Jazz Fest 2nd weekend Craft spotlights
By Veronica Cross
Now in its second week, the 2026 Jazz and Heritage Festival features numerous artist friends and clients of The Ella Project in the Contemporary Crafts, Congo Square African Marketplace, and the Louisiana Marketplace sections that will open to the public on Thursday April 30th. Here is a preview of the work of Karen Ocker, Chester Allen, and Erica Swanson:
Karen Ocker, Trouble in the World, 2026, oil painting on board with gold leaf and antique mirror frame.
Karen Ocker starts her day at sunrise listening to gospel music in preparation for her studio time. A graduate of New York’s School of Visual Arts with a major in graphic design and a minor in art therapy, Ocker’s work progressed from painting alongside her grandmother in the woods of New Jersey to painting the heroes of the ever-present musical and cultural heartbeat of New Orleans. Early commercial work inspired by album covers and love of live music informed her eventual move to New Orleans and the overall arc of her artwork. Ocker was always drawn to portraiture.
Ocker’s paintings are iconic, referencing album covers, her background in book design, and religious/spiritual painting traditions; elements from voodoo and hoodoo are occasionally present, yet none promote a singular practice overall. Her meticulously-rendered subjects reflect historic cross-sections of New Orleans’ musicians, culture bearers, and noteworthy persons including James Booker, Mahalia Jackson, Doctor John, and Mother Catherine Seals, among others. Salvaged narrative materials like deconstructed piano keys and hammers, bits of trombones, mirror trim, and record players frame each subject, many of whom are surrounded by gold leaf. Consider her work a reimagining of what remains after the storm, “...in a city whose parts are sometimes washed away,” as Ocker puts it.
Karen Ocker has exhibited locally at Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, Tréo, McKenna Museum of African American Art, New Orleans Arts Center, New Orleans Museum of Art, Creative Alliance New Orleans, Jazz and Heritage Gallery, and at A.I.R. Gallery in New York. She is represented by Orleans Gallery, for which she is currently preparing a solo show and the gallery’s upcoming group exhibition at the Palazzo Mora in Venice, Italy during the Venice Biennale.
Karen Ocker, Walk on Gilded Splinters II, 2026, oil painting on board with gold leaf, reclaimed wood, piano keys and hammers, antique poison bottle and rusty nail, chicken foot, poison bottle, votive candle, and a gilded splinter.
2026 marks Ocker’s 17th year as a Jazz Fest art vendor, revealing her full circle from volunteering in the Jazz Fest Kid’s Area prior to Katrina, joining the art staff, and developing relationships within the Cultural Village. Here she found community and inspiration for the storytelling arc of her artwork; she was also moved to join the executive board of preservationist Congo Square and Tremé nonprofit Save Our Soul, for which The Ella Project’s Ashlye Keaton advised and administered their nonprofit status. Ocker cites The Ella Project as a significant resource, stating, “... from seminars and advocacy to contracts to pro bono legal consultations, Ella Project has been instrumental in ensuring New Orleans’ cultural and creative community has the necessary resources to protect their work and legacy. Ella Project furthers that vital work by providing support to local nonprofits, whose purpose and mission is to protect and sustain the unique root culture and sacred traditions of New Orleans.”
The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is the first place that Karen Ocker exhibited her artwork. This year, she is bringing approximately 50 paintings, including 20 smaller paintings at 7 in. x 9 in. that are framed in reclaimed wood. You can find her at Tent F at Contemporary Crafts.
Chester Allen, Universal Groove, sculpture
Chester Allen is a New Orleans sterling silver jewelry artist appearing at the Congo Square African Marketplace during the second week of the 2026 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
“I'm a philosopher with a ball peen hammer”. Chester Allen encountered metalsmithing through a series of events rooted in chance, ethics, and intuition. While preparing for a corporate career track during an internship with a top ad agency, he repeatedly met the same issue with the product’s negative health impacts on the user. This dilemma inspired him to start his own marketing consulting firm, and when he connected with a husband-and-wife team as potential clients, all their destinies would change for the better.
A ball peen hammer is a specialized tool designed for shaping, riveting, and hardening metal. It’s used by jewelers and metal workers such as machinists and fabricators. Allen’s new clients needed guidance in creating business and marketing plans – and support in executing these steps. In appreciation, he received an in-kind education that would initiate and shape his life as a jewelry artist, supporting his creativity so that he could apply his philosophy to tangible things. Here, he could combine elements of craft with larger principles such as those of social justice. Coming from a musical family in Chicago, his father’s suggestion to “go off the page” (a phrase for improvising while playing a song) would inspire Allen’s “Universal Groove” theory for the “improvement of living of your life” and a series of jewelry sculptures.
Chester Allen, DNA Silver Choker
Allen’s “The Storm Within” series features geometric shapes and employs negative space. His visual lexicon includes African diasporic sankofa and adinkra symbols, base clef, Eye of Horus, the ankh, and others. “The Creator Has A Master Plan”, inspired by the Pharoah Sanders’ spiritual jazz song, is a calligraphic sculpture that combines most of these symbols and more, merging ideas from across time and culture to create something perhaps universal. Symbols are repeated in different forms, demonstrating Allen’s adept hand, for example, at adapting the double helix twists of the “It’s All in Your DNA” series to silver choker, necklace, bangles, earrings, and cufflinks.
Allen is a friend of The Ella Project and notes Gene Meneray’s inclination to meet artists where they’re at, anticipating their needs at the various festivals he’s organized, and in education and support around intellectual property rights. When festival applications were first becoming digitized, Meneray organized workshops with laptops and a photographer to assist artists in the process. Allen notes that even through informal conversations, he was inspired to build his own website – a distinct space of autonomy different from Etsy and similar platforms. View Allen’s jewelry and sculpture arts online at chesterallenarts.com, Etsy @ thesilverman, in New Orleans @ Ariodante Contemporary Crafts 535 Julia Street, and in Chicago @ Jackson Junge Gallery .You can find Chester Allen and his Spring 2026 Collection at The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in Tent T at the Congo Square African Marketplace.
Selections from Erica Swanson’s Trace Path pottery series
Erica Swanson is a Ceramicist, Painter, and New Orleans Artist appearing at the Louisiana Marketplace during the second week of the 2026 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
During her employment as a full-time math educator in New Orleans, Erica Swanson would merge her love of numbers and art. Swanson adapted an approach to her drawing and painting that used ratios, applying principles of both the golden mean and the Fibonacci sequence to her layouts. Skulls became her signature motif, asking the viewer to consider that the compositional balance of Beauty can also be measured numerically, a device used in Renaissance and Classical periods. As her artwork developed, she became more active in local art markets and ultimately left her education job to prioritize her studio practice. As she leaned into her painting and drawing, Swanson found that working in the studio can be isolating, so she sampled pottery classes at London Clay Works and found community and a new way to express her ideas.
Erica Swanson established her Etsy store EricaLeeArtNOLA in 2015, offering a mix of paintings, pottery, and mixed glass and has sold her artwork and pottery at various local night art markets, Freret Fest, Po Boy Fest, and New Orleans Clayfest. In conversation, Swanson shares how her foundational experiences as an art vendor at the annual Christkindlmarkt at the Deutsches Haus and the Crescent City Blues BBQ Arts Market, both managed by Ella Project’s Gene Meneray, set a standard for well-organized and supportive infrastructure for artist-vendors. These are experiences that she would build on, ultimately inspiring her first application to the Louisiana Marketplace at the 2026 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Erica Swanson’s Whispering Gray pottery series
In Swanson’s kitchenware pottery, she finds inspiration in stories from customers such as a mother’s garlic keeper that conjures the warmth of home life. In addition to her functional kitchenware and New Orleans-centric pieces such as bead mugs, Swanson will also debut two new pottery lines as her “primary artistic expression” at Jazz Fest. In her first new pottery line, Whispering Gray, black mason stain is pressed into porcelain clay, producing different tones of gray on wheel-thrown vases. Using a traditional cut-out technique called the Devil’s Work or gui gong, she creates organic, intricate designs in this line of large porcelain vases and bowls. These are then glazed with “snowflake”, which produces a crackle effect when fired in the kiln. Swanson’s second line, Trace Path, features small vessels, bowls, and platters. Employing the centuries-old sgraffito technique, she carves wheel-thrown white clay through a layer of black slip that is finished with a teal “lagoon” glaze to amplify the carving. You can find Erica Swanson at Tent F in the Louisiana Marketplace.
