Installation image of Ron Bechet’s From The Storms of Our Souls at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. Image courtesy of the artist.

New Orleans is one of those rare locations where the veil is perceptibly thin. Many spiritual systems acknowledge that our world – the world of the living, the anthropocentric, the present – is just one of many realities; there are certain places, seasons, or times of days when the separation between them dissolves and, as if wiping the condensation from a pane of glass, we can perceive the realms of ancestors or the consciousness of the more-than-human world with pronounced clarity. Here, our road traffic and daily errands must yield to the flows of second-lines, homes are nestled betwixt blocks-wide cemeteries, and with parts of the city lying six feet below sea level, one could say we occupy a kind of underworld.

Ron Bechet’s artistic practice is an ode to these thresholds, and his current retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Center, titled From The Storms of Our Souls, celebrates his engagement with liminality and the in-between. Over a decades-long career, Bechet’s virtuosic charcoal drawings have returned to and reworked one primary subject: the forest floor, an ecology that is only partially visible above-ground, but which extends downwards through the soil beneath our feet. He renders the bases of tree trunks, bulbous roots and twisting vines in constant, entropic motion, signaling the entanglements of life and death, present and past, the physical and the spiritual. Yet the drawings are far from redundant: in one, vine-like tendrils might swirl into tumbleweeds; in another, the ground cracks open like sheets of mica or shale. 

Installation image of Ron Bechet’s From The Storms of Our Souls at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. Image courtesy of the artist.

Curator Shana M. griffin writes that the artist embraces a distinctly Black visuality that “challenges the overlooked experiences, voices, teachings, and whispers of ancestral wisdom reflected in nature.” Indeed, Bechet’s art dismisses the Eurocentric history of landscape representation, wherein expansive vistas of pastoral hillsides and productive farmlands are typically glimpsed from above and afar, allowing viewers to enjoy a sense of ownership and control over nature. It is no coincidence that landscape painting reached its apex alongside the rise of imperialism, settler colonialism, and extractive capitalism. This is not a tradition with which Bechet’s work engages. His drawings, instead, place us down in the beautiful muck of the natural world, forcing us to fathom its animacy and matter. He renders new growth blossoming from decay; thick roots curling into body-like chrysalides; and hollow cavities that resemble our own viscera, our wombs, challenging the condition of alienation that is a hallmark of post-industrial modernity. 

Across the exhibition, Bechet’s monumental works on paper rival the immersive scale of those precedent panoramas of European art, stretching from floor to ceiling and hugging the arcs of the CAC’s curved walls. They also expand into three dimensions: in wall-mounted sculptures like Validity of the Root and Value’s Persuasion, both 2014, Bechet’s charcoal marks wrap around geometric armatures that jut out towards the viewer. It is imperative that Bechet—a Black, New Orleans native—is really taking up space here, asserting the significance of his presence in the city’s art scene and invoking Black and Indigenous ancestral legacies and geo-ecologies as his work fills the museum’s architectural breadth.

Installation image of Ron Bechet’s Listing Through My Fears, For My Sons, 2025 at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. Image courtesy of the artist.

One of the exhibition’s standout works is a site-specific drawing within the CAC’s iconic oval gallery. Titled Listing Through My Fears, For My Sons, 2025, it immerses the viewer within a sublime torrent of roots and branches. This cycloramic format places us in what feels like the eye of a hurricane, as we are dwarfed and surrounded by a vortex of blasted tree trunks, electrified branches, and root systems that undulate like ocean waves, just above eye level. More than mere reverence for the sublimity of nature, this tempest represents a manifestation of collective and personal anxieties: amidst the rise of domestic fascism, over-policing, divestment from poor and marginalized communities and detainments without due process, how do we protect our loved ones? As we harness the courage to crash through the eye-wall, will we emerge transformed?

See From The Storms of Our Souls at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, 900 Camp St, New Orleans, LA 70130, through October 4, 2025. The exhibition will conclude with a live performance and ceremony. 

Ron Bechet, Vulnerability, 2016, Charcoal on paper, 143 x 216 in. Courtesy of the Artist, Photo: Shana M. griffin.