Parlour Gallery and Camp Street Studios: Creative Equity & Community in New Orleans’ Arts District
By Veronica Cross
Notes From Ella is presented with support from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation.
The founding members of Camp Street Studios and Parlour Gallery: left to right - Sara Madandar, Tom Walton, Cristina Molina, Nurhan Gokturk, Ryn Wilson.
Five New Orleans-based artists joined together to develop a site with studios at below-market rents and gallery space at 822 Camp Street in New Orleans’ Arts District. Cristina Molina, Sara Madandar, Ryn Wilson, Nurhan Gokturk, and Tom Walton had been variously connected through artist-run gallery The Front and The Joan Mitchell Center Residency program, with additional overlaps throughout New Orleans’ wide-ranging art ecosystem. Their experiences in such environments would shape their vision for an equitable artist-run center with multiple purposes; Camp Street Studios were established first in early 2022, and the Parlour Gallery opened its doors to the public with the inaugural exhibition, “Echoes and Shadows”, in January 2023. This first exhibition spoke to the building’s history as each founding member exhibited artwork that envisioned their presence as part of a larger continuum. As a home designed in the Greek Revival style by Louisiana architect Henry Howard in 1853, this building stood empty for about a year before the artists retained it.
After her residency at the Joan Mitchell Center, Molina was determined to locate a building with enough studio spaces to accommodate a sustainable and independent visual arts community.
The Center’s residency cycles of 2021-2022 had been limited to New Orleans-based artists to diminish travel regarding Covid-19 social distancing precautions and then truncated as infections surged. Hurricane Ida then derailed the remaining time. During residency, Molina connected with Sara Madandar and Tom Walton and realized the importance for artists to be in community and proximity with each other. On a tip from artist Sally Heller, who had seen a large building in New Orleans’ Art District, Molina contacted realtor Beth Aguilar to reach the building’s owner Michelle Molina (no relation). Cristina Molina presented the project as cultural investment; Michelle Molina agreed to rent them building at $1 of its $40 per square foot market value, with no rent for the first six months while the artists developed the property. The agreement also addressed how cultural equity can inflate property values and potentially displace the workers who create it; hence, their lease contains two renewable options within a nine 9-year span.
Molina, Madandar, Wilson, Gokturk, and Walton formed the LLC for Parlour Gallery and Camp Street Studios and confirmed their 3-year lease. The result is a holistic center for art whose programming has expanded to exhibitions, wide-reaching workshops, paid internships, young people’s art camps, and more. This is made possible through the collaboration of the artists and the patronage of the building’s owner. Each founding member occupies a role within the development, operations and/or programming. You may already know their names from the fertile, diverse, and far-reaching New Orleans art ecosystems of studios, galleries, museums, cultural institutions, and festivals; note each one has exhibited far beyond the city’s limits.
photo by Ryn Wilson
Gokturk, Molina, and Madandar were artists and board members at The Front gallery, where they learned how a self-governing arts organization works, each contributing to other programming as well. The Ella Project’s Ashlye Keaton created The Front’s 501 ©3 articles of organization for nonprofit status, providing a valuable reference point for self-organizing artists. Nurhan Gokturk cites The Front as a significant model, also for its ability to produce up to 48 exhibitions annually and sees his participation at Parlour Gallery and Camp Street Studios as a continuation of service to the needs of artists. As an accomplished architect, Gokturk reconfigured the building’s living areas into 12 workspaces. He honored the heritage and craftsmanship of the enslaved Black ironworkers whose intricate work graces 822 Camp Street
his 2023 series Forged by Iron, reimagining their West African Adinkra symbols in calligraphic mixed media and monoprints. Gokturk earned his master’s degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute. Recent projects include a 55-foot panoramic mural at the Hotel Monteleone.
Visual artist Cristina Molina works in time-based media, installation, photography, and performance – media that often overlaps in her eco-femme, mythmaking practice that upends dominant colonial narratives. Molina was recently awarded a large grant (soon to be announced) for her ongoing performance, video, ceramic, and installation project based on river cities; its recent iteration, Tell it to the River, was set in New Orleans on the Mississippi and was exhibited locally at Other Plans Gallery. Molina is a Professor of New Media + Animation and Gallery Director at Southeastern Louisiana University, where she has received multiple awards and is the Gallery Director of the university’s Contemporary Gallery.
Sara Madandar’s current project, “A Land with No Name” merges female figural silhouettes with antique maps, implying relationships of power and control. In these cutouts, both figures and land masses become anonymous and literally “flattened” to a one-dimensional concept.
Work from this series recently appeared locally in Refreshing America, curated by Don Marshall, at the Contemporary Arts Center. Madandar also manages the Parlour Gallery, where recent programming has included the ten-artist group exhibition Artwork from Iran, featuring 55 artworks, and a book making workshop inspired by Varvara Degtiarenko’s exhibition, Barabara’s Game. Early in the building’s development, The Ella Project donated materials and assisted Madandar with creating an LLC for Art Summer Camp X Camp, which has been ongoing with related programming. A later iteration of Camp X Camp, NOLA Art Camp, was founded by and managed by Robyn LeRoy Evans.
Friendships and collaborations between founding members strengthens their artist community. Ryn Wilson is a member of intersectional performance group Crystal Efemmes with Molina and was a member of The Front, where she also curated exhibitions and co-founded an annual shorts film festival. Wading Room, Wilson’s six-month gallery project with Peter Hoffman housed in a suburban garage, offered an unlikely uplift during 2021’s uncertainties. Wilson does pop-up events in her studio for her clothing line ALTAR, which has appeared at New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Contemporary Crafts. Wilson manages the Camp Street Studios and its finances.
Tom Walton works in a figurative painting tradition that merges observation with the intuitive.
Walton says that “artists need time”, recalling the support, space, and even meals that his mentor, the painter Carlo Pittore (1943-2005) gave him. Like Molina, Walton also teaches at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art + Design. Fittingly, Walton serves as the Internship Director at Parlour Gallery and Camp Street Studios, fostering a practice of “cultivating belief” in the interns. Interns are now paid thanks to a rent abatement commensurate to their pay, demonstrating building owner’s Michelle Molina’s investment in this project, reflecting the founding members’ mission right back at them.
For more information, go to Parlour Gallery and Camp Street Studios.
