Jacob Todd Broussard at Towards

Artist: Jacob Todd Broussard

Exhibition title: Afters

Venue: Towards, Toronto, Canada

Date: June 8 – July 15, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Towards, Toronto

Towards is pleased to present Afters, an exhibition of new work by Jacob Todd Broussard.

The works in Afters stem from a chance discovery of a late forgotten family member after Broussard returned to his hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana. While researching the Mystic Krewe of Apollo de Lafayette – the longest running gay Carnivale organization in the state – Broussard came across images of a masked member. Upon further research, Broussard discovered that the masked individual was Gene Dominique, his mother’s cousin who had passed away two decades before, and unbeknownst to Broussard, was an original member of The Mystic Krewe of Apollo de Lafayette. The Mystic Krewe of Apollo is an organization that was founded in New Orleans in 1969 to foster brotherhood, unity and equality within the gay community. Every year they stage an annual Bal Masque during the Mardi Gras season.

With Afters, Broussard explores ideas surrounding loss, memory, and invention. Using Gene as a starting point, Broussard hypothesizes on an invented archival memory–one made up of what ifs while simultaneously folding himself and his late second cousin into a biomythographic tall-tale. Afters examines a queer atemporal space encountered when locating oneself between things: between similarity and alterity, between the familial home and the disco, between the singular and the collective.

Jacob Todd Broussard (b. 1992) received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art (2019) and his BFA from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (2014). He’s shown work in various exhibitions across Louisiana, New York, California, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Recent solo exhibitions include Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston, The Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Rivalry Projects in Buffalo, and PEEP Gallery in Philadelphia. He was a 2020/21 Drawing Center Viewing Program participant and a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant for three consecutive years. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Bunker Projects, The League Residency at Vyt, and more. He co-founded Kingfish, an art and architecture project space based in Buffalo, NY. Currently, he is an artist-in-resident at the House of Cards Artist Retreat in South Louisiana. He is an Assistant Professor of Painting at Virginia Commonwealth University.