Gabrielle Garcia Steib (SLA ’26) was born and raised in New Orleans, with family from Nicaragua and Mexico. A candidate for photography in Tulane’s MFA program, her work explores memory as a place — specifically ways in which collective memory and images are used to communicate in political landscapes.
Steib is currently one of 13 artists featured in the 40th anniversary edition of the Museum of Modern Art’s annual group exhibition of current photo-based work, “New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging.” Described on the MoMA website, “these creative practitioners offer slowness, persistence, and care as an antidote to the viral, profit-driven speed of contemporary image consumption, metadata technologies, and artificial intelligence.”
Steib’s work focuses on documenting narratives that construct parallels between Latin America and New Orleans, using historical context and research and contrasting it with contemporary experiences — such as the 20th-century banana trade that created physical connections with the two places or post-Katrina migrants who rebuilt the city, documenting their children and the life they created in New Orleans.
“I try to engage with memory and images as modes of communication — memory as a fertile gesture [image as concrete evidence of a lived experience],” shares Steib. “I hope to continue exploring the tenderness and temporality of the human experience, and how grief and memory occupy space in this life.”
“Lines of Belonging” is on view through January 17, 2026.
