An Opportunity for Emerging Artists to Collaborate and Produce New Work!
About the North Louisiana Arts Interchange
The Arts Interchange program originated during the COVID-19 pandemic when the arts community in Ruston, Louisiana, came together to keep artists connected despite physical isolation. In 2022, the Ross Lynn Charitable Foundation launched the North Louisiana Arts Interchange project in partnership with the North Central Louisiana Arts Council, supported by a Project Grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts. The inaugural year of Arts Interchange was a bold experiment that challenged artists from Louisiana and neighboring states, resulting in numerous inspiring works of art and fostering strong relationships among the participants. In 2021, RLCF affirmed its dedication to the initiative by establishing Arts Interchange as an annual program offering.
In its current form, Arts Interchange is described as a “baby residency,” allowing artists to step out of their regular practices and explore new experiences without significantly disrupting their daily lives. The program accommodates practicing artists, educators, students, and aspiring full-time artists, enabling them to fit the activities into their weekly schedules while maintaining their other commitments. For emerging and younger artists, Arts Interchange offers an opportunity to expand their practices and build valuable connections with fellow artists. For more seasoned participants, the program provides a refreshing break, allowing them to explore new ideas and collaborations that can reinvigorate their creative practices.
At its core, Arts Interchange brings together artists to talk, play, and collaborate, fostering a deeper understanding of one another and themselves. Through this experience, the program aims to leave participants with new friendships, innovative ideas, and a renewed relationship with their art. The experience culminates in an exhibit in the Gilbert Center Gallery in Ruston, Louisiana.
2026 North Louisiana Arts Interchange Artists
Lemon Burnside
Bastrop, LA
Instagram: Soft_Lemon_Pie
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I find myself trying to collect/recollect all the times in childhood that I need to remember to feel valid in existence. Recollection turns into a tool for a path of self reflection. My ceramic pieces and sculptures help me build a scrapbook of memories to investigate my childhood experience. “Artifacts” like objects, toys, and photos help contextualize, though incomplete. Objects I cast to last forever come not only from my own collection, but found second hand. Mold recreation can provide an authentic beginning. They then are processed with imperfections of time and recall.
Being a rural kid, the woods speak to my surroundings growing up. Fragments of rocks, dirt, pine straw, leaves, etc are embedded with my sculptures like toys forever lost in the forest. I see myself reflected in these objects and perhaps carry fragments of others’ memories. With each piece on the shelf, I grow a collection of history so little to be forgotten but important to growth, character, and life.
Trinity Conant
Shreveport, LA
Instagram: trinityconant_art
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As a Black Queer Person, I find myself always asking questions about my identity. I explore themes like childhood, spirituality and/or the “inner self”, duality, and gender euphoria. I use vibrant color palettes, various textures, symbolism, and dramatic lighting as tools to explore different themes in my portraits. I'm enjoying exploring new mediums and new ways of thinking. My art is still evolving and I'm always learning new things that inspire me. I embrace the change knowing that my ideas of self acceptance and appreciation for life will find its way to show itself no matter what.
Fable Hyde
Ruston, LA
Instagram: Fable360
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I don't think that craft or technique are intrinsic factors in "good art". I care much more about what the art means to the maker and the viewer, and the conversations that that can lead to. If my art leads to nothing else, I hope it will lead to a few conversations that make you go "wow, I never knew I was that person inside" afterwards. As for my mediums, they are whatever is most loyal to the piece I am trying to make, which always starts out as an idea: a sanctuary, a question, a feeling of tension. I use art to ruminate on the things I didn't know about myself, uncomfortable feelings I contact every day without realizing, and I use it to process long-past memories, the pain of which I'm still dealing with. I don't think there is anything that makes me especially unique or inspiring, except for the fact that every choice I've ever made has made me what I am and no one else.
Lo Patt
Little Rock, AR
Instagram: the.esoteric.artistt
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Lo Patt is a Little Rock–based mixed media artist working in collage, assemblage, photography, painting, and installation. She received her B.A. in Studio Art from California State University, Long Beach (2021), where she worked as an analog and digital photography lab technician and developed a materially driven practice rooted in personal narrative.
Patt has presented five solo exhibitions, most recently Revival (The Window on Sixth, 2026), and has exhibited nationally, including the Arkansas Arts Council’s Small Works on Paper annually touring exhibition (2025) and the Lawrence Arts Center’s annual 8x8 exhibition, where she won Best in Show (2024). Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Windgate Center of Art + Design at UA Little Rock, the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, Southern Arkansas University, Harding University, the Lawrence Arts Center, and Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum’s virtual gallery.
In addition to her studio practice, Patt is actively engaged in arts education and community-based work. She is a Windgate Art School Instructor at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and has facilitated youth art camps, retreats, and public mural projects throughout Arkansas. She is an alum of the 2024 Artist INC Little Rock cohort through Mid-America Arts Alliance. Her work and community projects have been featured in the Arkansas Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Arkansas Department of Heritage, and THV11.
Her materially driven practice interrogates memory, domestic rupture, queer identity in the American South, and the politics of attachment, using found objects and photographic fragments to destabilize nostalgia and reconfigure personal narrative as a site of resistance and reconstruction.
Artist Statement
My work emerges from intimate relationships — the ones that shape us, rupture us, and refuse to fully release us. Through personal snapshots, found object assemblage, fabric, cut paper, and expressive mark making, I construct layered compositions that feel both tender and unresolved. Attached to materials that carry their own histories, I use them to reposition memory as something fragile and nonlinear.
Rooted in lived experience, my practice explores love and loss, nostalgia, grief, and the ever unfolding process of coming home to oneself. I am interested in the undercurrents of dysfunctional domestic spaces, venomous attachments to a person or substance, and inherited systems of oppression that take root in private shadows, contributing to an interior emotional residue. As a queer femme in the American South, I approach these themes as both witness and participant, navigating what is held back and what is revealed.
Shadows, silhouettes, exalted ordinary objects, de-personified figures, transparency barriers and poetic text appear throughout my work as gestures toward what is just out of view. The works become reconfigurations of myself, negotiations between concealment and exposure, vulnerability and protection to one’s inner world.
J.R. Welch
New Orleans, LA
Instagram: thejrwelch
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My work explores the tension between memory and place—how landscapes hold emotional residue long after the people and events that shaped them have moved on. Working in large-scale charcoal drawings, soft pastels, acrylic, and archival pigment photography, I examine how personal and collective histories are embedded in domestic interiors, abandoned structures, and Southern environments shaped by migration, industry, and the endurance rural impoverished communities practice. I grew up in Hayti, Missouri, where the Mississippi River isn't scenic—it's a fact of life. It floods. It destroys things and gives life to things. That corridor between small towns and cities along the river gave me my first education in contrast: survival-driven spaces versus aspirational ones, what's kept in memory and what needs to be healed. That duality still lives in my work. I’ve spent twenty years in New Orleans, a city that understands rupture and return better than almost anywhere.
Logan Stevens
Choudrant, LA
Instagram: slogan.me
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My sculptures were initially formal experiments in light, color and form. More recently I’ve been exploring the feminine and vaginal forms that were occurring naturally in my work. The forms now are more intentionally feminine and often, aggressively frilly. The goal being to make the viewer consider why such forms create feelings of joy and empowerment in some and revulsion or dismissal from others, due to their perceived feminine nature.
Paul Wolfe
Ruston, LA
Instagram: paul_c_wolfe
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My work comes from a constant questioning of value and worthiness. I ask the same question constantly, am I valuable, am I worthy, how does one know if they are those things? This line of questioning comes from living in a world that measures people through productivity, appearance, success, and approval. I am interested in how these systems shape the way we see ourselves, and how quickly worth can feel conditional or fragile. When people see my work they often see a person that casts a wide net and can't seem to pick a medium or subject matter, but I have come to realize with all my experimentation every piece I make is a question. Does this make me valuable now? By exposing my own questioning, I hope to create space for viewers to reflect on how they define value in themselves and others, and whether worth is something that must be proven or something that exists without permission.
Lindsey Pearce
Burelson, TX
Instagram: lpearce_studio
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My name is Lindsey Pearce. I grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, graduated from LSU with a degree in art education and have been a high school art teacher for 27 years. I currently live and work in Burleson, Texas, just a few miles south of Fort Worth. The “ArkLaTex” has definitely shaped my life in many ways! I have taught AP Art & Design for over 20 years and have been a College Board Reader for Art & Design since 2020. Through my guidance, hundreds of students have gone on to become artists, professionals, and most importantly, good citizens. My own personal art style varies quite a bit because I have always been influenced by the different styles, materials, techniques and artists my students are currently working with. My drawings, paintings, collages and mixed media works are iterative, experimental, creative problems that utilize bold color, textures and patterns. I like to give myself a “problem to solve”, in that I may not know what the outcome of the piece will be.
Amye Wake
Arlington, TX
Instagram: amyewake
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I use found objects, but they're really found subjects. I add collage, assemblage, sewing and painting techniques to form upholstered wall pieces. The creative ideas and physical materials are processed simultaneously, while I am assembling and attaching pieces. Memories feel like paging through an old scrapbook instead of making one. Most of my work resembles a canvas stretcher, being painted, but with all the wrong tools and supplies. I thoroughly enjoyed learning to create my own canvases, so now I just substitute in and out the things that make an object and not just a picture.