February 23, 2024
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival limited-edition poster ®&©2024 NOJ&HFF, Inc. Published by & available from: Art4now.com. All rights reserved.
New Orleans has a festival for almost everything and every weekend when the summer weather is pleasantly warm. As a reminder of good times enjoyed at festivals and also a great souvenir, many festival fans adorn their walls with collectable art posters from their favorite festivals. Many have gained remarkable value over the years and are quite coveted!
French Quarter Festival is thrilled to unveil their official 2024 collectible poster designed by local artist Monica Rose Kelly. The original was 100% hand-painted and lettered with watercolor on cold press paper. For this year’s poster, Monica chose to honor women musicians, specifically the musical mothers of New Orleans who work tirelessly to raise the children of our city and also moonlight as culture-bearers. Women have not been often represented in New Orleans festival posters or murals, which is why she has chosen to depict them in many of her recent works.
Monica’s poster illustration highlights the decorative motifs found in the French Quarter, as seen in the ornate lettering and the wrought iron border. The curled center design represents the spire topping the steeple of St. Louis Cathedral, inspired by the legacy of the African blacksmiths who infused Adinkra symbols into the ironwork of the Quarter. The tropical botanicals of the balconies and hidden courtyards intertwine with jasmine vines, each blossom pinpointing a location on a map of French Quarter Fest stages! There are two editions of the 2024 French Quarter Fest poster available. The first is an edition of 1,000 Numbered lithograph prints, and there is a second edition of 200 artist-signed and numbered handmade silkscreen prints. The second edition features an alternative color scheme with metallic gold pigment.
Monica Rose Kelly has been serving the music community of New Orleans for thirteen years. Her artistic practice intersects the fields of fine art, public art, illustration, design, and performance art. Music has been her constant inspiration, and she start her career producing album covers, designing merchandise, and providing art direction for bands & festivals. Her client list has grown over the years; it includes WWOZ, Offbeat, The City of New Orleans, Arts New Orleans, The Fillmore, The Joy Theater, Tulane University, The New Orleans Musicians Clinic and countless musicians, bands, and festivals.
Monica began live painting at concerts twenty years ago, which influenced the rhythmic nature of her style. She recently reawakened that aspect of her work after being chosen as the inaugural Resident Visual Artist for the National Jazz Historic Park, painting several compositions at their live shows throughout the city. She now performs improvisational projection art with bands, a modality she’s coined as “live light painting”. Performing with local and touring acts, Monica combines lighting design with flow-state digital painting and video/animation, resulting in an immersive experience of color and light that flows with the music.
Monica’s work is vibrant in nature and communicates the energy of the soul. Her unique style was influenced by growing up around hip hop and graffiti, as well as traveling around the world and discovering the great works of the Impressionist painters, as well as the Art Nouveau and Art Deco designers. She is also inspired by the spiritual archetypes of the Divine Feminine, as made evident through the journeys of the strong women in her life. Her love for music and dance is channeled into each work with joyful gesture and motion, reflecting the joie de vivre, rhythms, and tropical color palettes of New Orleans. Monica’s studies in herbalism and work as a flower essence practitioner have infused a love of botany and healing into her subject matter, as she often uses flowers and plants as symbols representing different emotional archetypes.
Monica is passionate about visual storytelling in public spaces. In 2019, she completed a large public art installation on Galvez between Canal & Tulane with collaborator Nik Richard, titled “The Spirit of Lower Mid City”. This art walk serves as a commemorative anchor for visitors to learn about the community that once stood in the footprint of University Medical Center. An educator of many years, Ms. Kelly runs a studio apprenticeship program through which she trains young women on the various aspects of running an arts business. She whole-heartedly believes in the power of art to protest, uplift, and to heal.
Monica earned a BFA in Illustration from Savannah College of Art & Design, with studies in painting and printmaking. She also worked as a graphic designer for many years. She has always been inspired by the psychedelic poster movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and has created collectible screen print editions over the years for many venues and performing acts.
Ms. Kelly’s experience with leadership and passion for art direction has led to the formation of a new collective: People for Public Art. This artist-run coalition has a mission to create, fund, and document works of public art that tell the stories of the people. The first installation created by People for Public Art was “Memorial for Bubba, Quinn, and Jose”, the victims of the collapse of the future Hard Rock building at 1031 Canal St. The second collaborative install was the “New Orleans Queens of Sound & Soul” mural house on 1401 Laharpe St. Both of these projects were created by teams of around ten women artists under Monica’s art direction, and they just created their largest work yet: the new “Gumbo Botanica” mural on 1101 Elysian Fields at St. Claude. This mural project has been incredibly impactful as it was an educational collaboration between six women muralists and nine teens in partnership with Arts New Orleans’ Young Artist Movement. The muralists mentored the students in all aspects of planning and pricing out a mural, taught them digital mural design on iPad Pro’s, and trained them in mural installation techniques. The mural features several massive portraits of the youth artists who painted the mural and also pays homage to the healing plans that have influenced the culinary traditions of New Orleans. The mural dedication ceremony for “Gumbo Botanica” will be held on March 30th at 3:30pm, at 1101 Elysian Fields Ave. Monica will also hold an exhibition on April 5th at the National Jazz Historic Park’s French Quarter Visitor Center to unveil her recent live painting series created in-residence at their venues. Stay tuned for updates and more details on Monica’s instagram: @monicakellystudio or monicakellystudio.com
Each year since the Jazz Fest Poster Project debuted in 1975, a subject has been chosen to represent our culture. Early posters featured a few grand marshals, a big band, a bit of gospel, zydeco and intimate music scenes. In 1989, Jazz Fest posters began depicting artists who bent American culture to their will starting with Fats Domino to Jon Batiste in 2022. The Jazz Fest poster is the most collected poster series in the world, with early copies selling for up to 1,000 times their original prices and even recent editions selling for up to 5 times their publication price in the secondary market!
For the 50th anniversary of Jazz Fest, the poster gives us a sign for the half-century capstone of New Orleans’ visual jazz. That sign came in the form of a memory triggered by a song heard on local radio station WWOZ recalling a typically loud lunch at Mother’s in 1974 when the juke box blared as the Jazz Fest team conjured that first poster. The song was Chapel of Love, sung by three teenagers from New Orleans. They had come in second in St. Augustine’s talent contest but were so good they were whisked off to New York’s Brill Building, then the center of song writing and production. Sisters Barbara and Rosa Hawkins, along with cousin Joan Johnson found themselves in a room with the greatest writers and producers of the American pop catalog. They were given the song for an audition before the hit-making duo of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who are among the most influential songwriters and music producers in post-World War II popular music.
The as-yet-unnamed Dixie Cups felt the writers had the song all wrong. They excused themselves and soon came back with their bouncy flair to the composition by Phil Spector, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Infused with the soul of New Orleans, Leiber and Stoller recorded the girls’ arrangement, releasing Chapel of Love as the premier single on their Red Bird label. Bam! A million copies sold and a gold record was out of the gate! Chapel of Love knocked the Beatles out of the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in June of 1964 and held that spot for three weeks. Louis Armstrong upended the Beatles the month before! They also brought the Mardi Gras Indian chants their grandmothers sang from the streets of New Orleans to the world for the first time in 1965. Iko Iko spent ten weeks on the Billboard Top 100 upon its release as a single. Sixty years ago, they sang the biggest breakout hits from New Orleans since Fats Domino and Louis Armstrong!
Kellie Talbot is a sign painter of a different sort, and a perfect pairing for The Dixie Cups. She and her husband spend part of each year traveling the nation searching for heirloom signs, which she then renders on canvas in amazingly meticulous detail. Talbot says that she’s drawn to the typography, the craftsmanship and the wear and tear that lend the artifacts their character. “It’s like wrinkles on a face,” she said.
The “Chapel of Love,” sign is Talbot’s invention, but she designed it as authentically based on other vintage signs she’s studied. Her photorealistic style depicts American icons that defined the mid-century American landscape, embodied in the exuberant and once ubiquitous neon signs that beckoned us with vivid colors from every street corner. They’re mostly gone now, but like The Dixie Cups with only Barbara still with us, Talbot relights this pioneering girl group with a period-perfect mid-century sign. Marking the mid-century of the series in the 2024 poster, Talbot imagines a neon sign hanging under a French Quarter balcony for six decades, since The Dixie Cups first stormed the national stage in 1964, proudly wearing years of patina and radiant in its endurance. The Signed, ReMarqued & C-Marqued editions bear an added artist’s imprint of Jazz Fest’s grand marshal dancing inside a crescent moon and lettering augmented with an outline in gold ink. The 2024 poster is a breakthrough for the Jazz Fest series. Previously, the last time a woman designed a Jazz Fest poster was 33 years ago in 1991, when Patti Harris produced an abstract image of a brass band. In the 49-year history of the poster series, only seven artists have been women, and females have been the subject of the poster only seven times. "It would be an honor for any artist," Talbot said of the opportunity to design the Jazz Fest poster. "I'm happy to have joined the ranks of the female artists that have come before."
Talbot made her first trip to New Orleans a quarter century ago, beginning 3-month residencies in New Orleans. On road trips between here and her home in Seattle, she photographed surviving neon signs to preserve and interpret on canvas. Her photorealistic painting portfolio grew larger as her stays in town grew longer until she and her husband bought a house here in 2018. For years, Talbot has been the principal artist for the Krewe of Muses, contributing designs for throws, merchandise and floats.
Talbot is represented in New Orleans by Cole Pratt Gallery. Her recent sign paintings will be on display there April 6th through the 27th, with an opening reception for the artist on April 6th. The original painting that became the 50th Poster and the sketches and studies leading up to it will be unveiled on April 24, staying up through May 6.
Check out these ground-breaking female artists and bring home new art for your walls so you will always remember this festival season!
New Orleans has a festival for almost everything and every weekend when the summer weather is pleasantly warm. As a reminder of good times enjoyed at festivals and also a great souvenir, many festival fans adorn their walls with collectable art posters from their favorite festivals. Many have gained remarkable value over the years and are quite coveted!
French Quarter Festival is thrilled to unveil their official 2024 collectible poster designed by local artist Monica Rose Kelly. The original was 100% hand-painted and lettered with watercolor on cold press paper. For this year’s poster, Monica chose to honor women musicians, specifically the musical mothers of New Orleans who work tirelessly to raise the children of our city and also moonlight as culture-bearers. Women have not been often represented in New Orleans festival posters or murals, which is why she has chosen to depict them in many of her recent works.
Monica’s poster illustration highlights the decorative motifs found in the French Quarter, as seen in the ornate lettering and the wrought iron border. The curled center design represents the spire topping the steeple of St. Louis Cathedral, inspired by the legacy of the African blacksmiths who infused Adinkra symbols into the ironwork of the Quarter. The tropical botanicals of the balconies and hidden courtyards intertwine with jasmine vines, each blossom pinpointing a location on a map of French Quarter Fest stages! There are two editions of the 2024 French Quarter Fest poster available. The first is an edition of 1,000 Numbered lithograph prints, and there is a second edition of 200 artist-signed and numbered handmade silkscreen prints. The second edition features an alternative color scheme with metallic gold pigment.
Monica Rose Kelly has been serving the music community of New Orleans for thirteen years. Her artistic practice intersects the fields of fine art, public art, illustration, design, and performance art. Music has been her constant inspiration, and she start her career producing album covers, designing merchandise, and providing art direction for bands & festivals. Her client list has grown over the years; it includes WWOZ, Offbeat, The City of New Orleans, Arts New Orleans, The Fillmore, The Joy Theater, Tulane University, The New Orleans Musicians Clinic and countless musicians, bands, and festivals.
Monica began live painting at concerts twenty years ago, which influenced the rhythmic nature of her style. She recently reawakened that aspect of her work after being chosen as the inaugural Resident Visual Artist for the National Jazz Historic Park, painting several compositions at their live shows throughout the city. She now performs improvisational projection art with bands, a modality she’s coined as “live light painting”. Performing with local and touring acts, Monica combines lighting design with flow-state digital painting and video/animation, resulting in an immersive experience of color and light that flows with the music.
Monica’s work is vibrant in nature and communicates the energy of the soul. Her unique style was influenced by growing up around hip hop and graffiti, as well as traveling around the world and discovering the great works of the Impressionist painters, as well as the Art Nouveau and Art Deco designers. She is also inspired by the spiritual archetypes of the Divine Feminine, as made evident through the journeys of the strong women in her life. Her love for music and dance is channeled into each work with joyful gesture and motion, reflecting the joie de vivre, rhythms, and tropical color palettes of New Orleans. Monica’s studies in herbalism and work as a flower essence practitioner have infused a love of botany and healing into her subject matter, as she often uses flowers and plants as symbols representing different emotional archetypes.
Monica is passionate about visual storytelling in public spaces. In 2019, she completed a large public art installation on Galvez between Canal & Tulane with collaborator Nik Richard, titled “The Spirit of Lower Mid City”. This art walk serves as a commemorative anchor for visitors to learn about the community that once stood in the footprint of University Medical Center. An educator of many years, Ms. Kelly runs a studio apprenticeship program through which she trains young women on the various aspects of running an arts business. She whole-heartedly believes in the power of art to protest, uplift, and to heal.
Monica earned a BFA in Illustration from Savannah College of Art & Design, with studies in painting and printmaking. She also worked as a graphic designer for many years. She has always been inspired by the psychedelic poster movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and has created collectible screen print editions over the years for many venues and performing acts.
Ms. Kelly’s experience with leadership and passion for art direction has led to the formation of a new collective: People for Public Art. This artist-run coalition has a mission to create, fund, and document works of public art that tell the stories of the people. The first installation created by People for Public Art was “Memorial for Bubba, Quinn, and Jose”, the victims of the collapse of the future Hard Rock building at 1031 Canal St. The second collaborative install was the “New Orleans Queens of Sound & Soul” mural house on 1401 Laharpe St. Both of these projects were created by teams of around ten women artists under Monica’s art direction, and they just created their largest work yet: the new “Gumbo Botanica” mural on 1101 Elysian Fields at St. Claude. This mural project has been incredibly impactful as it was an educational collaboration between six women muralists and nine teens in partnership with Arts New Orleans’ Young Artist Movement. The muralists mentored the students in all aspects of planning and pricing out a mural, taught them digital mural design on iPad Pro’s, and trained them in mural installation techniques. The mural features several massive portraits of the youth artists who painted the mural and also pays homage to the healing plans that have influenced the culinary traditions of New Orleans. The mural dedication ceremony for “Gumbo Botanica” will be held on March 30th at 3:30pm, at 1101 Elysian Fields Ave. Monica will also hold an exhibition on April 5th at the National Jazz Historic Park’s French Quarter Visitor Center to unveil her recent live painting series created in-residence at their venues. Stay tuned for updates and more details on Monica’s instagram: @monicakellystudio or monicakellystudio.com
Each year since the Jazz Fest Poster Project debuted in 1975, a subject has been chosen to represent our culture. Early posters featured a few grand marshals, a big band, a bit of gospel, zydeco and intimate music scenes. In 1989, Jazz Fest posters began depicting artists who bent American culture to their will starting with Fats Domino to Jon Batiste in 2022. The Jazz Fest poster is the most collected poster series in the world, with early copies selling for up to 1,000 times their original prices and even recent editions selling for up to 5 times their publication price in the secondary market!
For the 50th anniversary of Jazz Fest, the poster gives us a sign for the half-century capstone of New Orleans’ visual jazz. That sign came in the form of a memory triggered by a song heard on local radio station WWOZ recalling a typically loud lunch at Mother’s in 1974 when the juke box blared as the Jazz Fest team conjured that first poster. The song was Chapel of Love, sung by three teenagers from New Orleans. They had come in second in St. Augustine’s talent contest but were so good they were whisked off to New York’s Brill Building, then the center of song writing and production. Sisters Barbara and Rosa Hawkins, along with cousin Joan Johnson found themselves in a room with the greatest writers and producers of the American pop catalog. They were given the song for an audition before the hit-making duo of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who are among the most influential songwriters and music producers in post-World War II popular music.
The as-yet-unnamed Dixie Cups felt the writers had the song all wrong. They excused themselves and soon came back with their bouncy flair to the composition by Phil Spector, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Infused with the soul of New Orleans, Leiber and Stoller recorded the girls’ arrangement, releasing Chapel of Love as the premier single on their Red Bird label. Bam! A million copies sold and a gold record was out of the gate! Chapel of Love knocked the Beatles out of the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in June of 1964 and held that spot for three weeks. Louis Armstrong upended the Beatles the month before! They also brought the Mardi Gras Indian chants their grandmothers sang from the streets of New Orleans to the world for the first time in 1965. Iko Iko spent ten weeks on the Billboard Top 100 upon its release as a single. Sixty years ago, they sang the biggest breakout hits from New Orleans since Fats Domino and Louis Armstrong!
Kellie Talbot is a sign painter of a different sort, and a perfect pairing for The Dixie Cups. She and her husband spend part of each year traveling the nation searching for heirloom signs, which she then renders on canvas in amazingly meticulous detail. Talbot says that she’s drawn to the typography, the craftsmanship and the wear and tear that lend the artifacts their character. “It’s like wrinkles on a face,” she said.
The “Chapel of Love,” sign is Talbot’s invention, but she designed it as authentically based on other vintage signs she’s studied. Her photorealistic style depicts American icons that defined the mid-century American landscape, embodied in the exuberant and once ubiquitous neon signs that beckoned us with vivid colors from every street corner. They’re mostly gone now, but like The Dixie Cups with only Barbara still with us, Talbot relights this pioneering girl group with a period-perfect mid-century sign. Marking the mid-century of the series in the 2024 poster, Talbot imagines a neon sign hanging under a French Quarter balcony for six decades, since The Dixie Cups first stormed the national stage in 1964, proudly wearing years of patina and radiant in its endurance. The Signed, ReMarqued & C-Marqued editions bear an added artist’s imprint of Jazz Fest’s grand marshal dancing inside a crescent moon and lettering augmented with an outline in gold ink. The 2024 poster is a breakthrough for the Jazz Fest series. Previously, the last time a woman designed a Jazz Fest poster was 33 years ago in 1991, when Patti Harris produced an abstract image of a brass band. In the 49-year history of the poster series, only seven artists have been women, and females have been the subject of the poster only seven times. "It would be an honor for any artist," Talbot said of the opportunity to design the Jazz Fest poster. "I'm happy to have joined the ranks of the female artists that have come before."
Talbot made her first trip to New Orleans a quarter century ago, beginning 3-month residencies in New Orleans. On road trips between here and her home in Seattle, she photographed surviving neon signs to preserve and interpret on canvas. Her photorealistic painting portfolio grew larger as her stays in town grew longer until she and her husband bought a house here in 2018. For years, Talbot has been the principal artist for the Krewe of Muses, contributing designs for throws, merchandise and floats.
Talbot is represented in New Orleans by Cole Pratt Gallery. Her recent sign paintings will be on display there April 6th through the 27th, with an opening reception for the artist on April 6th. The original painting that became the 50th Poster and the sketches and studies leading up to it will be unveiled on April 24, staying up through May 6.
Check out these ground-breaking female artists and bring home new art for your walls so you will always remember this festival season!
