The New Orleans Pelicans are an American professional basketball team based in New Orleans. The Pelicans compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the Southwest Division of the Western Conference. The team plays its home games at the Smoothie King Center. Since 2014, the NBA officially considers New Orleans as an expansion team that began play in the 2002–03 season.
Smoothie King Center is a multi-purpose indoor arena in New Orleans, Louisiana. It is located in the city's Central Business District, adjacent to Caesars Superdome. The arena opened in 1999 as New Orleans Arena and has been home to the New Orleans Pelicans of the National Basketball Association (NBA) since 2002. The New Orleans VooDoo of the Arena Football League played their home games in the arena from 2004 until the team disbanded in 2008. The VooDoo resumed play at the arena in March 2011, until after the 2015 AFL season when the franchise folded.
Leyah (Leah) Chase was an American chef based in New Orleans, Louisiana. An author and television personality, she was known as the Queen of Creole Cuisine, advocating both African-American art and Creole cooking. Her restaurant, Dooky Chase, was known as a gathering place during the 1960s among many who participated in the Civil Rights Movement, and was known as a gallery due to its extensive African-American art collection. In 2018 it was named one of the 40 most important restaurants of the past 40 years by Food & Wine.
Agata Oleksiak, known as Olek, is a Polish artist who is based in New York City. Their works include sculptures, installations such as crocheted bicycles, inflatables, performance pieces, and fiber art. They have covered buildings, sculptures, people, and an apartment with crochet and have exhibited in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Turkey, France, Italy, Poland, and Costa Rica.
Tameka Norris, also known as T.J. Dedeaux-Norris and Meka Jean, is an American visual and performing artist. Norris uses painting, sculpture, and performance art to create work about racial identity and the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of blackness through cultural appropriation in modern society. Her work critiques the presence of the Black body in the history of painting and fine art.
Bally Sports New Orleans is an American regional sports network owned by Diamond Sports Group, and operates as an affiliate of Bally Sports. The channel broadcasts local coverage of professional and collegiate sports events within New Orleans and the state of Louisiana.
Marc-Olivier Wahler is a Swiss curator and contemporary art critic and art historian. He is the director of the MAH Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva. He is the former director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, the former director of Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the former director of the Swiss Institute, New York, and the co-founding director of the Centre d’art Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He is also the former artistic advisor of De Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam, the former artistic advisor for CI Contemporary Istanbul, the founding editor of Palais/ magazine], the founding director of the Chalet Society and PAL, Paris; and founding director of Transformer Sculpture Park, Melides, Portugal.
Greenspon was an art gallery located in the West Village of New York City owned by Amy Greenspon.
Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick are American photographers from New Orleans, Louisiana. Calhoun moved to Los Angeles during his teenage years, where he attended Los Angeles Community College, working at KCET public radio station before returning to New Orleans to open a portrait studio.
Natalia Anciso is an American Chicana-Tejana contemporary artist and educator. Her artwork focuses primarily on issues involving Identity, especially as it pertains to her experiences growing up along the U.S.-Mexico Border, via visual art and installation art. Her more recent work covers topics related to education, human rights, and social justice, which is informed by her experience as an urban educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a native of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas and currently lives and works in Oakland, California.
Sophia Wallace is an American conceptual artist and photographer. She is best known for her project "CLITERACY," which addresses citizenship and body sovereignty through the medium of text-based objects, unauthorized street installation, performance and sculptural forms.
Zarouhie Abdalian is an American artist of Armenian descent, known for site-specific sculptures and installations.
Jacolby Satterwhite is an American contemporary artist who creates immersive installations. He has exhibited work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In addition to MoMA, his work is in the public collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kiasma, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Satterwhite has also served as a contributing director for the music video that accompanied Solange's 2019 visual album When I Get Home and directed a short film accompaniment to Perfume Genius's 2022 studio album Ugly Season.
Gia Maisha Hamilton is an applied anthropologist who employs methodology to investigate land, labor and cultural production while examining social connectivity within institutions and communities. As a model builder, Hamilton co-founded an independent African centered school, Little Maroons in 2006; later, she opened a creative incubator space- Gris Gris Lab in 2009 and designed and led the Joan Mitchell Center artist residency program in New Orleans as a consultant from 2011- 2013 and director from 2013-2018.
Shantrelle Patrice Lewis is an American curator, scholar, critic and filmmaker. She is a 2012 Andy Warhol Curatorial Fellow and a 2014 United Nations Programme for People of African Descent Fellow.
Genevieve Gaignard, born in Orange, Massachusetts in 1981, is best known for work exploring issues of race, class, and gender. As a self-identified mixed-race woman, Gaignard utilizes photography, videography, and installation to explore the overlap of black and white America through staged environments and character performances. She received an AAS in Baking & Pastry Arts from Johnson & Wales University, her BA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2007, and an MFA from Yale University in 2014. Gaignard's work is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, and has been shown at Shulamit Nazarian, The Cabin, The FLAG Art Foundation, The California African American Museum, The Foley Gallery, and at two residentially-owned art spaces in Los Angeles, CA. She was also included in the fourth iteration of the triennial Prospect New Orleans, in 2018, with an installation at the Ace Hotel New Orleans. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. Gaignard's photographic series draw inspiration from Carrie Mae Weems, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and Nikki S. Lee, remixed with the references to the selfie and Instagram culture.
Sam Vernon is an installation and performance artist. She works in various media to create her artwork, including sculpture, paintings and photographs. She is interested in "honor[ing] the past while revising historical memory" through works that explore her own personal identity. Several of her art pieces also convey a certain narrative, and this is done through Vernon's various Xerox drawings.
Alexandria Smith is an American mixed-media visual artist based in London and New York City. She is currently the head of painting at the Royal College of Art.
Lydia Y. Nichols is an American writer, specifically focusing on race, culture and the environment. She currently works as the Chief Cultural Columnist for BayouBrief.com, a public interest news source in Louisiana.
Dave Greber is an American digital artist and installation artist known for his digital animations and Video installations. His work explores the relationship between the natural world, mysticism and contemporary modes of communication.
