SPOTLIGHT: NEW ORLEANS

In this issue, Visual Arts Journal presents three alumni who are living and working in the cultural and economic capital of America’s Gulf Coast region, New Orleans. Each has carved out an individual path in one of the world’s most celebrated cities, whether in design, animation and video production or community building and sustainable real-estate development.

by Michael Tisserand

Illustrations by Louisa Bertman (MFA 2015 Visual Narrative)

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In the summer of 2005, Jenga Mwendo’s path seemed to be on a fairly straight line. She was in her seventh year at Blue Sky Studios, where she’d put her 3D modeling skills to work on films like Ice Age (directed by a fellow alumnus, MFA 1993 Computer Art graduate Carlos Saldanha). Then she learned that much of her hometown of New Orleans was underwater following a collapse of the city’s levee systems during Hurricane Katrina.

Mwendo and her young daughter returned home to her childhood neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward and to a house she’d originally purchased as an investment property. She went to work rebuilding that house, her family’s homes and her greater community, eventually founding the Backyard Gardeners Network to support home gardening and develop and sustain two cooperative gardens, yielding everything from herbs to okra to muscadine grapes. She received a master’s in sustainable real-estate development and now works as a project analyst with the nonprofit Gulf Coast Housing Partnership, developing a ordable housing.

She hadn’t predicted any of this when she was studying animation. “Gardening was brand new. Building was brand new,” she says. Yet Mwendo—whose first name, Jenga, is derived from the Swahili word for “builder”—doesn’t see the paths as all that dissimilar. “I feel more like an artist than I ever had in my life,” she says. She remembers her time at SVA—and, before that, at her high school, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts—as “an environment of self-expression, of using your art to say something.” She now lives and works on a crossroads of her arts skills and experience and the values she inherited from her parents about the importance of building a community.

“My art background also influences the way I solve problems,” she says. In her current work in housing, she uses SketchUp software to imagine rooms in use. “It’s very important to me to know how the space is going to feel as you walk through it.” It’s yet another example of Mwendo’s strongly held belief that “there are many di erent ways of being an artist.”

OPPOSITE, TOP SVA alumnus Jenga Mwendo (second from left) with members of the Backyard Gardeners Network’s Guerrilla Garden project. ELSEWHERE Backyard Gardeners Network gardens. Images courtesy Backyard Gardeners Network.

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The breakneck pace of setting up large-scale, immersive experiences gave Albertico Acosta the name for his company, Tico Sighting. As he busily worked to build interactive stations at massive events such as the Super Bowl, Coachella or Lollapalooza, his coworkers started joking about glimpsing him in brief “Tico sightings.” A title was born. “My work means being able to be in a lot of places at once,” Acosta says with a laugh.

Born and raised on Long Island, New York, Acosta moved to New Orleans in 2015, after having encountered the city while setting up an interactive, 360- degree dome experience for Microsoft at the 2013 Super Bowl. He was smitten. “It was like a love a air with the city, I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he says.

Tico Sighting o ers 2D/3D virtual-reality and immersive experiences through video projection, environmental design and installation art. Yet it’s all built on foundational courses at SVA, Acosta says. “I took a perspective drawing class that really changed the way I see a flat canvas,” he says. “That simple horizon line allowed me to see everything in 3D, and that type of training has made it a

ABOVE Tico Sighting, the company founded by SVA alumnus Albertico Acosta, helped to create a dome installation at Burning Man for artist Android Jones. Image courtesy Tico Sighting.

lot easier to be fluid with how fast the technology is developing.”

Those lessons in perspective would lead to extravagant projects such as an installation at the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas that Acosta built around an actual 1940s-era B-25 Mitchell bomber. Using such materials as Plexiglas, projection-mapping software and laser projectors, Acosta created the experience of a ghost flight descending from the clouds. Sometimes, the best solution is comparatively low-tech.

“Over the years, one thing I’ve learned is the power of the projector,” he says.

Tico Sighting work for EDC Las Vegas (photo by jspagg); By Dzign, Las Vegas; Unreal Garden, San Francisco (art by WERC); and Confluence Group, Los Angeles (art by Hans Haveron). Images courtesy Tico Sighting.

Jack Lykins goes all the way back to his childhood trumpet lessons to explain his eventual relocation from New York City to New Orleans. “Louis Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis were in heavy rotation, and I’ve always had this strange a nity for the city,” he says. “So after graduation I packed up and moved here.”

Upon arriving, he met up with his friend and former classmate Hunter Thomson (BFA 2009 Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual E ects), and the two began making music videos for friends. This grew into Flatland, an animation, motion graphics and design studio with projects that have included an animated New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival schedule announcement, a solar energy promotion and a short Netflix film with New Orleans–born actor Mark Duplass that blends live action, illustration and animation.

Thomson would move on to other endeavors, while Lykins continues to build Flatland. Current projects include graphics for an upcoming Netflix series and animating work by the artist Young & Sick for NFTs. He is also experimenting with digital/analog video synthesis.

A sense of musicality threads through Lykins’ varied projects. Although Lykins hasn’t taken his trumpet on stage, his work has found its way to local music clubs in the form of video projections behind musicians. Flatland’s music videos are among its most experimental products, including a series of videos for the band Nebula Rosa that manipulates outer-space pictures from NASA. The result is what Lykins calls a “weird little abstract jaunt through the universe.” As with New Orleans music, Lykins says, there’s a strong element of improvisation in his work. “Sometimes,” he says, “it comes down to plugging in a bunch of things and seeing what the result is.” ◆

Michael Tisserand is the Eisner Award-winning author of Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White (HarperCollins).

CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT Flatland, the creative studio of SVA alumnus Jack Lykins, has produced work for band Cardinal Sons; the 2021 ESPN documentary A Room of Our Own; Lykins’ own experimental art; band Nebula Rosa; online learning resource Learn Liberty; and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Images courtesy Flatland.

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