Other Plans is pleased to present You Can't Hide the Sun, an exhibition of new works by Ron Bechet and Hannah Chalew, April 12 - June 9, 2024.
Opening Reception: Friday, April 12, 5-8pm
Veryfew 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 ground 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, educator, musician, interdisciplinary artist
Ron Bechet was born in New Orleans and currently lives in Gentilly. 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 addition to his studio practice, Bechet 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 has exhibited widely around New Orleans and has shown around the country. 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.
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.
