RSVP for the Opening Reception on Saturday, April 5, 2025
From the Storms of Our Souls: The Art of Ron Bechet, curated by Shana M. griffin, explores the everyday experiences, communal ties, ancestral connections, and ecological encounters of Blackness. Featuring large-scale monochrome works inhabited by expressive portraits arising from nature, From the Storms of Our Souls invites viewers to engage in a poetic collection of belonging—journeying through the intimate dimensions of deeply furrowed barks of trees intertwined with curves of vines and punctuating roots, trunks, and falling leaves—revealing the often-concealed narratives of Black life.
Ron Bechet’s commanding use of charcoal drawings brings into sharp focus a Black visuality that challenges the often-overlooked experiences, voices, teachings, and whispers of ancestral wisdom reflected in nature. Within the exhibition, gestural traces of memory are juxtaposed with choreographic themes oscillating between severed kin, racial caste, social constraints, death, and loss to contemplation, rebirth, freedom, beauty, ancestral devotion, reverence, and justice.
About Ron Bechet:
Ron Bechet (b. 1956, New Orleans) is a visual artist whose practice and critical engagement within the arts spans over 40 years, incorporating a commanding knowledge of his transcendent practice.
Best known for his large-scale black-and-white charcoal drawings and paintings, Bechet’s improvisational approach and mark-making aesthetics are grounded in the experiences and cultural practices of the African diaspora and New Orleans’ unique African American traditions.
Working within, beneath, and alongside the underlying layers of his experiences and the consequences of systemic violence, Bechet challenges assumptions of what art can be while pushing the boundaries of his creative approach.
His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally and is held in private and public collections, including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design Museum, and the Tulane School of Law. He has received numerous awards and honors for his work and was recently celebrated as Prospect 6 Gala Honoree and featured in BOMB as part of their Oral History Project in 2024.
Bechet earned his BAF from the University of New Orleans, Louisiana, and his MFA from Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut. In addition to his studio practice, he is the Victor H. Labat Professor of Art at Xavier University of Louisiana, where he has taught for over twenty years.