12″x8″; digital media; 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
MUSEUM TOUR AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2025
Sacred Mother Space Gallery Walk
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Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 25-29 June 2025. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.
At Kolaj Fest New Orleans, LaVonna Varnado-Brown will lead a gallery walk of the museum that “honors the Divine Mothers through visual spellcasting.”
Varnado-Brown creates art that is “AfroFuturistic in aesthetic with odes to history, the Divine Feminine, and floral daydreams abounding.” In addition to creating multimedia works, she curates intentional workshops and experiences with a focus on healing and raising spatial awareness. Through her work she hopes to uplift the narrative of rest, joy, resistance, and abundance. “Sacred Mother Space Gallery Walk” is an opportunity to experience the museum in a different way.
“Magic in its earliest form was often referred to as ‘the arts’,” said Varnado-Brown. “Art is like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images texture to achieve changes in consciousness. It is my intention to inspire a literal chemical change in your psyche and physiological self through experiencing my work. Love is the medium.”
The tour will include some works in the “New African Masquerades” exhibition as well as works in the “Afropolitan: Contemporary African Arts at NOMA” exhibition, Maman Brigette by John Lister, and Mami Wata figures in the African art collection, and others. Varnado-Brown is a 2024-2025 Creative Assembly artist-in-residence. “NOMA’s Creative Assembly residency promotes community engagement by welcoming artists to collaborate throughout the year with the museum’s permanent collection, special exhibitions, and programs.” During the Sacred Mother Space Gallery Walk, Varnado-Brown will share her experience as a resident artist.
“To take seriously each other’s vulnerability, fragility, and precarity with clear socio-emotional boundaries according to each one’s needs. To see one another with big, world absorbing eyes. To both honor and allow space for each one to show up as they are. To enact community with an intersectional lens and practice interdependency to empower each one to another. That is AfroFuturist kinship. That can open the path to enter the sacred mother space.”
This event is part of Kolaj Fest at New Orleans Museum of Art, a day of activities that will take place on Thursday, 26 June 2025.
Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 25-29 June 2025. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
LaVonna Varnado-Brown holds a BA from Southeastern University Louisiana with a focus on Theatre and Liberal Arts, with studies in London and Paris. She has worked as an installation artist, artist advocate, teaching artist, and tutor in and around New Orleans. At Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2023, LaVonna presented her collage workshop, “Uses of the Erotic”, and was a panelist for the symposium, “The Mystical, the Esoteric, & the Magical”. At Kolaj Fest New Orleans 2024, she presented the collage workshop, “Take Me to the Water: A Baptism in Collage”; co-led “Collage & Kiki: New Orleans Edition”; and co-led a tour of “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” at the New Orleans Museum of Art. For 2022-2023, she was Artist in Residence at Longue Vue House & Gardens in New Orleans and for 2024-2025, she is Creative Assembly artist-in-residence at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The artist lives and works in New Orleans.