Carl Harrison, Jr. selected for solo exhibit “The Art of Labour: Past As Promise”
New Orleans, 2026
For the second solo exhibition in The Art of Labour series, Beloved Community is honored to feature acclaimed interdisciplinary New Orleans-based artist Carl Harrison, Jr.
The Art of Labour: Past As Promise invited artists to reflect on inheritance, memory, cultural stewardship, and the visible and invisible forms of labor that shape communities across generations. Rooted in the understanding that New Orleans is both a living archive and an ever-evolving cultural landscape, this exhibition asks artists to consider how the past informs the present and how contemporary creative practices contribute to the city's unfolding future.
We are excited to feature the work of Carl Harrison, Jr. for The Art of Labour: Past As Promise. Harrison adeptly explores place, land, labour, and possibility in his interdisciplinary practice.
Across my work—from the community garden to Eve’s Garden—one truth keeps surfacing: if we want to survive the next storm, we have to reimagine our relationship with water, land, and each other.
- Carl Harrison, Jr.
Carl Harrison Jr. is a New Orleans-based artist, filmmaker, writer, and beekeeper. His practice moves across documentary film, installation, photography, digital collage, and social practice, centered on Black ecological memory and place-based storytelling. He is a 2025 NOMA Creative Assembly fellow and a member of The Front artist collective. He is the founder of the St. Roch Community Garden, where he tends hives and produces honey and goods for the neighborhood. His current body of work, We Be Keeping, traces four generations of his family’s relationship to land in St. Roch, treating gardening and archive-building as inherited labor passed down through care rather than bloodline alone.
We Be Keeping is a body of work about inheritance, cultivation, and the labor of keeping memory alive. Rooted in Harrison’s family’s relationship to land in New Orleans’ St. Roch neighborhood, the work considers the garden as both a physical place and a living archive, shaped by generations of Black life, displacement, foodways, craft, and care. At the center of We Be Keeping is Portraits of the Carried, a digital collage series pairing plants grown in the garden with masks associated with cultures from their regions of origin. Through collage, plant and mask become a single figure. Okra, mirliton, black-eyed peas, cayenne, mustard, rosemary, thyme, sage, bay leaf, tulsi, Three Sisters, and Trinity become portraits not simply of what we grow, but of what those plants carry with them: histories of Indigenous cultivation, African and diasporic foodways, migration, trade, displacement, and exchange. The masks draw upon traditions of adornment, protection, ceremony, and transformation while speaking to New Orleans, where masking remains a living language through which ancestry and identity enter the present.
About The Art of Labour
In 2026, Beloved Community launched The Art of Labour, a 3-city artist talk series. Each city features a one-day solo exhibition and dinner that centers visionary artists whose work explores themes of labour, work, value, sustainability, and contemporary life. Each event is designed as both an exhibition and a meaningful cultural exchange. Creating space for artists to share not only their work, but the ideas, stories, and lived experiences behind their practice.
The curatorial framework for each city reflects the culture and context of the host community while highlighting local artistic voices and perspectives. For The Art of Labour: Past As Promise, Beloved is honored to collaborate with respected New Orleans’ arts community members - curator Delaney George and renowned jurors Martine Chaisson and Anne Collins Smith.
About Beloved Community
Beloved Community is a New Orleans-based nonprofit that works on sustainable solutions for racial and economic equity. Beloved leverages two mutually-reinforcing bodies of work: capacity-building for leaders in education and workforce sectors and community-engaged research. The Art of Labour is an extension of Beloved’s work on good jobs and community-engaged research, inviting artists, collectors, and curators to lean into prescient discourse about contemporary labor issues.
