In 1998, Jonathan Ferrara opened a gallery in New Orleans with a clear mission: “Be bold, take chances, and make an impact,” he says. More than a quarter century later, that ethos remains intact, thanks in part to a dynamic partnership.
Ferrara Showman Gallery, located on Julia Street in the city’s flourishing Arts District, is now co-helmed by Ferrara and Matthew Weldon Showman, whose curatorial chops and organizational savvy have helped propel it to international prominence.
Ferrara’s relationship with art developed by happenstance when he was working as a banker in Boston in the early 1990s. “An artist friend invited me to paint T-shirts,” he recalls. “It was one of the most transformative events in my life.” Soon, he was moonlighting as a painter in his basement studio while holding down a finance job by day.
In 1992, Ferrara relocated to New Orleans to work as a corporate fundraiser for the United Way. It didn’t take long for the city’s energy to lure him deeper into the creative world. He quit his day job in 1993, sold his car and supported himself by waiting tables while focusing on art.
By 1995, he’d cofounded Positive Space gallery, a short-lived venture that became nationally known for its provocative “Guns in the Hands of Artists” exhibition, with coverage in the New York Times and on Good Morning America.
He opened Jonathan Ferrara Gallery three years later. And in 1999, he bought an old 8,000-square-foot building on Carondelet Street.
“I spent the next twelve months gutting the building and transforming it into a commercial contemporary arts center that housed my gallery on the first floor and three creative tenants on the second floor,” Ferrara recalls. “I lived in the back apartment with a studio for my art. Go all in, or go home!”
Then, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck, “shredding the fabric of New Orleans,” along with the building, he says. “In 2007, picking up the pieces in a post-Katrina landscape, I took a significant gamble and bought a space on Julia Street, where the gallery is still located today.”
Showman came aboard in 2011, bringing institutional experience with him. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh with degrees in art history and anthropology, he had worked at places like the Andy Warhol Museum and interned at the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and Carnegie Museum of Art.
He was drawn to the Crescent City after a visit in 2010. “I couldn’t get New Orleans out of my mind,” he says. “Beyond the food and music, I was taken by the art scene — vibrant and still growing. I wanted to be part of it.”
He has expanded the gallery’s presence at art fairs, smoothed out its operations and deepened its roster, among other upgrades. “Matthew brought a keen curatorial eye, a definitive sense of structure and an impressive ability to work with collectors,” Ferrara says. “He’s helped refine the gallery’s image and complements my more intuitive approach.”
Their harmonious balance is most apparent in the Ferrara Showman Gallery’s programming. The current group show, “This City Holds Us,” marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, with a focus on resilience. “A spirit of triumph pervades the exhibition and brings a feeling of joy to the viewer,” Ferrara says.
Meanwhile, “Nowhere But Here,” a solo show by Kristin Moore, explores the landscapes and cityscapes of Louisiana, Texas and California through paintings of expansive skies and quiet environments, depicted as if seen through a windshield. (Both exhibitions are up through September 13.)
Looking ahead, this fall brings a call for artists to participate in the gallery’s 29th annual “NO DEAD ARTISTS” exhibition — a juried platform for emerging talent. Also on the calendar are an in-person show for figurative painter Trenity Thomas and a virtual one for Robert Minervini’s trompe l’oeil still lifes.
Together, Ferrara and Showman continue to shape a gallery that thrives on both vision and structure. As their latest shows reflect on place, memory and transformation, Introspective caught up with the duo to talk about the gallery’s origins, the impact of Katrina on the art scene and new trends in collecting.
In the group show “This City Holds Us,” how did you approach honoring the memory of Hurricane Katrina twenty years on?
Jonathan Ferrara: The exhibition celebrates the resiliency of the artists who lived through Katrina. Each one had a unique experience, as did everyone who lived through this traumatic event. We chose to focus on the here and now and not “go back” to those dark days.
As you walk through the exhibition, the combined works have a sense of vibrancy and celebration. We purposely chose works that evoke this sentiment so that as we remember what transpired twenty years ago, we applaud the power of art to heal.
How has the city’s art scene changed since you opened the gallery?
Ferrara: There are now several areas in the city that are hubs of creativity, with the growth of artist studios, retail outlets, co-op galleries and the main contemporary-art corridor on Julia Street, where we moved in 2007.
It has coalesced into a scene that is diverse in its artistic offerings and community engagement. White Linen Night now draws over 35,000 to the galleries on Julia Street. It’s one of the largest art events in the country.
And what’s happened to the arts since Katrina?
Ferrara: In some ways, Katrina was a catalyst for growth and innovation in the arts in New Orleans. It’s always been a place where creativity happens organically. This seminal event brought a national and international spotlight to New Orleans and her artists.
Young visionaries wanting to make a difference, determined to have their voices heard and eager to contribute to the rebirth of a major American city, descended upon New Orleans.
Prospect New Orleans, now a triennial, was founded right after Katrina, in the same way Documenta was founded in postwar Germany. It was conceived as a lifeline to the city’s art community, and over the next twenty years it had a positive impact, giving local artists the opportunity to exhibit their work alongside national and international talent.
How do you go about discovering and championing new voices in contemporary art?
Matthew Weldon Showman: The primary way is through our call for artists for the annual NO DEAD ARTISTS International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Art, which Jonathan founded thirty years ago and will soon open for the 2026 call.
We invite a rotating jury of art-world professionals to select roughly fifteen artists from hundreds of submissions. Past jurors have included Beth Rudin DeWoody, Billie Milam Weisman, C.C.H. Pounder, Dan Cameron, Franklin Sirmans and Nato Thompson, to name a few.
From each exhibition, we award one artist a solo exhibition the following year, and we typically continue to work with two or three others. I’ve also curated solo and group shows with artists who applied to the call but did not jury into the group exhibition.
Who’s one artist creating works that exemplify the type of art you gravitate toward?
Showman: Tiffany Calvert reflects an aspect of the gallery program that references art history but employs changes to subject matter and artistic process to either make a comment on history or resituate the image in the modern day.
Calvert collaborates with AI technology, feeding over a thousand source images of Dutch and Flemish Old Master still-life images into a dueling program and printing moments throughout the process.
She masks sections of the print to leave untouched and goes into the exposed areas to interpret further in oil paints. The resulting painting oscillates between abstraction and vaguely representational, continuing the conversation of the place, purpose and relevance of painting in the digital era.
Are you seeing a rise in interest in certain themes or mediums? What are collectors gravitating toward at Ferrara Showman right now?
Showman: Since the pandemic, there’s been an obvious yearning for human connection. People want to see people. Clients who, by and large, previously collected abstraction have turned to representational works and pivoted their collections to include more figurative and narrative art, as well as landscape, still-life, animal and nature scenes.
When the gallery first reopened post-pandemic, I curated a show of artists dealing with human relationships, and this marked the first exhibition of the paintings of Amanda Joy Brown. Her “Crowds” series felt otherworldly, capturing throngs of people gathering for different social activities — in a time when we were spending most of our time at home and social distancing in public.
It was also at this time that we began to work again with Kristin Moore, who was among the NO DEAD ARTISTS cohort of 2019. Her cityscapes evoke a sense of wanderlust and allow viewers to travel to the places in her paintings.
Tell us about an artist you helped put on the map.
Ferrara: Paul Villinski has been with the gallery for almost twenty years now, and the gallery has been instrumental in his success. I met Paul in 2004 in New York and knew I wanted to work with him the first time I went to his studio. His aesthetic of transformation and ascendancy spoke to me from the get-go.
In 2006, immediately after Katrina, I invited him to come to New Orleans and source his materials from a post-Katrina landscape. The resulting exhibition, “Airlift,” was a major success and, in fact, birthed a whole new vein of work in his studio practice. He found warped LP records in the Lower Ninth Ward near Fats Domino’s house and brought those back to his New York studio, where he transformed them into a flutter of butterflies ascending the wall.
In 2009, I was able to secure him a place in the first ever Prospect New Orleans exhibition, where he transformed a FEMA trailer, a symbol of destruction and suffering, into an off-the-grid, solar-powered, live/work studio environment.
What’s one piece that got away?
Showman: With any artist, there is always that one artwork from their oeuvre that really captivates you and you think, I want that for my own collection.
For me, that’s Anastasia Pelias’s Love, Pleasure, Water, which sold on 1stDibs to a brilliant interior designer in San Francisco. It’s a monumental-size color-field painting, transitioning from purple to green to blue and would be the hero-piece of any space.
Who would be your dream artist to exhibit?
Both: Yayoi Kusama.
Showman: Also, Genieve Figgis. I would love to exhibit her work. The themes she tackles would resonate well in New Orleans. I have two prints of hers in my own collection and have followed her career for over a decade. I simply adore her paintings!