Why we call it Indigenous.
Bryant Lee Benoit told our story in collage. He took what the world throws away — old magazines, grocery flyers, church programs, family snapshots somebody trusted him with — and cut, pieced, and layered them until our whole world was looking back from a single canvas. His gallery, Benoit Gallery, carried the name Indigenous Art. We carry it forward here.
Nothing in his work was random — the black walls, the hues, the hex codes, the measurements, intentional down to the millimeter, so a piece could leave the canvas and move through the room it lived in. He was quiet, and wise beyond it; secure enough never to be anyone but himself — a cool, Black man in the arts. We depended on him to keep a culture we're still living from being stripped, taken, or sold back to us as someone else's.
He created the first official Creole Culture Day artwork — his last piece before he passed. He was the honoree of our first book, and we wrote him into Storytellers. This station is his.
