about

Press Street's Antenna Gallery @ 3161 Burgundy Street, New Orleans, LA 70117

CONTACT

Snail Mail:
Press Street’s Antenna Gallery
3161 Burgundy Street
New Orleans, LA 70117

Email:
Please use our contact form for email correspondence.

Phone:
504-298-3161

Gallery Hours:
Sat-Sun 12-5pm

HISTORY

Press Street was formed in 2005 with a mission to promote art and literature in the community through events, publications and arts education. Shortly after Katrina, Press Street began producing events in small businesses which had yet to reopen, including the Saturn Bar and Preservation Hall, to promote a symbiotic relationship between small businesses, non-profits and artists in the city’s rebuilding. The organization continued to develop around the project INTERSECTION | NEWORLEANS -  a blind collaboration between 25 New Orleans artists and 25 writers, inspired by 25 specific street corners of the city. Though started in the summer of 2005, pre Katrina, it became all the more poignant when it was finally published in April 2006. INTERSECTION | NEWORLEANS spawned the first indoor art exhibition in the St. Claude Arts District with the original work from the project hanging in the gutted l’art noir space and 100 percent of the proceeds going to affected artists. INTERSECTION | NEWORLEANS established the mission of Press Street’s book projects, which focus on the relationship between the visual and literary arts.

Since 2006, Press Street has produced the event Draw-A-Thon, a round the clock, 24-hour drawing extravaganza where multiple forms of drawing are explored by artists and non-artists alike, last year attracting over 700 attendees. Press Street’s 24 hour Draw-A-Thon is the only event of its kind in the city of New Orleans. It is an art experience in which people are active participants– not spectators; where the premise is to encourage creating for the sake of creating, process over product. It is an all-ages, free event that is open to the public. All art materials are provided. The 24 hours are punctuated by two-hour drawing workshops led by local artists and arts educators, designed to encourage the participant to experience different aspects of the art of drawing. The environment constantly changes because of what is being taught and drawn. In addition to these more structured events, there are on-going activities: the Drawing Room, in which every surface is covered in paper, fun for children of all ages; as well as the Amazing Draw-a-tron 3000 and live figure drawing.

In March of 2008, Press Street opened Antenna, located in the 9th Ward Bywater neighborhood, one of the few small, non-profit spaces to exhibit visual contemporary art in the city of New Orleans. Over the past three years, Antenna has developed exhibitions which emphasize emerging artists and young curators focusing on collaborations, group shows, solo shows featuring long time local artists who are still underexposed, and challenging works of video and digital media while also encouraging partnerships with city-wide programming initiatives like Si Cuba and PhotoNOLA and national arts initiatives such as Independent Lens. Some new additions to programming are exchange shows with national and international art organizations and Press Street|Antenna public arts initiatives such as the Happy Hour Salon series. An active member of the New Orleans arts community and the St. Claude Arts District (SCAD), our shows have been well-received and well-attended with reviews in local, national and even international media. Drawing from the diverse strengths of members of the collective, we were one of the first galleries to embrace video arts, performance art, literary arts and community film screenings into our public programming.

Press Street’s most recent initiative is the Room 220 blog. What started as a literary hub in the former Colton School, Press Street’s Room 220 is now a virtual clearing house for news about New Orleans book and literature culture. In addition to an extensive online presence, Room 220 hosts a variety of workshops, lectures, and events focusing on all things written.

current organizing members:

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Angela Driscoll
Antenna Gallery Member
website

Angela Driscoll is a visual artist who explores time and narrative while creating visual and audio work from collected data. Her body of work includes artist books, drawings, installations, video, and sound. Angela received her MFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and she currently teaches at Loyola University New Orleans.

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Anne Gisleson
Board President

Anne Gisleson teaches writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Louisiana’s arts conservatory for high school students.  Her writing has appeared in The Believer, Oxford American and other magazines and has been selected for inclusion in several anthologies including Best American Non-Required Reading, Best Music Writing, Life in the Wake: Fiction from Post-Katrina and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide.

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Bob Snead
Antenna Gallery Member
Webmaster
website

Bob Snead was founding director of Redux Contemporary Art Center until 2005, when he left his hometown of Charleston, SC to pursue graduate studies in Painting/Printmaking at Yale University School of Art. After his northern exposure in 2007 he helped form the artist collective Transit Antenna, and spent the next two years on the roads of North America in a vegetable oil powered bus producing various community based art projects along the way.   Bob and his family moved to New Orleans in 2010 where he continues a rigorous artistic practice utilizing a wide range of media to express his deep commitment to humor, with such projects as his telling autobiographical paintings, a stand up comedian ATM Machine, and most recently with a project called The Is Not Broke Recession Proof Wallet Company.

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Bottletree
Antenna Gallery Member
Art House Films Coordinator
website

Jerald L. White is a New Orleans artist, crazy bicyclist and community advocate – also known as “Bottletree.”  Jerald has worked as a grass-roots organizer, attorney, and environmental policymaker in New Orleans and Washington D.C.  In 2004, he earned a MA in Media Ecology, Communications & Film at New York University, and made New Orleans his permanent home.  Jerald is the Founder and Director of the Charitable Film Network – a diverse group of media-makers, dedicated to community service.

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Brad Benischek
Board Treasurer
website

Brad Benischek is a visual artist, educator and scenic painter. His work has appeared in numerous publications, on t-shirts, telephone poles and in galleries and art spaces across the south. He received his BFA from Parsons School of Design and MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design.

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Courtney Egan
Antenna Gallery Member
website

Courtney¹s video installations connect nature with human invention. She creates short films, video collages, and media assemblages that straddle the worlds of special effects and art. These pieces explore the blurring boundary between mental states, digital worlds, and consensus reality. Courtney holds an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art. She is a Media Arts faculty member at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.

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James W. Goedert
Antenna Gallery Member
website

b. 1986 Omaha, NE
Lives and Works in New Orleans, LA.

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Laura Gipson
Antenna Gallery Member
website

Laura Gipson, a native of Maryland, has lived in New Orleans since 1980. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Her works are included in the collections of the Virlane Foundation, the City of New Orleans, Tulane Medical Center and private collections. Laura has taught at the University of New Orleans and she currently teaches Talented in Visual Art in the Jefferson Parish Public School System.

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Natalie McLaurin
Antenna Gallery Member
website

Natalie McLaurin grew up in Knoxville, TN. She has a Bachelors in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute. Hired for a 2 month stint as an art preparator for Prospect 1 in 2008, McLaurin fell victim to the charm of New Orleans. She moved permanently to the city in Fall 2009 and soon after joined Antenna.  She is an active artist and curator, and founding member of the artist group T-lot.

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Nathan C. Martin
Editor, Room 220
website

Nathan C. Martin is the editor of Room 220: New Orleans Book and Literary News. He is a former associate publisher of Stop Smiling: The Magazine for High-Minded Lowlifes, based in Chicago and New York. His writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago, BOMB, Stop Smiling, Vice, Pelican Bomb, Gigantic, The Black Warrior Review, Edible New Orleans, and other places. He was born and raised in Wyoming, and is at work on a book of essays about the state. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite.

Follow him on Twitter.

Robin Levy
Robin Levy
Antenna Gallery Member
website

Robin Levy is a sculptor and installation artist. She received her BFA from Louisiana State University in 1982 and earned her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1990. Levy’s artistic practice explores collective consciousness by visually recording what she refers to as “fragments of the everyday”. She has had solo exhibitions and participated in juried and invitational group shows. Her work is included in museum and private collections throughout the United States including New Orleans Museum of Art and Frederick R. Weisman Foundation.

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Robin Wallis Atkinson
Antenna Gallery Member

Robin Wallis Atkinson is an independent curator based in New Orleans, Louisiana. She curates for the nonprofit collective Antenna Gallery in the New Orleans St. Claude Arts District. In 2008, Atkinson served as the Curatorial Coordinator for Prospect.1 New Orleans, the largest-ever contemporary art biennial to be held in the United States. During Prospect.1, she oversaw production of the critically acclaimed installations in the Lower Ninth Ward as well as several other sites throughout the city. During the summer of 2010 Atkinson began curating the 16 artist exhibition CATALYST – Artists of Southern Louisiana in Response to the Gulf Coast Oil Crisis, which is set to open in July 2011 at Space 301 in Mobile, AL. Atkinson will be leaving New Orleans during the summer of 2011 to enter into the 2013 class at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She hopes to return to New Orleans after graduation to pursue her curatorial focus of socially engaged art practice.

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Shawn Hall
Antenna Gallery Member
website

Shawn Hall is a founding artist member of Antenna Gallery who has been living and working in New Orleans since 1997.  Shawn received her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art where she was a Patricia Harris Fellow. She has been in residence at School 33 in Baltimore, in NY through the LMCC, and in Los Angeles at 18th Street Art Center. Exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Center, Isaac Delgado Gallery, Barrister’s, Bassetti, and Antenna in New Orleans, Wolfson Gallery at Miami Dade, N.A.M.E. and Christopher Stokes in Chicago, The Hewitt Gallery and Bronx River Art Center in NYC, Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon, NY, Wagner-Sousa in Galveston, TX, and Chateau de La Napoule, in Mandelieu, France. Her work has been reviewed nationally in Art Papers, New Art Examiner, and dialogue. She is a part of the permanent collection of Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Linklater Corporate collection in NYC, and private collections throughout the United States and Europe..

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Susan Gisleson
Antenna Gallery Member
Draw-A-Thon Coordinator

Susan Gisleson is a founding member of Press Street and Antenna. A costume designer by nature, she curated “stitch” at the gallery in 2008 to explore the ways a needle and thread can interact with different materials. In 2010, she had a one woman multi-media exhibition called “Junkfish Caviar” in which she created precious effigies out of found and repurposed materials. She is an organizer of Press Street’s 24 Hour Draw-a-thon, one of many insane ideas by Brad Benischek that has come to life. Gisleson graduated from San Francisco State University and teaches art full time to middle and high school students. She is also one hell of an arm wrestler.

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The People Is Singular
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Curtain Optional
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howtorebuild

How to Rebuild a City
Edited by Anne Gisleson & Tristan Thompson w/ design and artistic direction by Catherine Burke

Beautifully designed, sometimes fun, always informative, How to Rebuild a City: Field Guide from a work in Progress, is a reflection of the many ways that New Orleanians have realized our way towards recovery, actively and creatively engaging with our communities.

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Bitter Ink
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A nine-part poem meant to be performed aloud, GZNO approaches questions of disaster and its aftermath from tragicomic perspectives. The poem is accompanied by the poet’s surreal line drawings. Mark Yakich is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (National Poetry Series, Penguin 2004), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in [...]

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Revacuation
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A post-Katrina graphic novel of sorts by New Orleans artist Brad Benischek. Part fantasy, part social commentary, Revacuation is a visual response to the tragic and absurd events of year one as they unfolded. Benischek’s raw, immediate style, lush imagination and quirky humor make Revacuation a wholly original addition to the post-K cultural discourse. Beginning [...]