Performances on the Porch: Arséne DeLay
Free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.
As part of Many Elizas, our second summer of responses to Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities, artist Fo Wilson’s installation on the grounds at Lynden, we have invited Arséne DeLay for an intimate concert on the porch of the cabinet. DeLay, part of a New Orleans music dynasty, spent time in Milwaukee, where she studied theatre at Marquette University and performed with the Skylight and Theatre X.
Eliza’s Cabinet is both wunderkammer and slave cabin; it imagines what a 19th-century woman of African descent might have collected, catalogued and stowed in her living quarters. Informed by historical research, but represented in the past, present, and future simultaneously, Eliza presents an imagined collection of found and original objects, furnishings and artifacts. With Eliza's Cabin, Wilson positions the Black imagination as an essential element in Black survival and self-determination.
About Arséne DeLay
A soulful voice, forged in a jazz tradition, with a heart of rock and roll, makes for a styling as complex as her hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Arséne DeLay is the youngest of the world-renowned Boutte vocalists, and though she’s well known in the music community of her home base, she started paying her dues on the road.
She’s no stranger to Milwaukee’s rich underground hip-hop/poetry scene, she started out collaborating with Poetree Chicago, Growing Nation, Black Elephant, & Sheree Amore, shortly after finishing her BFA in Theatre Arts at Marquette University; and is an alum of Milwaukee Skylight Opera, and the late Theatre X. After heading West to Los Angeles, DeLay added the Ascona Jazz and Heritage Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the REDCAT Theatre at the Walt Disney Concert Hall under her belt before finishing her Master’s in Acting from California Institute of the Arts.
After a season at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and a three year residency with the Los Angeles-based band, Vaud and the Villains, she was feeling the call back to the Crescent City, where she’s released her solo debut album, Comin’ Home, and single, Fest Time, and performs with the leagues of musicians who continue to make New Orleans the premiere city for live music. When she’s not on the road, you can catch her solo residency at Buffa’s Bar, or her other two main projects, The Bayou Saints, a band she co-leads with songwriter/guitarist Matthew Clark; A2D2, and project she does with longtime friend and fellow vocalist, Antoine Diel, along with several handfuls of other rotating projects that keep her moving in her favorite direction; forward.
Keep up with her projects at www.arsenedelay.com.