The museum’s community engagement–driven Creative Assembly residency fosters collaborations with NOMA’s collection, exhibitions, programs, and staff.
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NEW ORLEANS – This year’s cohort of Creative Assembly residents at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) includes eight artists from various disciplines. Launched in 2021, NOMA’s Creative Assembly residency promotes community engagement by welcoming artists to collaborate throughout the year with the museum’s permanent collection, special exhibitions, and programs.
“We are thrilled to see this year’s Creative Assembly Cohort hit the ground running, finding inspiration in NOMA’s collection and exhibitions,” said Susan M. Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of NOMA. “As one of the largest fine arts museums in the Gulf South, we are honored to serve as a space for discovery and innovation for the artists who are defining our current moment.”
Members of the 2024–25 Creative Assembly Cohort are:
- Poet Andy Young
- Dancer and choreographer Caleb Dowden
- Filmmaker and visual artist Carl Harrison Jr.
- Musician, spoken word artist, and harpist Cassie Watson Francillon
- Painter, drawer, and ceramic artist Horton Humble
- Clay, metal, and fibers artist Jer’Lisa Devezin
- Collage artist LaVonna Varnado-Brown
- Poet Nikkisha K. Napoleon
Artists kicked off the residency period with an orientation, followed by a series of professional development workshops and learning opportunities to dive into the museum’s collection and programs. Over the course of the residency, Creative Assembly Cohort members are provided funds and museum support to develop artistic projects and public offerings, like programs and workshops.
The theme for the 2024–25 cohort is Literacy and Language, inviting artists to explore how communication, accessibility, and language shape our world. Through this theme, NOMA will challenge the artists to consider the transformative power of words, symbols, and other forms of expression in today’s society.
The Darryl Chappell Foundation is partially supporting this year’s Creative Assembly Cohort by providing funding for two Afrodescendent visual artists.
“We are excited to partner with NOMA to support exceptional artists from the New Orleans community as a part of the 2024–25 Creative Assembly Cohort,” said Darryl Chappell, CEO and Chairman of the Darryl Chappell Foundation. “Our mission is to empower Afrodescendant artists to achieve their highest potential, and this collaboration aligns with our vision of artists having a transformative impact on their local community.”
Projects from the 2023–24 Creative Assembly Cohort include video works and live performances by Kr3wcial, Charm Taylor, and Simone Immanuel; workshops led by Daniel Fitzpatrick, Dianne Honoré, and Paige DeVries exploring topics such as poetry, Black Masking Indian beadwork, and cell phone photography; and a site-specific dance work by choreographer Lauren Ashlee Messina inspired by American classical composer Julia Perry.
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Artist Bios
LaVonna Varnado-Brown has worked as an installation artist, artist advocate, teaching artist, and tutor in and around New Orleans and with Beginning with Children, a Brooklyn–based college and career preparatory program). Varnado-Brown creates mixed-media visual art engaging with Afrofuturism, history, the divine feminine, and floral motifs. Varnado-Brown explores Afrofuturism as a cultural aesthetic to navigate the intersection of art and history and inspire action in the now by creating space for joy. Varnado-Brown finds inspiration in the community through facilitating workshops that create intentional space to engage in creative grounding practices that raise our spatial awareness and kinesthetic responses to one another and our environment.
Carl Harrison Jr. is a New Orleans–based filmmaker, artist, and urban farmer dedicated to preserving cultural heritage and promoting environmental sustainability. As the founder of the St. Roch Apiary and Food Forest, Harrison creates spaces for community engagement, combining urban farming with beekeeping to support local ecosystems and inspire others to reconnect with nature. His short film, The Buzz of St. Roch, won an Audience Award at the 2024 New Orleans Film Festival and highlights the beauty and resilience of his neighborhood. Currently, Harrison is touring The Buzz of St. Roch. His exhibition Echoes of the Hive was on view last year at the Tulane School of Public Health. Harrison also directed The Black Schoolhouse, a documentary exploring the intersection of art, activism, and education within New Orleans’ Black community.
Nikkisha K. Napoleon, fondly known as Momma Nikki, is a multifaceted educator, poet, essayist, and scholar. With a dual Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History from Southern University at New Orleans, she has established herself as a creative and talented workshop facilitator. Napoleon attributes her writing talents to the inspiration and guidance of her mother, Delores Ester Rudison Napoleon, and grandmother, Eva Mae McCoy Rudison, whose legacies continue to fuel her passion for words.
Jer’Lisa J. Devezin is an artist and educator born and raised in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. She earned her BA from Dillard University and MFA from Southern Methodist University. Heavily influenced by her upbringing in the city, Devezin’s work engages research through a black feminist lens centering on identity, sexuality, Black studies, and Southern culture, specifically focusing on New Orleans and socioeconomics. Devezin’s practice integrates ceramic and sculptural processes such as welded steel, woven forms, cast slip, plaster, and metal. Her research on materials like clay, metal, and fibers engages with the function of materiality and is intentionally used to coexist and initiate conversations between the viewer and the work. Devezin has exhibited at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Talley Dunn Gallery, Pollock Gallery, 500X Gallery, Antenna Gallery, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and internationally at the Jakmel Ekspresyon Center in Haiti. Devezin has received several grants and fellowships, including the Aurora Artist Relief Grant, the Talley Dunn Equity in the Arts Fellowship, and the Tin District Artist Grant, and was an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Devezin is based in New Orleans and works as an Assistant Professor of Art at Tulane University.
Born in New Orleans, Horton Humble is a self-taught American painter. Humble’s debut show in 2007, entitled Debris—a series of paintings using wood from the Hurricane Katrina wreckage—centered on themes of a lost city and water as a powerful force. After working and traveling, Humble returned home and established his studio with fellow artists in New Orleans. He co-founded the Level Artist Collective in 2015. At this time, his paintings on wood panels captured his impressions of a post-Katrina city represented inside human head figures. In 2017, Humble was a resident artist at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Through the summer, he created his first public sculpture in steel, The Guardian, commissioned by The Helis Foundation for the Poydras Sculpture Corridor. His works are included in public and private collections, including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and have been showcased at the Atlanta Contemporary Biennial, Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, and Antenna Gallery, among others.
Andy Young grew up in southern West Virginia and has lived most of her adult life in New Orleans, where she teaches at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, was published in October 2024 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She has also made four chapbooks and two kids. Young has won the Patricia Spears Jones Award and the Nazim Hikmet Award and has been granted residencies in Virginia, Louisiana, Vermont, and Barcelona. Her work has been translated into several languages and featured in classical and electronic music, flamenco and modern dance performances, jewelry, tattoos, and public buses. She is passionate about finding new and collaborative ways to present and interact with poetry. She and her partner, Khaled Hegazzi, translate poems from Arabic that have been published in Southern Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Norton Anthology Language for a New Century. Together, they founded Meena, a bilingual series aimed at creating a port of entry from the cities of New Orleans and Alexandria. They moved to Egypt with their two young kids during the Egyptian Revolution, where she worked at the American University in Cairo.
Caleb Dowden is a choreographer and researcher from New Orleans, Louisiana. In 2021, she graduated from the State University of New York at Purchase with her BFA in dance. As a 2021 recipient of a Fulbright Independent Research award from the US Department of State and a Fulbright-Hays fellowship with SUNY Purchase, Caleb’s choreographic work and research have been supported locally and internationally by the French Alliance of New Orleans, Le Centre (Benin Republic), Borna Soglo gallery (Benin Republic), the University of New Orleans, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the International Dance Festival of New Orleans, the New Ohio Theatre, and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University. As the Director of Dow-Dance Company, Dowden produces choreographic work at the intersection of African history and culture with a unique vision of (re)connecting the African Diaspora with the African continent.
Cassie Watson Francillon is a harpist and interdisciplinary artist, breaking conventions to construct “sacred sonic architecture” on her concert grand harp. Influenced by hip-hop, jazz, psychedelia, and Black American spirituals, she crafts a fresh, modern-day revival through collaborations and radical sonic soundscape, even on her own. Having studied directly under harpists Patrice Fisher, Brandee Younger, Mia Theodoratus, and Gabriella Pinto, her modern sound also reflects a personal blend of the journey, joy, and lamentations of Black American transcendence, coupled with spiritually-sonic investigations of her father’s Haitian lineage. Recent installations include: “Consortium” collaborative black sonic technology (2022-3), and “Lanati” liberation of acoustic sound for well-being in a public environment as nature (2024). Francillon has performed in settings traditional and innovative, private and public, including Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Studio BE, the Kennedy Center for the Arts, and the Marigny Opera House, where she directed, produced, and performed the sold-out production Eternal Harp of Björk in 2018. Her message and method incorporate deep advocacy for mental health, restorative justice, and animal & environmental welfare.
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About NOMA and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden
The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and its Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden are home to innovative exhibitions, installations, educational programs, and research. Exploring human creativity across time, cultures, and disciplines, the global scope of the museum’s initiatives open a vibrant dialogue with the history and culture of New Orleans. The museum stewards a collection of nearly 50,000 works, with exceptional holdings in African art, photography, decorative arts, and Japanese art, as well as strengths in American and French art, and an expanding collection highlighting contemporary artists. The museum’s exhibitions and dynamic learning and engagement offerings serve as a forum for visitors to engage with diverse perspectives, share cultural experiences, and foster a life of learning at all ages. Recent exhibitions include Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club, Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers, The Orléans Collection (an exhibition of forty European masterpieces from the collection of the city’s namesake, Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans), East of the Mississippi: Nineteenth Century America Landscape Photography, and Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories (seven contemporary art projects focusing on reimagining stories from the city’s past).
NOMA’s 12-acre Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden expands visitors’ experiences of the museum with one of the most notable sculpture gardens in the country. The Besthoff Sculpture Garden, free and open to the public seven days a week, has nearly 100 sculptures and outdoor works of art situated in a unique landscape featuring Spanish moss-laden live oaks and a sinuous lagoon surrounded by an expansive ecosystem of native plants. The works in the garden range from the 19th to the 21st centuries, with pieces by Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Ida Kohlmeyer, Claes Oldenburg, Sean Scully, Maya Lin, Do Ho Suh, Ugo Rondinone, Wangechi Mutu, Hank Willis Thomas, and many others. The Besthoff Sculpture Garden features contemporary design elements—including a sculpture pavilion, an amphitheater, and an architecturally significant canal link bridge connecting the garden’s original 2003 footprint with a 2019 expansion. Its water management practices support the health and resiliency of New Orleans City Park and the surrounding environment. Throughout the year, NOMA hosts outdoor programs in the Besthoff Sculpture Garden including festivals, performances, wellness classes, tours, and more.
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Media Contact
Charlie Tatum
Director of Marketing and Communications
New Orleans Museum of Art
ctatum@noma.org
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