PhD candidate Kaillee Coleman co-curated the exhibition "Poetic Gaps: Opacity in the Photographic Imprint" at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane
For the first time, the Newcomb Art Museum presents an exhibition entirely curated by Tulane graduate students. Poetic Gaps: Opacity in the Photographic Imprint is co-curated by Kaillee Coleman, an advanced doctoral candidate in the joint PhD program in Art History and Latin American Studies, and Fei Xie, an outgoing MA candidate in Art History. Drawing on Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concepts of “opacity” and “poetics,” the exhibition creates a dialogue between the Newcomb Art Museum’s permanent collection and works by five contemporary artists with strong ties to New Orleans: Shabez Jamal, Brandon Chavis, Cristina Molina, Gabrielle Garcia Steib, and Jeremy Jernegan.
We spoke with Kaillee Coleman about the curatorial process behind Poetic Gaps: Opacity in the Photographic Imprint and what this exhibition means for the museum, her research, and the broader community.
Poetic Gaps: Opacity in the Photographic Imprint officially opens with a reception on Friday, September 19, from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m., and will feature a special curatorial conversation with select artists on Thursday, October 16, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view at the Newcomb Art Museum (Woldenberg Art Center) through January 16, 2026.
How did the idea for Poetic Gaps: Opacity in the Photographic Imprint first come about?
Hi! Thank you so much for asking! I began working at the Newcomb Art Museum [NAM] in January 2024 as a curatorial assistant under Maurita Poole, the museum’s Director and Chief Curator. I spent the first nine months or so of my time working at NAM assisting with general curatorial tasks—doing research on the museum’s permanent collection and artists of potential interest, assisting with programming, sitting in on a wide array of meetings and just generally learning how the museum works. Around October of 2024, Maurita approached Fei Xie—another graduate student curatorial assistant who had been working at the museum for multiple months at that point—and I with the possibility of curating a permanent collection-based exhibition for the museum. We were lucky in a number of ways that made this opportunity possible: there was an opening in the museum’s exhibition schedule, and Maurita knew that both Fei and I had previous experience working in museums as well as a dedicated interest in pursuing museum-based professional pathways after our respective graduate degrees were completed. The idea was suggested to us to use Newcomb Art Museum’s photographic works as a starting point, and we got right to work combing through the collection to find pieces that spoke to us! The actual curatorial concept of the show is aligned with my doctoral dissertation research and came into being through many months of iterative work. Though Fei and I co-curated the exhibition, the strength of its’ vision and execution is a testament to many, many, many conversations and rounds of feedback from the whole museum staff!
How long did it take to bring the exhibition together, and what were some of the main challenges along the way?
Altogether, it took just under a year for the exhibition to come together! I would say that some of the biggest challenges along the way came about through the (perhaps) unconventional process of curating this show! Rather than starting with a specific artist, or from a particular curatorial idea, we were tasked first with starting from a wide swath of works in the permanent collection, building out a curatorial concept, and then finding ways to connect those works from the permanent collection (and our curatorial vision) with both Tulane—as a working academic community—and New Orleans more broadly—as a vibrant and thriving artistic community. But really, those things weren’t so much challenges as opportunities to think really critically and generatively about which local artists—or artists with deep local ties—that we wanted to put into conversation with the NAM permanent collection, as well as to think about how we could connect our exhibition with classes and students across different fields and schools!
In what ways does this exhibition connect to or reflect your own research interests?
My research, broadly, is rooted in contemporary Caribbean art and cultural production. More specifically though, I see all of my various areas of work as routed through a vocabulary of unbounded-ness. The grounding idea (or, “speculative prompt,” as we name it in our exhibition didactics) of Poetic Gaps: Opacity in the Photographic Imprint comes from the work of Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant – especially his articulations around opacity and poetics. What really drove us, as we began to solidify this exhibition, were the ways in which photography (as an artistic medium and an archival practice) can act as an agent of poetic opacity. A running theme throughout all the works in this exhibition—a connective tissue, perhaps—is the idea that the photographed subject asserts its’ right to remain not fully known, not fully seen, not fully captured; just as the photographed landscape (whether social or environmental) asserts its’ right to remain in motion, in movement, unbounded and uncontained by the enactment of borders, frames, or even static mapping.
Another one of Glissant’s key ideas (“space-time”) is central to my own doctoral dissertation – entitled “When I Am Not Here: Estoy Allá: Visualizing Expansive Space-Time in Caribbean Diasporic Memory” and which looks closely at a ‘curated’ network of contemporary Caribbean diasporic artists. In many ways, I see the work of Poetic Gaps as another living strand of my scholastic practice—which I think of as an in-flux project, or container, for the questions that drive at me. New Orleans, too, feels like the perfect place for this show and for my research to co-exist—as a place that is often referred to as the “northernmost city in the Caribbean,” a space that is older than empire or country and which defies neat delineation into prescribed frames of capture or understanding.
On a personal and professional level, what do you take away from this experience of curating Poetic Gaps?
On a personal and professional level, I can honestly say that co-curating Poetic Gaps with Fei has been the highlight of not just my career at Tulane, but my career as a whole! I’ve worked in and out of academia for a long time already at this point—I earned my undergraduate degrees in Interdisciplinary Art (emphasis in theatre) and Art History at Seattle University over a period of ten years, took a few years off to work in museums and as a practicing artist, came to Tulane in 2020 to do my MA degree in Latin American Studies, and am nearing the end of my joint PhD in Art History and Latin American Studies right now. It’s been a bumpy road at times, but I feel that I’ve always felt most aligned with the work that I’m doing in academia when it comes out of the vacuum—meaning, when it makes its’ way into public spheres and into living spaces of critical thought, reflection, and dialogue. In that way, being able to put all of this research I've been poking at for the last 15+ years into an exhibition (rather than, say, a paper or a journal article) has reaffirmed for me that there are so many pathways for scholarship to exist and to make an impact. One of my biggest hopes is that others will see this show and will be excited, in their own way, to think about how they can produce scholarship on their own terms! More than ever, it’s deeply important that we make space for critical thought, and generative engagement, wherever and however we can.
What do you hope visitors will take away from experiencing the exhibition?
Sort of related to my answer to the previous question, but my biggest hope is that visitors will take away a more expanded sense of the following propositions: identity is unfixed and always changing; place is unfixed and always changing; memory is unfixed and always changing; space and self and site and the archive are unfixed and always changing. I say this with a huge sense of wonder and curiosity and care! Rather than meaning that there is no meaning in any of these formulations (i.e.: identity, self, place, site, etc.), I hope Poetic Gaps prompts visitors to contemplate the meaning-making they are engaged in constantly throughout their lives as they grow, change, shed old selves, migrate or move, encounter new ideas, grow into who they will be.
Why should Latin Americanists—and those interested in New Orleans’ cultural connections to Latin America—make a point to visit this exhibition?
There are so many reasons! Not only does this show take very seriously a number of ideas and processes that are closely related to Latin American Studies (i.e.: diaspora, archival practice, migration, waterways and environment, etc.), but also the show features a couple of artists whose art practices are firmly rooted in New Orleans / Latin American cultural connections and shared histories!
One artist—Gabrielle Garcia Steib—has work in the show entitled “Nueva Orleans es La Frontera Espiritual con El Caribe” (2025) which blends Super 8 film stills, hand-marked prints, family photographs, and archival documents to create a scene of in-flux familial and political histories. Her work is particularly relevant and potent to Latin Americanists! (She also has work up currently in the 40th anniversary edition of the much-celebrated “New Photography” series at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC); more info available here).
There is also work in the show from Cristina Molina, a New Orleans-based artist (originally from Miami, FL but with family from Cuba) whose practice is rooted in environmentally precarious cities, which in turn have influenced her research on identity, loss, and disappearing landscapes.
The show features, for the first time, a work by the Cuban artist collective Los Carpinteros, generously donated by Martin Dimitrov in memory of Ana López. Could you tell us more about this piece and its significance within the exhibition?
Yes, absolutely! We have a sculptural piece in the exhibition called “Sandalia” that was created by the Cuban artist collective Los Carpinteros in 2004. In “Sandalia,” Los Carpinteros cast rubber sandals with imprinted street maps of Havana’s Old City and Vedado. In this cast rubber work, the photographic imprint is unlinked from the photograph itself. Expanding into the realm of sculpture, the photographic imprint of city grids and built architecture are linked to lived movement and bodily memory. In “Sandalia,” urban space becomes something inseparable from the body, mapped out and shaped by the act of passing through.
“Sandalia” was recently donated to Newcomb Art Museum by Martin K. Dimitrov (professor and current department chair in Political Science) in honor of Ana M. López, who passed away in 2023. Ana was a prolific and, in truth, foundational scholar on Latin American cultural studies—film in particular but her work was not content to held to just cinema.
She arrived at Tulane in 1986 as an assistant professor in the Department of Communication. She rose to the position of full professor in the department and continued to teach and conduct scholarly research there, recently serving as the chair of the department. López also had an active leadership role in Tulane’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies, where she became director of the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute in 2000, establishing major new program initiatives and expanding its scope to encompass the Caribbean basin.
Anyone who came into Ana’s orbit was lucky to know her. I was one lucky enough to do so. Though the story of “Sandalia” and I goes even further back—in a turn of events I like to think she would have enjoyed hearing! I first encountered “Sandalia” in a show at the Seattle Art Museum in 2017 called Everyday Poetics. This was during the time when I had decided to return to school to complete an undergrad in art history, and it marked a massively transitional moment in my life. To this day, I credit the exhibition Everyday Poetics, and the version of “Sandalia” I saw then, as the pieces that set my sights on a path towards a graduate degree and career in Caribbean diasporic art history. As someone who grew up in South Florida —a space so deeply formed by Caribbean diasporas as to be unthinkable without them—it took my move to Seattle, and almost the whole decade I spent there, to start to see the outlines of the place where I was from. “Sandalia” got me thinking clearly on this, and I used my analysis on it as part of my writing sample when I applied to Tulane for my MA in Latin American Studies! In a full circle moment, it was right around the time that I began my work at Newcomb Art Museum that Martin offered to donate the work to the museum in honor of Ana. Being able to help steward it into our permanent collection in her memory is a moment I won’t soon forget.
