Fragile Matter: The Hilliard Permanent Collection and Beyond: Manon Bellet, Hannah Chalew & Harriet Joor
Hilliard Museum of Art
Lafayette, LA
September 2025-January 2026
curated by Aaron Levi Garvey
included Bottomland Chimera, Miscible Zone, Feedback LOOP, and Palmate Cultivar
Fragile Matter brings together historic work from the museum’s permanent collection with contemporary art, creating a dialogue between past and present perspectives on Louisiana’s fragile ecosystem. The exhibition features Louisiana artist Harriet Coulter Joor (1875-1965) from the Hilliard’s permanent collection alongside contemporary Louisiana artists Manon Bellet (b. 1979) and Hannah Chalew (b. 1986).
Documentation by Jason Cohen and Rush Jagoe
Though shaped by different historical and cultural contexts, these three artists share a deep reverence for nature and an awareness of the delicate ecological state of the Gulf South. Through craft, material studies, and nuanced environmental understanding, their work creates an intergenerational conversation about our relationship to the natural world: how we mark it, mourn it, remember it, and find ourselves reflected in it.
Fragile Matter acts as both an ode and invitation, to touch the earth more gently, to reflect on the past more thoughtfully, and to imagine new futures through the fragile and poetic materials of the present.