Recent Exhibitions
You Can’t Hide the Sun
Two-person exhibition with Ron Bechet
Other Plans Gallery
New Orleans, LA
April-June 2024
“Very few artists so articulately speak to our environmental futures as Hannah Chalew and Ron Bechet. In their exhibition You Can’t Hide the Sun, both artists synergistically bring beauty and life to materiality with a laser focus that incorporates all ingredients into the pot: (im)mortality, timeliness and timelessness, colonialism, and wild nature.“
- Denise Frazier, educator, musician, interdisciplinary artist
Dry Cypress Bayou
Solo Exhibition at Ibis Contemporary
New Orleans, LA
January 2023
Dry Cypress Bayou is the name of a place that no longer exists; it is one of 30 place names that NOAA removed from its maps in 2011 because coastal erosion had disintegrated the land around these former bodies of water, turning them into open water. We live in an “oil and gas state,” with a coastline whose unraveling is both caused by and exacerbated by these industries, yet we fail to shift course. These recent drawings and sculptural drawings, created with paper and inks I handmade from my local ecosystem, reference the changing nature of place in Southern Louisiana.
Installation view featuring Bouyancy Factor, Petroplexus and Feedback LOOP (from left to right)
Structural Trap
Solo Exhibition at the Front Gallery
New Orleans, LA
Spring 2022
A structural trap is the name of the geological structure formed when massive layers of rock are bent or faulted from Earth’s shifting landmass and create reservoirs or “traps” of petroleum. This title also references the situation Louisiana faces as an oil and gas state, with a coastline whose disintegration is being both caused by and exacerbated by these industries, yet we fail to change course. This work combines sugarcane, the staple chattel slavery crop, with single-use disposable plastic waste, linking fossil fuel extraction and plastic production to their capitalist, settler-colonist roots; these industries have exploited people and the landscape for centuries. Plants, both living and dead, weave through these drawings and sculptures—bridging past and present with visions of the future ecosystems that might emerge from our culture’s detritus if the status quo remains unchanged.
Installation view featuring Petroplexus, Study for Collapsosophy, Pipelandia and Structural Trap (left to right)
Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys?
Group exhibition at Whitespace curated by Corey Oberlander, Jamie Steele + Lindsey Stapleton
Atlanta, GA
Spring 2022
This show considered the disparity between a collective expectation of nature-as-experience and the reality of what’s actually there. The twelve participating artists present work that both directly and indirectly reacts to the trouble with the idea of wilderness, today - whether by illustrating the ways in which we irrevocably altered our big natural world, opportunities to honor or exist within real nature, or just how farcical attempts at reconveyance with the myth of true wilderness have been throughout history.
Installation view of my sculpture, Pipelandia
Eco-Urgency: Now or Never
Group exhibition at Wave Hill
Bronx, NY
Fall 2021
My drawing, Embodied Emissions, was featured in this two-part exhibition co-organized by Wave Hill and Lehman College Art Gallery, showing the varied responses to our current ecological crisis by artists working across wide-ranging practices. This show brought together artists looking at the urgency of the present moment, raising awareness through a holistic approach to understanding social, political and environmental concerns.
Installation view. Clockwise from left: Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, “The Violence of Care”; Allora & Calzadilla, “The Great Silence”, text written in collaboration with Ted Chiang, courtesy of the artists and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; Mary Mattingly, “Along the Lines of Displacement”; Alison Moritsugu, “Talisman”; Hannah Chalew, “Embodied Emissions”. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Stefan Hagen.
Horizon Flux
Two-person exhibition with Lily Brooks at YesWeCannibal
Baton Rouge, LA
October 2021
An interdisciplinary visual conversation around capitalism, ecosystems, and systems of oppression. Together, these works examine the relics of past and present: in surfaces aboveground and below, in ties between sugar and petroleum, and in the presence of water and sediment. These works visualize the local landscape in relationship with global concerns around climate change, anthropogenic landscape, and our collective uncertain future.
Installation view with photographs by Lily Brooks on far left and right, and Tremblant (middle left), and Study for Structural Trap (middle right)
Solastalgia: Book Art and the Climate Crisis
Group exhibition at the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts
Minneapolis, MN
Summer/Fall 2021
Solastalgia: Book Art and the Climate Crisis, curated by Director of Exhibitions & Artist Programs Torey Erin, features expansive and experimental works by twenty local, national, and international artists addressing the paradoxical nature of grief, despair, beauty, elegy, regeneration, and loss that we are facing as we confront one of the most defining issues of our time.
My drawing, Solastalgia, was featured on the title wall (left).
The American Dream Denied: The New Orleans Residents of Gordon Plaza Seek Relocation
Group Exhibition at Newcomb Museum of Art
New Orleans, LA
Fall 2019
This exhibition was organized by Tulane’s environmental studies students who collaborated with residents of Gordon Plaza– explores the lived experiences of communities impacted by pollution, and its concomitant effects on health and environment.
My drawing, Abundance Undermined (far left) was commissioned for this exhibition.
Three person exhibition with Dan Rule and Michel Varisco
Isaac Delgado Fine Art Gallery
New Orleans, LA
Fall 2018
No Man’s Land is a phrase used to indicate disputed or unoccupied territory. It was used to both justify territorial conquest and to refer to places that were dumping grounds for refuse. Through a diverse range of approaches and media, these three artists have come together to present work on the relationship between the human gaze and terrain that is both real and imagined, inhabited and free.
Each artist in the show has depicted landscapes devoid of people, literal “no man’s lands,” but bearing strong signs of human imprint and disturbance. Through their works, the artists ask the viewer to consider how our relationship with the environment on an individual and collective level has led us to where we are today and what the future for both humans and the land will look like.
My installation of drawings, Refining Patterns (far-right)