Meet 2024 Louisiana Open Call Juror :: Risa Puleo
Every year, to provide the opportunity for Louisiana artists to have their work reviewed by curators from around the country, Antenna Gallery’s Louisiana call for exhibitions hosts a guest juror to choose the exhibition selection. For 2024 year, our juror is Risa Puleo based in Chicago, IL.
Risa Puleo is an independent curator and one of a team of curators organizing the 2023 Counterpublics Triennial in St. Louis. Her exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System was curated forThe Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2018 and traveled open Tufts University Art Gallery in 2020. Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly was curated for Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during her year as curator-in-residence, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Blue Star Art Space and Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, The Nerman Art Museum in Overland Park, Kansas. Other exhibitions have been hosted by ArtPace, San Antonio, the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City, Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT, Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, and more. Puleo has Master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College and is a doctoral candidate in Northwestern University’s art history program. She has written for Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, Asia Art Pacific, Hyperallergic.com, Modern Painters and other art publications.
Meet The Artists
2024 Solo Exhibition Recipient: Lauren Cardenas
LAUREN CARDENAS is the Assistant Professor of Printmaking at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA. She is a studio artist who focuses on print media. She was the editor and founder of PIECRUST Magazine (2011-14), which was a biannual art and literary magazine based out of St. Louis. Lauren also was a co-founding member and co-director of Museum Blue (2014-17), an artist-run project space in St. Louis. Co-curating many exhibitions in attempts to bridge the gap between art and literature. Along with her curatorial and publishing practice, she was a founding member and an active part of the steering committee of the St. Louis Small Press Expo (2014-16). Cardenas holds a BA in Painting, Printmaking, and Drawing from Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX; she has completed the Tamarind Institute Printer Training Program and holds an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis.
2024 Group Show Recipients: Utē Josephine Petit, Maggie Bard, is
Utē Petit works as a visual artist, and farmer Inheriting her grandmother’s roles as quilters, educators, and farmers she explores how a visual art practice can integrate with farming. Her work aspires toward a new nation called Ailanthaland; nation of heavenly beings. Ailantha aspires to be an ecological paradise tenable to all beings, following the stewardship of Afro-Indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere. Her work has sparked curiosity to establish a regional transit & housing cooperative: Kindred Airways, Rural Railways, & Trailways. She’s exhibited at Loyal Gallery (Stockholm, SE), The New Orleans African American Museum of Art, Bas Fisher International (Miami, FL), and Library Street Collective (Detroit, MI).
Maggie Bard is an American artist born in 1984 in the Northeast. She received her BFA in printmaking from Pratt Institute, and completed programs at Massachusetts College of Art and the School of the Art Institute Chicago. In 2008 she accepted a job with acclaimed artist collective FAILE as their head printer. It was then that she learned how to cultivate her own studio practice while being employed full time (which beyond drawing included tattooing, sign writing, design work and installation.) After twelve years in Brooklyn she moved to New Orleans in 2017. With the sudden death of a friend, her work shifted towards themes surrounding adorned portals, pathways and voids- explorations of both the uncertainty of death and a deteriorating planet. In December 2022 she completed her fourth solo show at Alone Time Gallery, which explored these themes. She is currently based in New Orleans.
is = curates connection to self, other and nature, through many different media, reflecting experience as an educator, performer, artist, and linguist. As a trained art director and aspiring cultural architect, big picture solutions are envisioned to address how we interact with the spaces around us, including the people within them and ourselves. Newfound approaches to conflict resolution, diplomacy, and expression lay at the heart of this work.
Recently, being selected as a semifinalist for No Dream Deferred’s We Will Dream: New Works Festival, has been a great honor. is’ play, Charleston is the New Orleans, used fictional characters to explore both the correlation between the two cities and the tragedy of America’s “juvenile justice” system. Other preferred mediums include journalism, publishing and creating games that encourage participants to share their inner realities with others.
is currently resides in New Orleans, and is at home throughout the African Diaspora.
