Book Release, Garden Tour, and Musical Activation organized by Hannah Chalew
Contemporary Arts Center
900 Camp Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
This program celebrates the release of P.6 Artist Hannah Chalew’s new artist book Chimerical Futures, which includes Chalew’s recent research, process, and artwork that informed her P.6 installation, Orphan Well Gamma Garden. Books will be available for purchase and pre-ordered books can be picked up at the reception.
As part of the closing reception, art historian Allison Young and Chalew will lead a “garden tour” of the installation; a walking conversation about the work. To close out the reception, harpist and interdisciplinary artist Cassie Watson Francillon will activate Orphan Well Gamma Garden with an immersive sound piece entitled Resonance: Gamma.
About the Artist
Hannah Chalew
Hannah Chalew is an artist, educator, and environmental activist raised and currently working in New Orleans. Her artwork explores what it means to live in an era of global warming with an uncertain future; it unearths the historical legacies that got us here to help imagine new possibilities for a livable future. This work is specifically rooted in Southern Louisiana as a microcosm of our shifting time.
Chalew received a BA from Brandeis University in 2009, and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016. She has exhibited widely around New Orleans and has shown around the country at the Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO; Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; Minnesota Center for the Book Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Dieu Donné, New York, NY; among other venues. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, American Craft, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, Hand Papermaking, the LA Times, The Boston Globe, and more. Chalew’s work is held in the collections of the City of New Orleans and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA. She is the 2022 South Arts Southern Prize winner as well as the South Arts Louisiana State Fellow.
About the Contributors
Cassie Watson Francillon
Cassie Watson Francillon she/her b.1986 is an avant-garde harpist and interdisciplinary artist; breaking conventions to construct her “sacred sonic architecture.” Influenced by hip-hop, jazz, psychedelia, folk and Black American spirituals, she crafts a fresh, modern day revival through collaborations and solo radical sonic soundscapes. Her sound reflects the journey, joy and lamentation of Black American transcendence, coupled with futuro-sonic investigations of her biological father’s Haitian lineage, proclaiming, "This is not a recital. We do this... to set people free." Cassie has transformed stages from New Orleans Marigny Opera House to the Kennedy Center. Her recent activations have included “Consortium” collaborative black sonic technology (2022-3), “Lanati” liberation of acoustic sound for well-being in a public environment as nature (2024) and appeared in collaboration with Luke Stewart for Kemetic Hymns (2025) at the Met Museum. Visit: www.cassandharp.com www.instagram.com/cassandharp
Allison K. Young
Allison K. Young, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at Lousiana State University and A&M College, Baton Rouge. Her research focuses on postcolonial and contemporary artists and art histories of the global South, as well as issues surrounding art's intersection with identity, environmentalism, and social justice. Before joining LSU, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow for Modern and Contemporary Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and in 2021, she served on the National Advisory Panel for the exhibition Promise, Witness, Remembrance at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, which commemorated the life and legacy of Breonna Taylor.