Named for the founding chancellor of the University of New Orleans, the Homer L. Hitt Society recognizes donors who give $10,000 or more annually to support the University. Their generosity ensures that New Orleans' preeminent public university can continue to educate, ignite ingenuity and drive economic development in our region.
Thank you to our Homer L. Hitt Society donors for your continued support and commitment.
The purpose of the Homer L. Hitt Society Art Award is to recognize the artistic achievements of the student body, increase community awareness of the high quality of work produced at the University of New Orleans and recognize the philanthropic supporters who make so much possible.
Annually, since 2015, the UNO art faculty has selected a recipient of the Homer L. Hitt Society Art Award, which identifies the artistic achievements of the student body and increases community awareness of the high quality of work produced at the University of New Orleans. The selected artwork is reproduced as a limited edition and made available to our Homer L. Hitt Society donors for the previous year, in recognition of their philanthropic leadership.
Artist Statement: Meg Turner is a photographer and printmaker currently enrolled in The Masters of Fine Art program at The University of New Orleans. She relocated to New Orleans in 2009 to build The New Orleans Community Printshop and has been documenting the landscape of Louisiana, New England, and her own narrative as an artist, explorer, and queer-identified woman.
Her first major portfolio ‘Weathering’ features photogravure prints of old industrial sites from Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana: steel mills, power plants, and cold storage warehouses built in the industrial booms from the 1910s to the 1950s and abandoned in between the ’70s and ’90s. Meg is interested in the place these buildings currently occupy in the urban landscape - how they are woven into daily life despite officially being unoccupied and ignored.
Recently Meg has begun a new series ‘Wild is Free’ focusing on members of her community of artists, punks, families, and queers, and the locations they carve out for themselves to feel safe, celebrated, and free.
Artist Statement: I've been doing this sort of work for almost a decade. Street art, punk rock, and comic books definitely played a part early on in my development. Over the years, the techniques and color schemes I use to compose a painting have progressed through experimentation and have become more complex.
I think everything I do has a mixture of nature and nurture. The world pushes me around, and I push back. I observe, then I document. I interpret between my eyes through my hands. But the people in my paintings aren't famous or even people I've met. I don't even know who they are. I'm not sure if I found them or if they found me.
One day, while out for a jog, I happened to see someone's trash and noticed two photo albums from the 1890s. They're old, aged albums; one of them has a red linen cover with golden clasps. The albums are full of portraits, almost like a portfolio. Different people from different families, but most likely all from the same community.
When I found them, I saw my future. Seeing these unique people in this beautiful, casually discarded book really made me see how short life is on Earth. You only have so much time here, and you have to live with purpose passionately. The strangers in these photos-their spirits or ghosts, or just the power of their memory-have guided me in my life and work. Sometimes they nudge me, sometimes they slap me in the face. Sometimes they speak at just barely a whisper.
No matter how they speak, I would never be doing the type of work I am now had I not been in the right place at the right time with my eyes searching. So, I believe that everyone is meant to shine. That's you, that's me, that's everyone. Finding these photos helped me see that, and really inspired me to go after what I want to do.
They are my constant subjects while everything around them varies, changes patterns and moods, shifts in tone and color. That's not entirely different from anyone's life, really.
Artist Statement: Photography, as an act of seeing and framing, is central to my art practice. All photographs are, by nature, an abstraction of reality based on perspective and, while often thought of as an objective document, they create a scaled and flattened image of three dimensional space. A photograph is a representation, not an actualization, of reality. I am intrigued by this tension between our sensory experience of the physical world and the (often digital) means we use to make rectangular representations of it.
Using photographic processes, my aim is to create imaginary landscapes, to transform familiar objects, materials and scenes into something less ordinary. This image of Lake Pontchartrain started with a scene many of us are familiar with in New Orleans; I photographed it with my 35mm Pentax film camera and made dark room prints of different sizes. I then placed the smaller print on top of the larger print and digitally photographed and printed this simple collage, careful to include the reflections of ambient light on the two prints. By combining two prints of the same image of different scale, my intention is to call attention to the illusion of our collective perception of the physical world as well as the fallacy of the inherent truth of photography.
Artist Statement: I make art about nature, focusing on its relation to itself and to humans. I am compelled to find the unity in disparate bodies, drawn to parts of various lifeforms like the shape of strange fruit, the organization ,of flowers, mammalian facial features, and amphibian skin. I borrow from systems in nature to make my work with Frankensteinian sensibilities. I like to consider the sublimity of nature, both abject and beautiful, on an intimate scale as the aesthetic details of life are constantly changed through natural occurrences or through forced alteration by human manipulation.
Sculpture is my primary method of exploration, important to my work because I feel that it forces the viewer to react more immediately to a piece as it exists within their physical space. Individual pieces function as specimen, hybrid forms consisting of familiar living elements. I often use casting to explore ideas of cloning and combination, musing on evolution and the forms that develop in completely different ways for ultimately the same purposes. Drawing is another important element in my artistic practice, both for ideation and as finished work. Through careful drawing I can imagine beyond the physical limitations of scale or material.
The screen-printed image is a combination of parts of flora and fauna found on UNO's campus. To me, they become like the different fields of study at the University, all with their specific focuses but growing with or influenced by one another. Growth is a study on the beauty of creative potential and the variety of small living things I come across in my daily life at school.
Artist Statement: Using bold colors and focusing on elegant forms found in nature and of the body, I enjoy playing with shadow, composition, and form. Using a combination of realism and surrealism I create images that are at once familiar and intriguing. It is my intent to create narratives that are fantastical and nostalgic at the same time.
Summer Shadows is a piece that draws from the bold color pallet of New Orleans life and architecture to depict the beautiful everyday plant life we are so lucky to enjoy here, especially in the courtyard of the UNO Fine Arts building, where I worked on my preliminary drawings.
Currently, I am working on a series of aquatint etchings depicting scenes from my daily life as a queer woman existing within fringe artist, punk, and queer communities here in New Orleans, showing special and significant as well as seemingly insignificant moments in daily life and nightlife. I am also working on a series of satin silk screened, highly ornamented, beaded and sewn banners, depicting surreal, brightly colored imaginary worlds and characters that function as alter pieces or talisman. This series draws on a rich tradition of women artists using craft, kitche, and fiber art in their work, as well as being inspired by the orate costumery and colors found here in New Orleans.
Artist Statement: My work explores identity, culture, family, endings, and transitions; sometimes all together and sometimes individually. Nevertheless, my personal experiences are always present in my work.
I use media and techniques such as embroidery, knitting, textiles, cyanotype, papier Mache, video, printmaking, photography, and sculpture, among others.
My work usually carries a mystic, enigmatic or somber feeling. This is because I am drawn to the spiritual roots and rituals of my cultural heritage.
For the Homer L. Hitt Society Art Award I decided to work with one of my favorite techniques, Cyanotype. Cyanotype photography is one of the first photographical techniques. It was created by Sir John William Herschel in 1842. The cyanotype process consists of coating paper with an iron salt solution and exposing it to light. Anything placed onto the paper blocking the light will be white, while any part coming in contac t with the light will turn blue in the water bath during the developing process. This process was originally used to catalog botanical specimens by Anna Atkins and was the first photographical technique to be published in a book.
The Cyanotypes I made are one of a kind, each one of the prints are created individually by hand and are unique pieces. I kept the original blue color of the technique to represent the University of New Orleans. I used flowers, vegetation, lace, and handcrafted crochet pieces. A thin crocheted chain is the one element that is repeated in all the prints. This chain stands for the need of unity the world needs to go through this difficult moment.
Artist Bio: Hilary Dugas, M.F.A., is an avid printmaker and graphic designer who specializes in screen-printing. Her work has been exhibited in multiple galleries and platforms across the U.S., Australia, and most recently in London. Over the last decade, she has worked for large- and small-scale print shops and taught printmaking and design classes to children and adults. She was born, raised, and currently lives in New Orleans where she works as a freelance artist, graphic designer, and teacher.
Artist Statement: In my current practice, I deploy a system of mark-making to compose my abstract imagery within my prints. My marks are inspired and often made from objects in my surroundings that personally represent my compulsions and spiraling thoughts, which are caused by high levels of anxiety that I often experience.
Through my time in the Master of Fine Arts program at The University of New Orleans, I have explored techniques that include: screen printing, relief printing, drawing, painting, collage, and wood cut-outs as additional layers to my prints. Combining these different mediums and techniques with the knowledge of layering from printmaking has allowed me to create multiple visual systems and endless combinations. I convey repetitive motion, obsessive thoughts, and actions within my prints by overlapping and duplicating the marks. I break down the system and reconstruct it attempting to embrace chaos and concurrently impose control.
Artist Bio: Kjelshus Collins is an Oklahoma-born artist working in traditional printmaking and sculpture. Kjelshus attended Oklahoma State University earning a BFA and a BA in Art History. He spent much of his childhood with his parents selling their art around the country. Never one to focus on one art form, he often combines two different methods to create one piece, like printmaking with mod making to create a figurative piece in the form of a package toy. Kjelshus now lives in New Orleans. In May 2022, he completed his MFA at the University of New Orleans.
Artist Statement: Oklahoma is like your mixtape, time for your full release.”- The Super Sucklord, to me. Lower East Side, Manhattan, Spring 2017, NAEA conference.
In my view, artists are alchemists, mixing together materials much like making a mix tape. I seek to combine fine art with the lowbrow, using elements from kitsch in the spirit of Pop Art and rendering imagery with fine art techniques like relief and intaglio printing and ceramic sculpture (which itself has been regarded as a “craft” material). In doing so, I construct objects through a ritualistic process in which I begin to lose myself to the magic of creative production. Then I release these imbued objects to the masses, selling them through the artist’s commercial venues.
My printwork may be deemed as a satirical yarn on society and the sculptures are the artifacts of this metafictional society. These drastically different genres will often find themselves combined in my world; the casting and the printing become a whole new thing.
I’m a native of Oklahoma, and I identify with the history and the landscape of the place. There and elsewhere I indulge my love of junk shops, souks, bazaars, dig sites, museums, art theft, forgeries, bootlegs, curio cabinets, and toy stores. I’m fascinated by the human obsession with things. And then, I have always liked things like mysticism and prehistory, Star Wars and Vic’s Novelty, consumerism and mass production. All of these things I can brew together in a world-building venture through a self-stylized type of Pop-Brut-faux-kitsch. I work in a heavy amount of esotericism, but at the same time, if you are paying attention, I will make you laugh.
Clay, plastics, and paper are my mediums. Toys, pottery, zines, and other sundries are my subjects. Cargo cults are my muse. While you peruse my suites, keep all of this esotericism in mind and enjoy some late-stage capitalism.
Artist Bio: Christy Lorio, a Louisiana native, primarily examines concepts of loss, identity, and chronic illness, while also exploring the feeling of being at home in one’s body, through photography and writing. Lorio won the Society for Photographic Education’s South Central Caucus 2021 Conference Award, second place in Auburn Art Gallery’s “Landscapes” exhibition, and was a finalist in New Delta Review’s 2020-21 Ryan R. Gibbs Award for Photography. She was chosen as an Eddie Adams Workshop XXIV participant. She was also selected as a Fellow for the 2021 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference, hosted by the Piper Center at Arizona State University, where she presented on “Writing About Illness.”
Her artwork centers around living with stage IV rectal cancer, the same cancer her father died from when she was 21 years old. His life, and subsequent early death, largely factor into the work, as does Barataria Preserve, the swampy area in Jean Lafitte where Lorio grew up. Self-portraits and landscapes comprise the bulk of the visual imagery she creates.
Christy’s work has been selected and exhibited during two photography festivals: Photo NOLA and Atlanta Celebrates Photography. Other exhibitions include Louisiana Tech’s Louisiana Biennial Gallery (Ruston, LA) Auburn Art Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Millepiani Exhibition Space (Rome, Italy) and The Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, LA). Christy’s photography has also been published in Vice News, In These Times, and Analog Forever, among other places. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans.
Artist Statement: My work is a combination of digital and analog photography, old family photos, altered medical imaging, and familial objects. I utilize these materials and mediums to explore and reflect on the environment I grew up in. I contemplate the way my relationship with the land has evolved due to the death of my father to cancer, as well as my own cancer diagnosis. I respond to both my inner and outer landscapes, in response and reaction to my disease, which is contained inside myself, a darkness only revealed through medical scans.
Faculty Note: Christy Lorio was admitted, and enrolled, as an MFA Fine Arts student starting in the fall of 2020. Lorio sent this document, here in abridged form, via email on April 19, 2022, to the faculty of The University of New Orleans Fine Arts Department for Candidacy. She passed this benchmark in the second year of the three-year program and continued to pursue the Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Art at UNO until the time she passed in November, 2022.
Artist Statement: My work explores kinship, mystery, and reverence for the more-than-human world. Paintings and etchings emerge from intimate encounters with elements of nature that I inhabit and that inhabit me. I spend a lot of time in the swamps in and around the Atchafalaya Basin in South Louisiana, so the flora, fauna, light, and water I encounter there is especially present in my work. My presence in the landscape and practice in my studio strengthen my relationship with the land in its beauty and fragility, as well as my sense of responsibility for an environment that is on the front lines of a rapidly changing climate.
Here in Bulbancha (colonially known as New Orleans), which translates to “the land where many languages are spoken,” my practice is to continue to deepen my receptivity to more-than-human languages and ways of being. I consider each painting a record of all that we stand to lose as the planet warms and the land vanishes. I hope to invite viewers into an awareness of a kinship with the land that may become an antidote to estrangement, from the earth and each other and ourselves.
Anhingas is a print that represents one of the most iconic bird species of the South. Like many creatures that inhabit the swamp, the anhinga moves between worlds. Their unique slender profile (they’re also known as the “snakebird”) and markings make them easy to spot on cypress branches hanging over open water, or poking their heads above the surface after diving for fish. This is a bird I’m delighted to encounter whether I’m deep in the swamp, walking in City Park, or headed to UNO’s campus along the lakefront! I carved the original image out of a linoleum block to create a relief print, which I then photographed and translated to a screen print for this unique edition.
