NEW ORLEANS – This year’s cohort of Creative Assembly residents at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) includes six artists working in painting, music, poetry, film and other disciplines.
Launched in 2021, NOMA’s Creative Assembly program cultivates community engagement through a year-long residency in the museum’s department of learning and engagement. Artists are encouraged to draw inspiration from public programs, the museum collection, exhibitions, and the Besthoff Sculpture Garden.
“This year’s cohort of New Orleans–based artists represents a breadth of artistic perspectives,” said Dr. Redell Hearn, chief educator at NOMA. “We are thrilled for NOMA to be a place of discovery and innovation for working artists who are helping define our current moment.”
Members of the 2026–27 Creative Assembly Cohort are:
- Artist, designer, and storyteller Compton III
- Painter and art educator Ben Hamburger
- Musician and composer Kelly Love Jones
- Performance poet, advocacy journalist, and teaching artist Donney Rose
- Multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Kelsey Scult
- Interdisciplinary artist and photographer Tiffany Smith
The artists kicked off the residency in September with an on-site orientation that offered insight into the museum’s history, collection, and programs. During the residency, Creative Assembly Cohort members receive funds and museum support to develop artistic projects and collaborate with the museum’s learning and engagement department to create public offerings.
Kelly Love Jones is this year’s Creative Assembly Artist-in-Residence supported by the Darryl Chappell Foundation, which returns as a supporter of Creative Assembly by funding one Afrodescendant visual artist in the 2026–27 cycle. The Chappell Foundation’s support incorporates the Wilfred Wallace Hammond Jr. Performing Arts Legacy Award.
“We honored NOMA as our Partner of the Year for its Creative Assembly program, now in its second year of support from the foundation,” said Darryl Chappell, founder and CEO of the Darryl Chappell Foundation. “The New Orleans Museum of Art is an amazing partner that is always finding creative ways to move community-centered programs forward.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Compton III is a native New Orleans artist, designer and storyteller whose expansive practice spans fine art, public space, popular culture, and cultural preservation. Across sculpture, designer toys, illustration, and children’s literature, he creates contemporary mythology inspired by New Orleans’s traditions and spirit. At the center of his practice is Spy Boy, an original character and expanding universe inspired by the Black Masking Indian tradition and his family’s connection to the culture. His work is held in the collections of the New Orleans African American Museum and Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Museum. He was selected for the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Louisiana Contemporaryexhibition and received Best Display at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. His public art includes citywide & international activations of his 16-foot inflated Spy Boy sculpture. Through art, products, collaborations and storytelling, Compton III creates cultural touchpoints moving between institutions and everyday spaces, inspiring curiosity, pride, imagination and connection.
Ben Hamburger is a painter and art educator based in New Orleans. His painting practice is grounded in observation and explores relationships between people, place, and the natural environment. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, including at Ferrara Showman Gallery, the San Bernardino County Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh. Hamburger has taught and led workshops in schools, universities, art centers, museums, correctional facilities and nonprofit organizations throughout the United States, as well as in Bolivia, Thailand and India. He is currently an Adjunct Instructor at Western Carolina University and teaches painting at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Art. Hamburger holds a BA in Visual Arts from Eckerd College and an MFA in Community Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He can often be found painting throughout New Orleans or working from his studio at Mid-City Artist Studios.
Musician and composer Kelly Love Jones merges Caribbean rhythms with a skillfully wholesome body of lyrics that celebrate kindness, growth, and the sweetness of connection. The New Orleans musician’s flair fuses world, reggae, hip-hop and soul with the direct immediacy only a seasoned singer/songwriter can provide. Having written with Grammy-nominated spoken word artist Queen Sheba and having opened for talent the likes of Lenny Kravitz, Meshell N’Degeocello, Stephen Marley, Steel Pulse, Arrested Development and Dick Gregory, Jones shares that her most compelling musical encounter came from Chaka Khan herself during a chance meeting on an airplane. When Jones asked Khan what advice she might offer a single mother following her dreams, she offered the commanding wisdom: “Whatever you do, don’t stop. Never give up.”
Baton Rouge native Donney Rose is a New Orleans–based performance poet, advocacy journalist, and teaching artist. He is the creator of The American Audit, a series of multimedia spoken word projects examining the Black American experience by infusing history, creative verse, and research into performance text. His work, spanning two decades on stages and in classrooms, guides others in their creative journeys and brings nuanced and colorful perspectives through spoken word and other creative outlets. Donney is a past John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Citizen Artist Fellow, a 2022 Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award recipient in Literary Arts, and a member of the 2025–26 Artist At Work cohort, where he is serving as a Community Health Worker fellow at Ashė Cultural Arts Center, focusing on neighborhoods and the built environment as social determinants of health.
Kelsey Scult is a New Orleans-based multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Her work explores the physical intersection of desire and decay, contemporary intimacy, and the afterlives of objects, noting that food and grief are her muses. She works across film, sculpture, sound, and installation to explore the body as an archive and reimagine how personal and collective histories are held and transformed. Films she has produced have screened at Sundance, SXSW, Outfest and Prospect New Orleans, and her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad, including locally at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She is an alumna of the New Orleans Film Society’s Southern Producers Lab, the Southern Foodways Alliance Filmmaker Residency, and the Joan Mitchell Center Artist Residency. She is a member of The Front Gallery, and holds a BA in Studio Art from Oberlin College and an MFA in Film Production from the University of New Orleans.
Tiffany Smith is an interdisciplinary artist from the Caribbean diaspora currently based in New Orleans. Working between photography, video, installation, and design, Smith uses constructed environments informed by researching histories of representation, diasporic identity, and liminality to define spaces and experiences that oscillate between the roles of visitor and native and parse the definition of home. Smith earned her BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and her MFA in Photo/Video from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and in a solo exhibition at Ten Nineteen Gallery, New Orleans. She is the recipient of the Laundromat Project Create Change Fellowship, a NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Fellowship, and is a Bronx AIM Fellowship alumna. Her work is represented in public and private collections, including the permanent collection of New Orleans Museum of Art.