Joelle Nagy, MFA August 2024 graduate of the LSU School of Art, was selected to be included in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Louisiana Contemporary 2024 exhibition. The works are on view August 3-October 13, 2024.

Nagy, a Louisiana-based multimedia artist who studied painting at LSU, was one of 37 artists to be selected from over a thousand submissions to the annual exhibition. This statewide, juried exhibition “promotes the contemporary art practices in the state of Louisiana, provides an exhibition space for the exposition of living artists’ work and engages a contemporary audience that recognizes the vibrant visual arts culture of Louisiana and the role of New Orleans as a rising, international art center.”

“I’m extremely honored to be included in the 2024 Louisiana Contemporary,” Nagy said.

Her featured work “Hunglish” is a grouping of ceramics works recreated from her childhood memories of “of my father’s daily routine of maintaining his native tongue of Maygar/Hungarian,” Nagy said in her artist’s statement. “These items create a still life memorializing these ordinary objects that I view as ritualistic.”

Nagy’s MFA thesis exhibition CSALÁDI is “a compendium of paintings and sculpture that narrate and itemize memories, mementos, and feelings from my childhood in relation to the home. It is an autobiographical agglomeration of objects and spaces that I am honoring and remembering through the act of creating. I am effectuating the feminine and maternal instinct of gathering and arranging my memories pertaining to personal history and inherited cultural identity through altar-making. Idiosyncratic items are collected and bound through color association and sensory memory. Constructed interior and exterior spaces of the home in a series of large-scale paintings wherein Proustian memories were involuntarily recorded through a child’s lens. These works serve as a fragmented memoir of my családi.

(Családi (Magyar/Hungarian) adjective: related to the family; related to the home.)”

This year’s juror is Lauren Haynes, Head Curator, Governors Island Arts and Vice President for Arts and Culture at the Trust for Governors Island. Learn more about the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Louisiana.