Lucky Art Fair
uptown laundry
Curated by Taylor Balkissoon
Location
Beaubourg Theatre
614 Gravier Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Hours
Monday–Thursday, 7 AM–4 PM
Friday–Saturday, 7 AM–6 PM
Sunday, 8 AM–3 PM
Accessibility
Ground level area is wheelchair accessible.
COVID-19 restrictions
Gallery capacity is limited and all visitors are required to wear masks.
About the Exhibition
Uptown Laundry is a mobile art project that brings artists together with revolutionary organizations and mutual aid efforts. Founded in New Orleans in 2021 with the support of the Lucky Art Fair team, the project funds ongoing mutual aid efforts, commissary for incarcerated individuals, bail for protestors, as well as art production and publishing for BIPOC artists whose practice is anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist.
The mobile nature of the project aims to build solidarity across different communities that are invested in enacting systemic change in the arts and in fighting existing white cis-hetero patriarchal violence against marginalized people. Uptown Laundry aims to facilitate strategic relationships between artists invested in collective action, and activists who are interested in engaging with creatives in order to facilitate their long term goals.
Over the course of the next three months, we will host a rolling open call for artists wanting to contribute prints or exhibit work at the venue. Our opening exhibition will feature works by Bianca Walker (New Orleans), Sly Watts (New Orleans), Ginssiyo Apara (Philadelphia, PA), Taylor Balkissoon (New Orleans), Greta Boney (Fayetteville, NC), Courtney Lewis and Jahrea Brown (Atlanta, GA), Lorenzo Lawrence (New Orleans), Face Plants (New Orleans), Lio Bumbakini (Denver, CO), Erica Christmas (New Orleans).
We are hosting overlapping exhibitions and programming at the Beaubourg Theatre over the course of Prospect, culminating in a finale exhibition in January as part of Prospect’s cumulative programming and celebrations.
About the Organizers
The inaugural Lucky Art Fair took place in New Orleans in June 2019. Occupying a hotel property under development in Mid City, more than eighteen guest rooms were filled with installations and exhibitions by thirty-five New Orleans–based artists. The space was occupied over the course of two weekends, hosting more than forty local performers and programmers and welcoming over two thousand visitors. All artists were paid for their contributions, facilitating, for some, the first financial transaction for their artworks. New Orleans has a rich history that is plagued with systemic racism and wealth disparity; Lucky Art Fair built its 2019 fair on a philosophy that attempts to address the manifestations of those inequities in our local art scene.
Image courtesy of Taylor Balkissoon.