Josiah Gagosian was born in Pocatello, Idaho and raised in Idaho and Oregon. His father is a descendant of Ottoman-Armenian converts to Mormonism, and his mother the daughter of a Mexican Catholic and a lapsed Mormon of Scandinavian extraction. These distinct identities have shaped a reverent sensibility that is keenly interested in the natural world and humanity’s place in it. Gagosian has shown his work in local group and solo exhibitions in New Orleans, and is a former artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center. He has curated exhibitions for the John Burton Harter and Joan Mitchell Foundations, and is also an art educator, teaching classes at the University of New Orleans.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Josiah to learn more about his creative projects. Read below!

Norah Clifford: Your images are striking compositions with incredible detail. Can you walk us through your creative process, from what inspires you to begin a piece to deciding when it feels complete?

Josiah Gagosian: I have a background in literature and so my process involves a lot of reading and writing. I collect excerpts and images, write poems, and make drawings and photographs which start to coalesce around an idea or concept. I tend to intuitively follow any patterns that emerge from this initial process. Philosophical and literary language help me to crystallize my thoughts around what is often a very nebulous interaction between myself and the painting. I’ll make a series of choices and then have to adjust and readjust the painting based on the material results of those choices. This can go on indefinitely and I often spend months working on a painting before it is finished. Sometimes “completion” has more to do with a deadline than anything else, but I try to develop the work to a point where what it is saying to me has a certain intensity, a consciousness of its own, so to speak.

NC: With painting as your primary medium, why does multimedia also call to you; what is its relationship to the themes you explore?

JG: As a kid I had a very eclectic array of creative interests: calligraphy, modular origami, beading, drawing, collage, illuminated manuscripts. I also read voraciously and played music. Painting came much later when I was in high school and then college. I feel like my process now mirrors some of this developmental progression, beginning with constructed layers of drawings, photographs, and various papers, and ending with layers of paint, and in many cases, sculpture. Each medium has a different expressive quality, like instruments in an orchestra. I am always trying to bring disparate elements together into a coherent whole, which is in many ways parallel to how I view my life—a process of trying to make sense or meaning out of the raw material of subjective experience.

NC: How does your artwork represent the convergence of your own identities and how those identities exist within greater cultural contexts?

JG: As a queer person I think I’ve always had a fraught relationship to the idea of identity that was only magnified by my fragmented cultural background. I tend to relate most to my mother’s Mexican ancestry, but I have lineages that connect me to many places, from the indigenous people of Sonora, to Scandinavia and Wales, to the Basque regions of Spain and France, to the ancient Armenian villages of what is now Eastern Turkey. I find that my work has become a way for me to confront the mysterious way these seemingly unconnected threads have braided themselves together into what I experience as my individual life. I borrow religious, mythological, and historical motifs from all these threads to which I am connected, and weave them together with personal imagery, often using plants and animals as signifiers of memories or specific events. I believe their specificity is part of what makes these images resound with other people. They don’t have to know all the intricate details to see something of their own equally kaleidoscopic experience of the world reflected in mine.  

NC: What does it mean to you to be the cover artist for the 2026 Saints & Sinners Short Fiction Anthology, and can you speak more on the creation of that piece?

JG: Literature has played an enormous role in my development both as an artist and as a human being so I was excited to have my work used for the cover of this fiction anthology. While my primary focus for the past decade has been my visual practice, I have written a good deal of fiction and poetry which has influenced or complemented my visual work. The cover painting is part of a diptych I made several years ago and is probably my most recognizably New Orleanian painting, based on both my personal experiences of carnival season (particularly the Krewe of St. Anne) as well as the celebration of Carnival as a widespread cultural phenomenon more generally. As a transplant to New Orleans, I try to be conscious of the imagery I work with and avoid visual cliches or appropriation, favoring a vision of New Orleans that is particular to my own experience of it over the past 20 years. What does Mexican-Armenian-Queer-New Orleans Carnival look like? Can I be a part of something and outside of it at the same time? I like to make work that digs into deeper questions without necessarily attempting to answer them.

NC: You have twice curated exhibitions for the John Burton Harter Foundation. Can you elaborate on those experiences and working with other LGBTQ+ artists in New Orleans?

JG: Working with the Harter Foundation was an incredibly transformative experience for me. I hadn’t curated an exhibition before, but I have taught art at UNO for years and I love art and being in conversation with other people who make it. It was heartening to be able to approach both friends and strangers about my vision for an exhibition theme and see them respond with enthusiasm. I learned so much about the inspiration and ideas and experiences behind other artists’ practices, and it was rewarding to be able to pull these diverse approaches together into cohesive exhibitions that fostered conversations between the different works and artists from different backgrounds. Curating is an enormous amount of work and requires so much collaboration, which is something that’s easy to forget in a solitary art practice. Our city has such a wealth of creative voices, and it was gratifying to get out of my own head and focus on collaboration with other LGBTQ+ artists in my community. It helped to clarify some things for me on a personal and a communal level.

NC: What are you working on now that you’re excited about? 

JG: I am currently working on a more ambitious long-term project that merges my literary and visual practices in an exploration of the history, biography, and mythology surrounding the Mexican side of my family. My mother and grandmother are “fronterizas,” border people from the town of Douglas, Arizona/Agua Prieta, Sonora, which was one of the first locations to see the effects Customs and Border Protection when it was established in 1924. This event and subsequent deportation policies had a profoundly traumatic impact on my family that I am still trying to fully understand. The border has become a symbol of rupture and division in my mind and addressing it and its history is a way to tease apart both learned and imposed divisions within myself as a person of mixed ancestry raised in a profoundly stratified and racialized society. I’m not yet sure where exactly the work is going, but the journey has begun.

Find more from Josiah on instagram @josiahgagosian!

Click HERE to see our 2026 Fiction Finalists. 

Newsletter Editor, Norah Clifford | info@tennesseewilliams.net 

Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival is a program of

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