IN CONVERSATION: KATHERINE AINSLEY OWNER of SIBYL GALLERY ‘AT THE EDGE OF THE CITY’
“In New York you were always trying to keep up with the Joneses, knowing everything that's going on, every new artist, and going to every opening. It was exhausting. It’s comforting that I could go to every gallery in New Orleans in one weekend. And I was really impressed with the St. Claude Galleries. I was more familiar with Julia Street. The St. Claude scene felt like they were taking more risks, because they could.”
Katherine Ainsley made a bold choice when she and her husband, Storm, opened Sibyl Gallery in October of 2022 in New Orleans’s Riverbend neighborhood. She is about as distant as one can be from Julia Street, which is still the controlling grand dame of New Orleans’s art market; as well as from the St. Claude scene, where the city saw its post-Hurricane Katrina visual arts renaissance. She has none of the foot traffic one might hope for in a space on Magazine or Oak Street. What the location does allow is for Ainsley to fulfil her dream of a space she both lives and works in. Sibyl is her home as well as a large, high-ceilinged gallery that is simultaneously warm and industrial, with a mezzanine offering views of the New Orleans levee.
Read Full ARTICLE by Adam Falik in the WINTER issue.
Street Date: Tuesday December 9th 2025
Adam Falik
Adam Falik is a writer of fiction, drama, and cultural criticism. He has been a contributor to Artvoices Magazine, Art + Design, Hyperallergic, and wrote the forty-one essays for The Saratoga Collection (UNO Press). He is an Associate Professor at Southern University at New Orleans.
