The John Burton Harter Foundation presents Tigers in the Garden, an exhibition opening Saturday, June 13, from 6 to 9pm at UNO Gallery, located at 2429 St. Claude Avenue. There will also be a preview on Thursday, June 11, from 5 to 8pm. The public is invited to both of these events which coincide with Pride New Orleans, situating the exhibition within a broader moment of visibility and celebration.
Sponsored by WWNO and curated by Bradley Sumrall, Curator of the Collection at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the exhibition will spotlight creations from a diverse group of emerging and established LGBTQ+ artists with ties to New Orleans, including Matthew Draughter, André Hubbard, Marta Rodriguez Maleck, Michael Meads, Jacob Reptile, Maxx Sizeler, Cars Stewart, Goldie Ray Sylvan, Trenity Thomas, Meg Turner, and Kyle Young. The artists will exhibit their work alongside that of the late J. B. Harter, whose images explored and documented gay male culture of the 1970s and beyond.
“Is He a Fairy? No, He’s a Dragonfly” by Trenity Thomas
At its core, Tigers in the Garden positions New Orleans itself as both sanctuary and stage—a place where cultivated surfaces and untamed realities exist side by side. As described in the exhibition text, the city becomes “a lush, unruly garden where identities are cultivated, performed, and continuously reimagined,” and where artists move with “a kind of feral intelligence—improvisational, self-possessed, and unafraid.”
The title draws from the 1950 novel Tiger in the Garden by Speed Lamkin, a work that explored class tension, social change, and one of the earliest candid depictions of gay life in the twentieth-century South. In Lamkin’s narrative, the “tiger” emerges as a disruptive force within the rigid structures of Southern society—an apt metaphor for the artists in this exhibition, whose practices challenge inherited norms while embracing visibility, sensuality, and self-definition.
This exhibition extends that metaphor into the present. Where earlier generations navigated coded or constrained identities, the artists in Tigers in the Garden assert presence openly. Their works collapse distinctions between private and public life, control and abandon—reflecting a city long defined by its ability to hold contradiction.
“Growing Between the Cracks of Civilization 1” by Jacob Reptile
Tigers in the Garden is underwritten by the John Burton Harter Foundation, whose mission is to advance awareness of visual and queer art through the legacy of its namesake. Harter’s own prolific practice—comprising more than 3,000 works, many centered on the male figure—helped document and preserve the richness of queer experience in New Orleans, often outside mainstream recognition.
In this context, the exhibition operates not only as a presentation of contemporary work but as part of a broader lineage. It traces a movement from coded representation to unapologetic visibility, from marginal narratives to embodied presence. As the exhibition text concludes, in New Orleans “the garden has not been tamed—it has simply learned to hold and celebrate its tigers.”
The show will run through July12. Regular gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12pm-5pm, with extended gallery hours for Tigers in the Garden on Thursdays and Fridays, 5pm-7pm.
