In recognition of the 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina we are releasing the Saratoga Collection book featuring 41 emerging and mid-career artists mostly of color who decided to live and work in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. The book's release will coincide with the upcoming exhibition in November 2025 at the Alexandria Museum of Art in which the Saratoga Collection is in its permanent collection. The Saratoga Collection documents and further validates the burgeoning contemporary art scene developing in the New Orleans St. Claude and Bywater arts districts, but more importantly, artists from marginalized and underrepresented communities of color, LGBTQ and mature who have decided to live and work in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. The Saratoga Collection features notable artists: Katrina Andry, Keith Duncan, Robert Tannen, Bruce Davenport Jr, Rebecca Rebouche and Alex Podesta to name a few. The artists in this collection are relevant, coherent and offer a peek into the world of the new New Orleans contemporary art movement. 

The Saratoga Collection, while not systematic or all-inclusive in intent or context, offers a snapshot of the evolution and effervescent nature of contemporary art in Post-Katrina New Orleans. - David Houston, Former Director of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art

The Saratoga Collection offers a peek into the world of the new New Orleans contemporary art movement. It serves as an overview of the work being created by artists with a by- any-means-necessary attitude and impeccable work ethic. New Orleans is and always will be a wondrous, turbulent, and beautiful city, that produces artists and artwork of the highest caliber, and that embodies compassion, fearlessness, and humanity. - Terrence Sanders Smith, Curator & Publisher

These works were created by individuals living and working in New Orleans since hurricane Katrina, which, along with 9/11/01, now serves as one of our national historical signifiers. To utter the phrase “post-Katrina” is an attempt to describe a sensibility, an assessment; not only an era in time, but an era of culture; a flux marked by alteration, change, cultural evolution. - Adam Falik, Art Critic & Writer

As the first curatorial effort to lay the groundwork post Hurricane Katrina for collecting current artwork by New Orleans artists…. - Dan Cameron Curator 

While artists of all ages and from across the city are represented in the Saratoga Collection, a preponderance of its energy comes from young artists plying their craft along St. Claude avenue, located in the city’s Ninth Ward, a section of the city perhaps hardest hit by Katrina. Anyone who was here in the weeks just after the flood couldn’t imagine the transformation this corridor had undergone, with artists and galleries undeniably leading its rebirth. – Bill Sasser Art Critic & Writer