The Masur Museum has a full slate of children's summer camps. Evie Stewart, museum director, joins Cory Crowe on Lagniappe to discuss the numerous camps and the upcoming exhibit American Cowboy: Alternative Landscapes. The newest exhibit will run through August 1 with a public reception and gallery talk on May 22.
Summer camps include Plushie Buddie Camp, Ceramics Camp, and Cartoons, Comics and Anime Camp. More info on camps is available at masurmuseum.org
American Cowboys: Alternative Landscapes is a new exhibition at the Masur Museum of Art featuring works from the museum’s permanent collection, including a lithograph by Salvador Dali, alongside contributions from contemporary artists Jason Byron Nelson (Monroe, LA) and Grace Kennison (Ridgway, CO). Through painting, prints, and sculpture, the exhibition traces shifting visions of the American landscape—from the desert Southwest and mountain ranges to Louisiana’s bayous. At the center are questions about how we see, remember, and mythologize these terrains. The central cowboy figure serves as an entry point into larger themes: environmental change, historical industrial expansion, and the combination of personal memory with collective mythology. American Cowboys invites viewers to confront how familiar landscapes are reshaped—by commercialization, nostalgia, and power.
Artists:
Grace Kennison: “My work explores fantasy, motif, and apparition in the regional context of the American West. I often depict performances of freedom in my subjects because I am interested in the gestures and excesses that define such performances.
By replicating, diluting, and inventing elements of the commercially-imagined West, the work reaches for a way to describe my own relationship to place. I’m interested in the notion of settler memory, an idea from Indigenous Studies, that settler societies turn the living present into an imagined past, into a ghost. My work tries to poke fun at that fantasy, and even to identify with the ghosts. I also confront the role of women in colonial histories and the gendered perception of land in settler mythology.”
Jason Byron Nelson: “Jason Byron Nelson, born and raised in Louisiana, is a multidisciplinary artist, illustrator, and writer whose work draws from the richness of everyday life. Known for his eclectic methods—ranging from digital media to spray paint—Nelson is the creative mind behind the can art of Monroe’s Flying Tiger Brewery and the founder of Trick Button, a design boutique launched in 2018. A father, author of three illustrated books, and a frequent contributor to local causes, Nelson’s art bridges commercial and fine art spaces, blending whimsy with emotional depth. As he puts it, “We’re complicated people in a complicated time… I’m blessed to have found an avenue of expression people connect with.”
