On Thursday, November 2, 2023, Trinity City will award our first-ever TRINITY CITY ARTIVIST AWARDS to visual designers Ayo Scott and Antoine Prince, Jr., and musician/performer Denise Frazier. Chosen for their profound impact upon our community, our project, and us as individuals, these three people will be recognized as artist-activists of the highest calibre.
Ayo Scott
Ayo was born and raised New Orleans and attended Xavier University of Louisiana where he studied Art with a focus in Graphic Design. After graduating from Xavier in 2003, he entered graduate school at The Institute of Design in Chicago. With one year left in the program, he took a year off to create a series of paintings inspired by the people affected by the tsunami of 2004. The next year, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans the day he was supposed to return to complete his last year of graduate study. He withdrew from the program and returned to the city as soon as people were allowed back. While living in his parents' gutted house in the Gentilly neighborhood, he began renovating homes and started NOYO Designs Inc., a design company and clothing line. Over the next several years, he began to shift from commercial graphic design to creating fine art and incorporating elements of his digital design work into his process. In 2022, the New Orleans Culture and Tourism Fund recognized Ayo as their inaugural Visual Arts culture bearer. He has multiple murals and large scale paintings around the city of New Orleans, including in the New Orleans International Airport (Leah's Kitchen) and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities office (The John Scott Center). Ayo has created album cover art for musical artists Pell and Tank & the Bangas, and he has had works featured on television series, including Queen Sugar and Bel Air.
Antoine Prince, Jr.
Antoine Prince, Jr. is a native of New Orleans. He is a graduate of Southern University at New Orleans where he received his Bachelor Art degree in Art Education. He also attended New Orleans Center of Creative Arts (NOCCA) for one year in an intensive visual art program. However, it was at Southern University at New Orleans, under the tutelage of instructors in the Art Department that his expression of art was fully realized.
PRINCE, as he is widely known, captivated the art world by hosting his first solo exhibition in 1991 entitled “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.” Since that momentous event, he has done numerous art exhibiltions including, most recently, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art the CAC, Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, the Isaac Delgato Fine Art Gallery, and the NCA, National Conference of Artist MLK Art Exhibitions. Prince has also taken his art shows throughout the state and country. Jazz Fest, Essence, Miami Black Heritage Festival and the Denver Black Arts Festival are several of his stops. After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, he relocated his family to Atlanta.
Now, after a ten-year hiatus, he has returned with new eyes and zeal to put his visions on canvas. PRINCE is currently a teacher in the Talented Visual Art program at John Ehret High School in Marrero, Louisiana.
Denise Frazier
Denise Frazier is an educator, musician, and interdisciplinary artist from Houston, who has lived and worked in New Orleans since 2002. She is a 2023-2024 MLK Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recently, she was the assistant director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, a place-based research Center that grants fellowships and organizes public programming, immersive experiences, and collective contemplation about the bio-region stretching from Texas to Florida and its connections with other regions around the world. Her research interests currently include the Gulf South and the Anthropocene, sound studies and the political, social, digital, natural, and built environments of the Gulf South and Circum-Caribbean. She is also the manager, co-founder and violinist/vocalist/percussionist of Les Cenelles, a string and technological interfacing ensemble thatperforms African Diasporic music through a prismatic lens that honors African and Indigenous ancestors and chronicles ecological realities. As a company member of Goat in the Road Productions, Frazier has used her skills as an actor and as a musical composer in immersive performances and collaborations that tell lesser known stories surrounding sexuality, politics, liberation, and colonialism. Frazier has participated in several boards that have supported the cultural and social ecosystem of New Orleans culture bearers.
She has worked with the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans, Antenna Gallery, Make Music NOLA,Goat in the Road Productions, and, more recently, the NOUS Foundation and No Dream Deferred. She has also worked with College Track New Orleans, a national college completion and access program, where she advised students attending Xavier University of Louisiana, Delgado Community College, Tulane University, and Southern University of New Orleans (2010-2014). She has taught a wide variety of courses at Tulane University (Geography of the Gulf South, AfroLatinx Studies, Spanish Language), Southern University of New Orleans (Spanish Language), and Xavier University of Louisiana (Medieval Spanish Literature, Spanish Language classes, Introduction to African American Studies). Frazier is tri-lingual in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. She completed an M.A. (2004) and PhD (2009) in the Latin American Studies Department at Tulane University, studying the political and social dimensions of hip hop music and performance in early 21st century Cuba and Brazil. She is the proud parent of one son.
Join us on November 2nd at Trinity City's House Party Fundraiser to honor Ayo, PRINCE, and Denise!
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