Ace NOLA’s Artist in Residence (AIR) program, will launch its next exhibition from artist Sultana Isham this Friday, November 17. Across Ace globally, AIR invites local artists for a month-long hotel stay to create works that are then displayed on a quarterly basis. Ace NOLA’s Artist Program
Sultana Isham is an award-winning film composer, violinist, writer and published scholar based in New Orleans, LA. Isham’s film composer credits range from avant-garde, horror, fantasy and archival, combining natural sounds with composition. Earlier this year, she made her conductor/composer debut with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. Isham previously worked as a researcher and composer on the PBS documentary “All Skinfolk Ain’t Kinfolk” and the films “Ailey” and “The Neutral Ground” which debuted at the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals. Up next, her score will appear in the HBO mini-series “Stax Records.” As a solo artist, Isham has performed with renowned musicians including Miri Ben-Ari, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, John Mayer and Pink Floyd. She has also lectured as an ethnomusicologist at universities including Tulane University and Reed College and has been published in a number of academic and archival journals.
Isham will be showcasing her work at Ace New Orleans from November 17, 2023 – January 2024. “Them Handy Sisters,” on view at Ace starting this Friday, is a sonic-based archival exhibition on the lives and works of performers-musicologists Dr. Geneva Handy Southall and D. Antoinette Handy. This exhibition is a collaboration with their descendents, Tisch Jones and Patrice E. Jones of Handy Heights.
Hailing from a multi-generational classically-trained musical family from New Orleans with pre-emancipation origins in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, Geneva and Antoinette made international acclaim as musicians and historians of various Black musical traditions, performers, and composers. Antoinette and Geneva toured Europe together as a classical chamber ensemble in the 1950s, and both made history independently despite the gendered racialization of sound. Dr. Geneva was Ellis Marsalis’ first piano teacher, and between 1970 and 2000, Dr. Geneva Handy Southall wrote a three-volume thesis titled “Blind Tom: The Black Pianist-Composer; Continuously Enslaved.
D. Antoinette was the music director for the National Endowment of the Arts and was a faculty member at several universities, such as Virginia State College. She was the first Black female to solo with the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra while she was still in high school. She was a member of several symphony orchestras and recorded an album of chamber music called “Black Images.” Her best-known books include “Black women in American bands and orchestras,” “Black Conductors,” and “Jazz Man’s Journey,” the only biography of Ellis Marsalis.
Following Sultana’s residency, Chef Jasmine Robinson and Donaka Autry will also participate in residencies over the next year. These artists were selected in collaboration with the locally based curatorial partner Material Institute, a nonprofit arts center in the 9th Ward providing resources to a new generation of artists across music, fashion, and community gardening.
Ace Artist in Residence (AIR) was first launched in 2014 at Ace Hotel New York. More than 350 artists stayed over and turned their rooms into studios, creating work of all types. Nearly ten years after it began, AIR returned to New York and expanded to Brooklyn, Kyoto, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Palm Springs, Sydney and Toronto. They’ve partnered with local collectives and organizations to co-curate a lineup of four artists, per property. Over the next year these artists are given time and space to create and to exhibit or showcase their work in celebration with community. You can read more about the program and our exceptional curatorial partners here.
Ace NOLA’s Artist Program
