Reports from New Orleans | The Spiritual & The Ancestral

Guest artists honor the spiritual realm through their artistic practices. Interviews feature recurring visions, an interview with a phantom ghost, a visit from the spirits of family members, and the healing power of continuing ancestors’ traditions.


Guests: Deja Jones, Xavier Juarez, Cristina Molina, Theodora Eliezer 

Deja Jones descends from a lone lineage of New Orleanian artisans and carpenters. After studying at the New Orleans Charter of Science and Mathematics and NOCCA, she began teaching herself to work with a variety of mediums to depict the many stories of New Orleans natives and their struggle to maintain their way of life.     Xavier Juarez is an artist working currently in theater, music, and film. He lives in New Orleans and is finishing up his first full length play.     Cristina Molina is a visual artist who hails from the subtropics of Miami and currently lives and works in New Orleans—two precarious and vulnerable terrains that have majorly influenced her practice. Spanning performance, video installation, photography, and textile design, Molina’s artwork is set amongst landscapes both real and imagined—using the language of magical realism, her artworks centralize women’s stories to upend dominant histories.     Theodora Eliezer is a New Orleans-based multimedia artist and futurist. Their practice is characterized by interconnected narratives in installation, lens-based media, digital and physical artifacts, and related critical theory.     
     
 Images from Cristina Molina’s series The Matriachs