Life of the Party
July 18 - September 27, 2025
Life of the Party is an exciting new exhibition by the ascending Southern artist Vitus Shell. He was the 2021 Louisiana Artist of the Year and received an NPN Take Notice Fund in 2022. In 2023, he was included in the group exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage organized by the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2024, Multiplicity traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.
Life of the Party features portraits by Vitus Shell of Black youth from Dothan and the surrounding areas, as well as others throughout the Deep South. In preparation for Life of the Party, Shell visited the Wiregrass Museum of Art and ArtFolk. to conduct photoshoots and interviews with his subjects. The resulting portraits are beautiful, bold, and psychologically nuanced depictions of community members whose likenesses are superimposed on backgrounds of collaged advertisements and articles. Seeing these large-scale portraits in person is empowering, especially for those who know Shell’s subjects and can see themselves in his work. Shell’s multidimensional, collaged backgrounds illustrate how black bodies and white bodies are, for better and worse, depicted by the media. The juxtaposition between the portraits and collaged elements in the work creates a rich framework for analysis.
Shell’s frequent use of gold paint as a framing device is also noteworthy. It signifies traditional economic and political values; values he ironically critiques through use of gold paint rather than precious materials associated with fine art through the ages. Like his collaging, his material choices of gold paint and unstretched canvases, reference hip-hop culture’s urge to sample and reimagine the world through a Black lens.
The cultural push and pull created by Shell’s images and materials illustrate the aspirational goals of youths and how hip-hop culture can subvert cultural norms. This dichotomy often appeals to corporations when it suits their needs. The same can be said of the exhibition’s title, Life of the Party. This title addresses how Black youth culture is marketing gold for corporations and can also be used to mobilize political movements. While it is difficult to determine if any culture caught up in marketing campaigns and the 24-hour media cycle has agency in that context, it is not the case in Shell’s work. Shell emphasizes joy and pride within his work, embracing the notion that existence is resistance.
This project was made possible through a partnership with the Alabama Contemporary Art Center (Mobile, AL) whose mission is to support cultural production, provide space for courageous conversations that shape identity, and seed growth in the greater creative economy.
Artist Biography
Mixed media collage painter, Vitus Shell lives and works in his hometown Monroe, LA, where he is an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. He was the 2021 Louisiana Artist of the Year and received an NPN Take Notice Fund in 2022. He has exhibited in solo exhibitions at IBIS Contemporary Art Gallery in New Orleans and 5 Points Art Gallery in Milwaukee, WI. His extensive list of group exhibitions includes Multiplicity at Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN and Louisiana Contemporary at Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
His work is geared toward the black experience and giving agency to people from this community through powerful images deconstructing, sampling, and remixing identity, civil rights, and contemporary black culture. In 2007 while attending the University of Mississippi, Shell was honored with the MFA Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Public Collections include the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt University and the Elliot Perry Collection, among others. Additionally, Shell has taught at Grambling University and Louisiana Tech University. He is also the president and co-founder of the Black Creatives Circle of North Louisiana.
Curator Biography
Ben Hickey is the Executive Director for the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts in Buffalo, New York. Previously he was curator of exhibitions and Emily Cyr Bridges Endowed Professor of Art at the Hilliard Art Museum on the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Most central to his curatorial practice are projects that blend social history, sense of place, and interdisciplinary collaborations. With over one hundred exhibition credits, artists whose work he has exhibited include Brian Kelly of the Marais Press, Letitia Huckaby, L. Kasimu Harris, Robert C. Tannen, Richard Landry, Pat Phillips, Beili Liu, Sonya Clark, Hasan Elahi, Dawoud Bey, and James Surls.