The oldest artist in the exhibition, Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980), lived the first 38 years of her life in Alabama and Georgia, but became a preacher and missionary after hearing a voice from God telling her to move to New Orleans and open an orphanage. In 1956, other voices told her to begin painting and that she was the Bride of Christ, and from then on, artwork and singing on were integral to her ministry. 

Jules Cahn (1916-1995) was a New Orleans businessman with a passionate interest in jazz, who left behind an outstanding photographic legacy that documents marching club parades, Mardi Gras Indian processions, Krewe of Zulu festivities, Preservation Hall, and jazz musicians’ funerals. One of his rarest pieces of footage records the first Super Sunday meeting of Uptown and Downtown Mardi Gras Indians in 1970. 

The photographer Michael P. Smith (1937-2008), who followed in Cahn’s footsteps as the house photographer for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, was an even more dedicated scholar of African-American vernacular culture, producing an extraordinarily cohesive body of photographs that document the full range of cultural expression, from spiritual churches to funk, soul and zydeco music. The fourth artist occupying an historical past is Noel Rockmore, a New York-born child of successful illustrators, who discovered New Orleans in the 1950s and spent most of the remaining years of his life developing an eclectic pictorial vocabulary that encompassed Surrealist-tinged views of the French Quarter and detailed portraits of jazz musicians from Preservation Hall.

Bruce Davenport Jr. grew up within the New Orleans public housing system, made drawings as a child, and played football in college until an injury, followed by Katrina, precipitated his return to making art. 

Courtney Egan, one of the first New Orleans artists to work primarily in video, continues to create in many different media, but with a particular emphasis on projections that incorporate found-object sculpture. 

Skylar Fein, born and raised in New York, was planning to be a doctor before the experience of Katrina made him instead opt for being an artist, and in a relatively short time he has become one of the city’s most prominent artistic voices, with works ranging from the monumental Remember the Upstairs Lounge to more recent projects focused on music, youth and political revolution. 

Srdjan Loncar is a sculptor who was born and raised in Croatia and Louisiana before returning for good during the mid-1990s wars in former Yugoslavia. Deborah Luster has photographed both prisoners and crime scenes in New Orleans using atmospheric treatments, and often works with traditional printing techniques. 

Gina Phillips makes conventional paintings, but is best known for her densely packed assemblage-paintings that substitute skeins of colored threads for pigment. 

Dan Tague, who has worked in photography, sculpture and installation with tart renderings of political themes, is currently developing a multi-media room-scaled environmental installation based on his memory of ninth grade social studies class.