heritage, her self-definition is a process of fluidity, tension, and mystery. Surviving an adolescence of violence and homelessness, her saving grace became the ability to transmutate abjectness into power coupled with a frank awareness of the impermanence of all things. This is the main tenet of her creative work. Underwood has lived in New Orleans for 15 years. Photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, as well as creative and critical writing inform her work in process-oriented installations. Out of a frustration with the limitations of formal art-making procedures and a desire to make art that can be vs. describe, her current work includes organizing a series of community-based, site-specific installations in areas recovering from disaster with her project “ARTinACTION”. In this way she consistently addresses issues of impermanence, exile, and individual/collective responsibility while also promoting the creative process as a valid tool to recover from trauma and intimately connect to the world that surrounds us all.

Dave Wingo is a Brooklyn-based musician, composer, and film scorer. His best know scores come from working intimately with close friend and New Orleans film director David Gordon Green, having scored the bulk of Green's films including: All the Real Girls, Undertow, and Snow Angels. When not working on films, Wingo dedicates himself to his band, Ola Podrida, and rides his bike around Brooklyn. Wingo has spent many a month in the Crescent City; this sound piece was created nearly 10 years ago and many a New Orleanian has agreed that this is their favorite of his work.

J.T. Yost is a freelance illustrator, pet portraitist, and musician. He grew up in the south and prefers a hot & humid climate, but is currently making do with the decidedly un-swampy weather of Manhattan. Admittedly, he is not from Louisiana, nor do does he have relatives (past or present) from Louisiana, but the few times that he’s visited New Orleans and the surrounding area they have had a huge impact on him. The neighborhoods outside of the downtown area were immediately familiar and instantly put him at ease. Houses that look somewhat run-down to some give off a warmth of history to him. As the sterility of strip-malls and corporate chain restaurants take over every American city, he finds great pleasure in architecture that speaks of individuality, of families firmly entrenched, entwined, and protected in its belly. He is also indebted to Louisiana for the gorgeous music it has provided. The Zydeco, Cajun, Blues, Country, Gospel and R&B music played by the Acadian, Creoles, and other indigenous people of the region have had a huge impact on his own accordion playing. Even when Yost can't understand the language, the seemingly impossible dichotomy of mournful and joyful sounds never fails to send a shiver up his spine. Whatever his ties to Louisiana, the bottom line is that there are people who have been displaced, who have lost their homes and their history. He believes that it is up to us to help in any way we can. He is honored to be a part of this show, and he hopes that if he were in the same situation he could count on my fellow humans to lend a hand.

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September 5 - October 11, 2008

Showing just days after the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Way Down in New Orleans unites an array of New Orleans-based artists with other artists nationwide, including:

Marc Bianchi, Brice Bischoff, Jacob Borndal, Kyle Bravo & Jenny Leblanc, Lauren Castle, Chin Music Press, Lisa Choinacky, Mike Combs, Constance, Beth Dary, Dirty Coast, Aubrey Edwards, Courtney Egan, Skylar Fein, Abby Gitlitz, Kevin Golden, David Grant, Jenny Hart, Brad Jensen, Kid Camera Project, Miranda Lake, Kristin Littwin, Leo McGovern & Jason Reeves, Neighborhood Story Project, New Orleans Craft Mafia, Royce Osborn, Marlowe Parker, JR Portman, Matthew Bonifacio Rodriguez, Megan Roniger, Beth Schindler & Summer Bethea, Dread Scott, Tabitha Soren, Elizabeth Underwood, David Wingo and JT Yost.