Driving down to St. Bernard Parish and passing by a corridor of refineries recently, I noticed idyllic pastoral landscapes with docile, grazing cows right before a beautiful patch of shade provided by a canopy of oak trees. The refreshing, delicious air of an early March spring buoyantly lifted a blackbird tightly clenching a CheeWees bag in its beak. Within this landscape, and so many other landscapes where industry lives alongside humans, there is a reverberating juxtaposition of cemetery, playground, and petrochemical facility; it’s a similar system echoed in the profuse snarl of brambles that appear in Ron Bechet’s charcoal drawings and the twisted dance of pipes, palmettos, and palm leaves in Hannah Chalew’s work. Their work is a reminder of the environmental and cultural entanglements that enrich our roots and choke our bodies, lands, and waters.
Very few artists so articulately speak to our environmental futures as Hannah Chalew and Ron Bechet. In their exhibition You Can’t Hide the Sun, both artists synergistically bring beauty and life to materiality with a laser focus that incorporates all ingredients into the pot: (im)mortality, timeliness and timelessness, colonialism, and wild nature. Chalew’s and Bechet’s work prophetically grounds us in the realities of flooded plains, chemical landscapes, ancestral murmurs, and the current contradictions and addictions of our Gulf South region as a place of deeply rhythmic rhizomes planted in fertile cultural soils and toxic, glittery trash.
- Denise Frazier
Denise Frazier x Ron Bechet x Hannah Chalew
Denise Frazier (DF): Let’s dive in. Ron and Hannah, I’m curious how you play with boundaries as an artist? Do you consider your work transgressive or paradoxical? Do you consider your work as pushing boundaries?
Hannah Chalew (HC): I think a lot about the ways that our state interacts with the fossil fuel industry, and how despite what we know about the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and despite the impact of these things literally eroding our state, it’s still business as usual—I think this is a paradigm that we’ve become used to. I grew up here, and driving between New Orleans and Baton Rouge when I was younger, I recall seeing the chemical flares and the petrochemical infrastructure and feeling like that was just part of the landscape. But when I returned home from grad school and participated in Fossil Free Fest—particularly the “toxic tour” that was organized by Leon Waters (the founder of Hidden History Tours) and Anne Rolfes (the founder of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade) that made the link between enslavement and the petrochemical industry so clear—I began focusing much more on the history that got us to this precarious place that we are in today.
Many people don’t want to look at the legacy of enslavement and how that’s still showing up, preferring a whitewashed version of history. But failing to face a history that viewed both people and the landscape as endlessly exploitable allows us to ignore a reality where these practices continue. In my work, I’m trying to reveal how these legacies are perpetuated to this day and draw connections through my material choices.
Ron Bechet (RB): As you can see in my work, I love to deal with paradox and contradictions. Irony is something else I enjoy dealing with. And it takes on many forms in our lives, and I guess, in trying to figure that out and deal with it is why I do what I do.
In terms of materials, I keep seeing one of Hannah’s pieces, Flotant (2020), in my mind’s eye, one of her three-dimensional works where she uses materials that you would not normally think of, such as old, rusted pipes. These pipes are really beautiful, because they have a termination point, but you can’t see a source of what’s coming out. There are all of these pipes in the work, but you can’t see how they connect. So, when you talk about disruption, you can see that completely in the work. And then, among the pipes, her works might have soil in them, and handmade paper in them. The works will even have living things in them—things that you wouldn’t normally think of going into a work of art.
To me, it’s this wonderful paradox. The messages that you see in Hannah’s works are very interesting because they talk about exactly where we are, I think, in our society. We have all these ends with no beginnings.
DF: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that’s one of the ways both of you connect with each other artistically—the interruptionthat I feel when I look at your work. I can’t be complacent.
RB: I feel like we’re often forgetting where the beginning is. And then we don’t have a relationship to the end because we don’t know where it starts. But we still have this end, and we’re still trying to milk this end, right? I see that in Hannah’s work, her sculptures that are just standing precariously, but they are somewhat three-legged. And then I remember, from geometry class that you need three points to make something three-dimensional. But you can barely see those three points in her works and you’re wondering how this thing is precariously existing and standing.
Flotant, like Bottomland Chimera (2023), has a sort of strange balance about it that I really enjoy. And that message of “Here’s Louisiana, here’s New Orleans. You know, here’s our society.” And the way that we see things—we have all this advancement, all this wonderful stuff, but we don’t know how we got there. We don’t care how we got there. We don't look back to those things that really have true value, like our culture. ’Cause it’s cut off. Rusted off.
HC: It’s such a gift to hear you talk about my work.
DF: It is a gift. I just love hearing your response to Hannah’s work, Ron, because it’s recalling how I’ve responded to her work, too. Where I’m just like, how is that standing up? That’s so top-heavy. And this is the type of organic garbage mix that my son leaps over as he’s trying to go into the French Quarter. It reminds me of the big sewer drains with plastic bottles and cigarette butts and some soil, all just kind of mixed together. And I think, yeah, that’s the Hannah Chalew mix, you know? It’s a sculpture of who we are. It’s just everything.
RB: Yeah. Yeah. It’s so funny you mention the storm drain and the curb and so on. When I was an undergraduate, those are the kinds of things that I was painting.
DF: Storm drains?
RB: Well, yeah. I was painting that in a photo-realistic way. I was taking photographs and making them large-scale paintings. Photo-realism was a big thing when I was an undergrad. So that’s what I learned about painting, it was that particular style and, for me, seeing the beauty of that. And understanding how these drains had been put together by not-human hands, first of all, but that, humans had contributed to this, the material used. But who put it together? Who composed it? The composition was not human hands? That was an interesting process; an interesting thing to consider. And then, people just walk over it. They don’t see it. They don’t see its beauty. They ignore it.
So, I used that tool as a way to talk about the way I felt as a young Black man. That I was being walked over in all of the beauty that I have. So that’s why those works were really significant to me when I first started painting them. That was a long time ago.
DF: I’m just touched by this sense of disposability, Ron. And now with your experience, what would you do with that work today? How has your experience and your maturity, your sense of lived life shifted your perspective? What would you do with that work or what you would say to yourself at that age?
RB: I wish I could go back, and, well, you know how the saying goes, “Youth is wasted on the young.” I’d love to be able to go back with the information I have now and talk to that young man and say, “So how do you make this even more pronounced? How do you make it even more like the culture you come from? How do you make it more layered? How do you make it resonate with other people who are in your situation?” I guess those would be some of the things I would think about as a younger me with the big Afro.
DF: Beautiful. This brings me to another aspect that I’d like to discuss when thinking about your work: the layers that you both tangle and untangle, and the disposability.
And maybe you can go back in time, too, Hannah, what would you say to a younger Hannah making work? How does this relate to what Ron shared about making things more understandable, or how have you seen your work mature over time?
HC: Looking back, when I moved home to New Orleans in 2009 after college, I was exploring the city through drawing and the materials I was using, store-bought paper and pens, had no connection to the place. These works were more illustrative. Whereas now, I’m really trying to get the concept and the materials to be one and the same.
It’s become a creative constraint in my practice to try and be as fossil-free as possible, which affects many different aspects of my studio. This constraint forces me to be very intentional with how I source my “art supplies,” choosing materials that can be found in my ecology living in Southern Louisiana, which has the added benefit of making the work very specifically rooted in this landscape.
DF: It’s a beautiful integration.
RB: Yeah. I also love Hannah’s pen drawings. They are just spectacular. The way that she would make her mark was truly authentic. It’s truly hers, you know?
And then she began finding ways to make that mark using what’s actually here. I can’t say that I’m always using what’s here because I’m getting my paper from a mill and Lord knows how much water they use to make this paper. And I'm getting my charcoal from a source that’s probably using a lot of energy to make the charcoal. I would love to make the leap at one point to where Hannah is, where I’m more seriously considering my materials.
We’re from a different generation, too, you know? It’s beautiful for me to learn from her how to become more aware of the damage I may be doing in terms of the way that I make my work.
DF: That's amazing. Yes.
RB: And I guess that’s why I was trying to make charcoal.
DF: You’re making charcoal now?
RB: I’ve tried over the years and have not been successful, because you have to burn it with a lot of oxygen for it to burn consistently, throughout a whole week. And then there’s the question of what do you burn it with? And what is your burning doing to the environment? So I’m thinking about this, and I think about how it’s not so much what you do with some of the natural elements, it’s how much of it we’ve been doing. And there’s no level of saying, “Let’s have some sort of a limit for ourselves.” We’re just not capable of doing that. It’s like how many crawfish can you eat? You eat how many they put in front of you, right?
It’s those kinds of considerations and thoughts that come to me in the work, but they also come through a cultural lens and an experiential lens in the society that we live in. And who I am, and through who I am.
This may sound a little strange, but I’m often trying to figure out how to communicate and understand myself through my ancestors. And hoping that what I’m working on can help me explain what the work needs for it to have a particular statement that I’m trying to get at.
DF: It makes perfect sense.
RB: It doesn’t make sense to logical me. But it makes sense to me in my heart because I know that’s what’s happening. But if I stop and listen to it and say, “Logically, does that make sense?” I’m not sure. But certainly, from my heart, my spirit, I think that it makes a lot of sense. But it is true, like Ancestors (2023-2024) is still giving me heartache. It just won't come together. There’s some beautiful passages in it. I just, I’m struggling to make the whole thing come together.
DF: That’s a beautiful struggle. Do you love struggle when you work?
RB: Oh yeah. Well, that struggle represents any kind of thing that we do; any action we take is a struggle. Standing up and walking requires friction. So, it’s a struggle. Whenever you move your arm, one muscle relaxes while the other one has to work. So that whole idea about there always being an opposition, that to me is how we exist. And, so I guess too, I’m always trying to figure out how that works rather than try and fight against it.
To me, that’s part of the beauty of our existence. How do we survive? How have we survived? And understanding how we have survived leads us to how we’re gonna survive in the future. And I think that’s where Hannah’s work really stretches me. For me to think about this understanding of Sankofa: you have to understand where you came from in order to know where you’re going, but also live in the moment.
DF: Understanding how it translates in the moment?
RB: Yeah.
DF: Yeah. How these ancestral murmurs, and sometimes screams and pushes, relates to these cosmic things that happen to us, and how that gets translated into the work is always very interesting, because there’s this the sense of, okay, you’re not done yet, you’re struggling with this.
With that said, how do you know when a work is complete? I feel like I can walk into a space and be absolutely amazed by a piece, and an artist will share that the work isn’t complete. There’s a real grappling with a cosmic energy, a feeling that you know where you’re going, but maybe you’re not sure how you’re getting there. Do you ever feel that way, Hannah?
HC: Yeah, I definitely grapple with this idea of complete-ness. People can walk in my studio and think a work is complete, but there’s something in my mind that is telling me it’s not done yet. Because as artists, we are trying to make this abstract thing real. I mean, it’s kind of the coolest thing about being an artist, it’s our job to visualize and somehow synthesize and make real this idea we have in our head that no one else can see or yet understand.
DF: Y’all know me well enough to know that I’m a circular thinker, and I love turning back to thinking about materials but I’m just as curious about this concept of ‘real,’ and how Ron has brought up authenticity. How does your authentic self show up in your work, Hannah? And who’s talking to you when you do work? I love what Ron just said about speaking with his ancestors.
HC: Wow. I feel like Mr. Willie Birch is coming up in my head a lot, and how after graduate school, he had to “remind me” to not overthink the work. I kind of had to unlearn the super analytic academic approach in order to reconnect to my intuition. Especially now, with two kids, I have more limited studio time. The goal is to be in my studio and kind of lose myself, where my brain and my hand can reconnect and focus on reacting to materials; trying not to think too much in the making, but just really allow my intuition to lead.
The last few years I have also been reconnecting to this landscape, even in an urban way. Foraging plants for inks and also city-waste, like scrap copper, to create pigments. I am still making sketches from life and I’m taking reference images, but also just trying to spend time outside with these amazing, natural, surreal things like cypress knees, while also noticing the way we’ve totally piped our landscape and how all this industry that has also become a part of the place we live.
Then back in the studio, I sort of mash up my findings, my source imagery with these raw materials—trying to put it together in a way that makes sense with the concept in my mind, but also keeping this balance of wanting the viewer to walk in and have no idea what I'm thinking about, but wanting the work to resonate with them and hopefully connect with them on a visceral level.
I think Ron and I are both also thinking a lot about beauty. I still want to make things that are beautiful, and I feel like that was my work that I was making 10 years ago—these drawings that were beautiful. But now I want to use beauty in a different way. I want beauty to draw you in, and then, when you discover the materials, for you to have a reaction like disgust at seeing trash or realizing your implication in recognizing a piece of plastic waste; a deeper burn that will keep the work in your mind longer.
RB: Yeah, I agree. I think especially in the South, and especially New Orleans, there’s a lot of, I guess I could say, sleight of hand, or shorthand, maybe even back of the hand, in our approach to difficult discussions or experiences.
I think that’s a very Southern way of experiencing things. And I think that’s beautiful. And I agree with Hannah, that's sometimes the intention of something beautiful or skillfully made—using beauty to really draw folks in to ruminate on what I want them to understand. And then once they’re in, then I have them where I can get them to see something else that they maybe didn’t understand before.
DF: That is so your work.
RB: I hope so.
DF: That’s it. That’s it. Every time I look at your work, Ron, I’m just like, “Oh, this is an elegant composition.” And then I get closer, and I read the description, and I’m just like, “Oh yeah, this is so heavy and real.” You drew me in and now, I feel like I’m being ripped apart. I’ll never forget the sugar installation that you made, and how it melted over time and just created a mess. And I thought, “We all know what this is. This is such a deep metaphor for how so many of us are feeling.” It was just so beautiful, and I loved how you used the material as a character, and the character over time just kind of melted away and became slush.
And, Hannah, you introduced me to the concept of Anthropocene. It’s just so futuristic. That’s how I’ve always felt about your work. I see it and think this is it. The ideocracy of how things are happening and continue to happen despite our knowledge, despite being told what’s going to go down with the environment, how we’ve all been experiencing it, it’s all layered in the palimpsests of Hannah’s work, and how that work will evolve over time. And this relates to Ron’s tuning into his ancestors. You both are in this beautiful in-between stage where you’re hearing the younger ones and, at the same time, experiencing the cosmic influence of the ancestors. It’s an exciting crucible of generational energy to experience in both of your practices. And, as you all get deeper into this practice, your art will tell stories that we can’t even yet imagine.
Ron Bechet was born in New Orleans and currently lives in Gentilly. He began his college career with an athletic scholarship at Mississippi State University but returned to study art at the University of New Orleans where he earned a BA. He went on to earn an MFA in Painting from Yale University School of Art. He is known for intimate large-scale drawings and paintings inspired by his experiences and observations of the consequences of forces of nature and time, on place and the human experience. For Bechet, his improvisational mark making is grounded on those experiences and in the cultural practices of the African diaspora and New Orleans African-American culture and ritual. In the work, the revelation of the effects of terrain, light, and water symbolize human contention and harmony, and ultimately the hope of reconciliation and spiritual transformation. In addition to his studio practice, Bechet has worked on several community-based projects using the arts in collaboration with other artists and community members. He is also the Victor H. Labat Professor of Art at Xavier University of Louisiana where he has been teaching for more than twenty years.
Hannah Chalew is an artist, educator, and environmental activist raised and currently working in New Orleans. She received her BA from Brandeis University in 2009, and her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016. Chalew has exhibited widely around New Orleans and has shown around the country at the Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO; Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center, Bronx, NY; Minnesota Center for the Book Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Asheville Museum of Art, Asheville, NC, and other venues. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Hand Papermaking, American Craft, Garden&Gun, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, the LA Times, the Boston Globe and more. Her work is held in the collections of the City of New Orleans and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. In 2022, she was the South Arts Southern Prize winner as well as the South Arts Louisiana State Fellow.
Denise Frazier is an educator, musician, and interdisciplinary artist from Houston, who has lived and worked in New Orleans since 2002. She is a 2023-2024 MLK Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recently, she was the assistant director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, a place-based research Center that grants fellowships and organizes public programming, immersive experiences, and collective contemplation about the bioregion stretching from Texas to Florida and its connections with other regions around the world. Her research interests include the Gulf South and the Anthropocene, sound studies and the political, social, digital, natural, and built environments of the Gulf South and Circum-Caribbean. She is also the manager, co-founder and violinist/vocalist/percussionist of Les Cenelles, a string and technological interfacing ensemble that performs African Diasporic music through a prismatic lens that honors African and Indigenous ancestors and chronicles ecological realities.
Other Plans is a contemporary art gallery located at the intersection of Dumaine and Galvez Streets in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded in 2023 by Emily Wilkerson, the gallery presents solo and two-person exhibitions by an inter-generational group of artists whose practices address the most pressing issues of our time.
A printed version of this interview was published in conjunction with Ron Bechet & Hannah Chalew: You Can't Hide the Sun, Other Plans, 2024. Design by Collection of Collections and printed by constance. To receive a copy of this publication, contact us at info@otherplans.gallery.
Special thanks to Adaeze Crenshaw and Elena Johnson for their support of this exhibition.