Faculty Retrospectives Exhibition Opening
A Word From the Director: Faculty Retrospectives at the Academy
Join us this Saturday, January 17th from 5pm-7pm for the opening night of the Faculty Retrospectives Exhibition at The New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. The show will be up from January 17th-February 28th 2026.
As the Academy continues to grow in 2026 and we look forward to our 50th anniversary in a few short years, it is an important time to look back on the foundation of what makes our school so special—our faculty. While we host faculty exhibitions regularly, it occurred to me that we have many faculty members who have graduated from the Academy themselves and gone on to great things. Whether through retirement, a renewed focus in their studio practice, or other important endeavors, the Academy is forever grateful for our current and past faculty members who help inspire the next generation of artists in New Orleans.
If the goal of teaching artists at the Academy is to inspire what we love about our practice in others—to gift the lifelong privilege of looking closer at the world around us and marveling in humankind’s ability to capture that beauty—then Allison Stewart and Jean Cassels have far exceeded this goal through their effect on our community and the larger art world.
Allison Stewart Allison Stewart was invited to teach at the Academy in 1998 by Dorothy Coleman—then Board President. Allison founded the Abstract classes in the annex and continued teaching until 2000, when she decided to focus exclusively on her work and the creation of KID smART, a non-profit arts education program for underserved children in New Orleans that has helped countless children grow through creativity in our city. Looking at abstraction as a rigorous process akin to naturalistic painting was not always appreciated in the world of fine arts, and the Academy is indebted to Allison for connecting with students through a different lens.
In curating this exhibition, it was important to Allison, Arthur Roger, and me that the work displayed in our gallery reflected the breadth of Allison’s career but also focused on what Allison described as “Chapters” in her life. Each series of work in Allison’s oeuvre is directly affected by time and by place. This vision excited me deeply; as artists, we all respond to our world and are often more affected by our surroundings than we let on. Allison’s work, so wonderfully rooted in the organic, seems to speak to what is not seen around us. It is almost impossible not to move with her colors across her canvases. To engage with Allison’s work is to engage with “a journey all its own,” as artist Helen Frankenthaler once said of her journey with painting. Her work does call upon the greats such as Morris Louis or Frankenthaler, each artist creating beauty from both the control of the medium and the great ability to let the medium do what it wants and, in Frankenthaler’s words again, “…look as if it was made in one stroke.”
Jean Cassels In 1992, Auseklis Ozols, founding director of NOAFA, invited Jean to monitor figure study sessions at the Academy. Jean worked tirelessly at the Academy until 2024—for 32 years. She is one of the most tenured alumni faculty at the Academy, inspiring countless student artists to paint, draw, and illustrate. Her work as an illustrator received great acclaim in the industry, such as the Golden Kite Award in 2004, the North Carolina Children’s Book Award in 2010, the 2004 Giverny Book Award, and many more. She created a distinct method in gouache that rendered highly realistic forms, as well as a black wash that created an alluring patina on the forms she created. Her career as an artist was focused on the applied art of illustration, but the rigor of the Academy was and is at the core of her practice. As Jean often remarks, she joined the Academy to “learn how to better draw people in her books.”
Her work in illustration, drawing, and painting has a quality of control that is rarely seen in contemporary work. The almost surreal dedication to color and detail calls upon artists like N.C. Wyeth—also a successful illustrator—and while N.C. Wyeth famously said that “painting and illustration cannot be mixed,” in Jean’s work the line between the applied work of design in illustration and the open expression of a painting is very thin. Each piece in the exhibition, whether it be a figure study or an original work that was printed in one of her many published children’s books, has a character that expresses more than simply the narrative of a story. Her line and expression evoke a greater appreciation for nature and for what the fine artist seeks—to truly commune with the beauty of reality in some way.
The Academy is deeply grateful to have collaborated with both Allison and Jean, and we look forward to future engagements with these master artists.