PhotoNOLA Opening Celebration and Keynote Address featuring Xaviera Simmons
New Orleans Museum of Art
Thursday, Dec 7
6-10pm

Keynote & Celebration: $35
Keynote & Celebration + Champagne mixer with Xaviera Simmons and Russell Lord at 6pm: $75
Purchase Tickets Here

The PhotoNOLA Opening Celebration begins at 6pm, featuring live jazz by the Russell Welch Hot Quartet. Xaviera Simmons will present the PhotoNOLA 2017 Keynote address at 7pm in the auditorium. After, the party continues with food, drink, moon booth portraits by Deep Fried Photo, drag performances by The Reba Douglas Review, and a fundraising raffle.

The patron level Champagne Mixer with Xaviera Simmons and Russell Lord, NOMA’s curator of photography, will take place in the Contemporary Gallery on the museum’s second floor, beginning at 6pm.

Xaviera Simmons’ work spans photography, performance, video, sound, sculpture, and installation. She defines her studio practice, which is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, abstraction, present and future histories- specifically shifting notions surrounding landscape- as cyclical rather than linear. Simmons is committed equally to the examination of different artistic modes and processes.

Simmons’ site-specific exhibition, created for the Prospect.4 international arts triennial, will be on view at NOMA. Guests will have access to museum exhibitions during the celebration.

Xaviera Simmons received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Transatlantic slave trade with Buddhist monks. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio. In 2015, Simmons was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Robert Rauschenberg) Grant. Simmons has exhibited nationally and internationally where major exhibitions and performances include The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Public Art Fund, The Sculpture Center, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and Brooklyn Museum, among many others. Her works are in major museum and private collections including The Nasher Museum, Deutsche Bank, The Rubell Family Collection, UBS, The Guggenheim Museum, The Agnes Gund Art Collection, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Miami, High Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, and David Castillo Gallery.

Image: Xaviera Simmons – On Sculpture #2, 2011