Allison Stewart

Natural Wonders 24

2020

New Orleans artist Allison Stewart has gained national recognition for her paintings expressing the complex and disturbing dialogue between man and nature. Trained as a biologist, Stewart is inspired by increasingly fragile environments and the ultimate interconnectedness of all living things. She uses layers of color, light, form and texture to address issues of beauty and loss, time and transformation. Residing somewhere between realism and abstraction, the paintings become visual diaries upon which Stewart records her responses to the threatened landscape. Allison Stewart has exhibited extensively throughout the United States. Her work is included in many public, corporate and private collections, including the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Historic New Orleans Collection, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Texaco, Freeport McMoRan, Price Waterhouse Corp., Chase Manhattan Bank, ARCO, American Express, Sun Bank of Florida, Pan American Life, and the Pensacola Museum of Art. Among the awards Stewart has received are an individual artist fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts in 1988, an individual artist grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities in 1997, and the Mary Freeman Wisdom Foundation Grant in 1995. In 2005 she was awarded an Artist in Residence position at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. In 1998, Stewart co-founded KID smART, a Louisiana 501.c.3 non-profit organization to teach under resourced children in Orleans Parish important life lessons through hands on art activities in the visual and performing arts