Aaron Collier

Bio Aaron Collier is a visual artist living in New Orleans. He teaches drawing and painting at Tulane University as an Assistant Professor. Solo exhibitions of his work have occurred…

Laurie Alan Browne

Bio By utilizing wildly uncontrollable colors as negative space, mixed media artist and painter Laurie Alan Browne challenges the viewer to confront social injustices and personal struggles as hopeful opportunities…

Andrea Brown

Bio Andrea Brown is a passionate and prolific mixed media artist. She is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design (Textiles and Glass), and studied abroad in the south…

Lily Brooks

Bio Lily Brooks received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art + Design in 2006 and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. Her ongoing…

Michele Blevins

Bio Michele Blevins is a retired, life long self-taught artist, who is at a period in her life to fully immerse herself in passion for art. She works in a…

Aron Belka

Bio New Orleans-based artist Aron Belka is best known for his large format portraits that are surprisingly intimate despite their scale. His work has been included in exhibitions at the…

Peter Barnitz

Bio Peter Barnitz received his MFA from the University of New Orleans in 2011 and his BFA from Loyola University of New Orleans in 2004. In 2012 he established the…

David Armentor

Whitten Sabbatini

Read More about Whitten Sabbatini

Whitten Sabbatini

Bio

Whitten Sabbatini (b. 1990, Mississippi) received his MFA from Columbia College in 2017. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including recent shows at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and Mana Contemporary in Chicago. Sabbatini worked as the Curatorial Review Coordinator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography from 2014 – 2017. His work has been published frequently in periodicals including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, Aint-Bad Magazine: The American South and Mossless: The United States 2003 – 2013. Sabbatini’s photographs are held in various permanent collections, including The Do Good Fund, Candela Books, and The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Artist Statement

In 2014, I found myself living outside of the American South for the first time in order to attend a three year graduate program located just up Interstate 55, the stretch of asphalt that links Jackson to Memphis, and Memphis to Chicago. I’m not quite able to put into any sort of sufficient words the kind of dizzying pull that the region has on me, but while struggling through school in a new place, I constantly sought after others who had previously expressed similar feelings: The way Carson McCullers describes relationships in a small Georgia town in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Jr’s Kimbrough’s sad, drunken lyrics in recordings from the Mississippi Hill Country.

The pictures that form Another Day in Paradise were made on several trips taken back home between 2015 – 2016. As a child, I remember my father once using the phrase, “It’s another day in Paradise,” as a way in which to show how grateful he was for the day’s simple blessings. As I grew older, I began to admire this phrase and what I believed it represented, as it was spoken with such sincerity by a man adopted from Italy and raised on the land of the Mississippi Delta.

For me personally, Paradise is the type of place where every ordinary day could be seen as a sort of idealised perfection, one where folks toil the earth, work on their cars, and spray paint “Honk If You’re Horny!” on interstate bridges.

Image credit: Whitten Sabbatini, Couple in Park, 2016, Archival pigment print, 16 x 20 inches

Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Aaron Collier

Aaron Collier

Laurie Alan Browne

Andrea Brown

Lily Brooks

Michele Blevins

Aron Belka

Peter Barnitz

David Armentor

Whitten Sabbatini

Whitten Sabbatini

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