Introducing Cole Broussard
Born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, Cole is a multimedia visual artist, naturalist, printmaker, experimental animator, and armchair philosopher. Cole graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2022 with a Bachelor’s in Computer Art and Animation, and has since become a certified Acadiana Master Naturalist and part-time Naturalist at the Acadiana Park Nature Station. His capstone project at ULL explored the death of his great-grandparents through a 4-minute animated short film titled “Crumble,” animated almost entirely using paper-cutouts and collage. Most recently, Cole’s work has been shown in 2024’s (un)common show at Basin Arts, and he gave a stunning performance as a dead body laying on a table at the LOUDHOUSE x ARCHIVES annual show in Chase Tower. He’s also a frequent vendor at Downtown Lafayette’s Second Saturday ArtWalk.
His work exists squarely in the space between art and nature – a practice that has rapidly consumed and amplified qualities of life and being he once thought to be disparate. His recent work is a mix of painting and collage that kinda looks like a conspiracy theorist connecting thoughts with red string, snatching meaningful images and text from his life as he attempts to explore and make sense of those disparate qualities.
Also to this end is his collaborative residency at Basin Arts with local artist Alex Sutherlin titled “Temps Rouler: Explorations in Change.” Through community workshops, interviews, sculpture, and animation, it seeks to manifest the disparities between Acadian culture/identity and its political relationship to the environment. These themes define Cole’s broader work as a synthetic, unified vision in pursuit of life, truth, and deep harmony. Or something like that, anyway.
Who makes up your art circle?
I find guidance and inspiration in both practicing artists and people who claim that they don’t have a creative bone in their body. I think humans creating is like birds singing or plants growing – it’s just what we were born to do. The artists I love the most make work that makes me feel this, people like my collaborator Alex Sutherlin, my mentor Hagit Barkai, and all of the friends I made at LOUDHOUSE. The people Alex and I interviewed for Temps Rouler include Louise Prejean, a local artist and fellow Acadiana Master Naturalist, and musician Ian Sutherlin, and their insight has become an essential part of my work over the past few months. Also recently, some animation friends and I started a Discord server called “Acadiana Time Wizards,” and they’re an endless source of inspiration in terms of time-based media. Shoutout to those absolute legends.
How do you expand your art circle?
Create. Run out of pages in your sketchbook. Run out of space in your bedroom for paintings. Run out of inspiration, then run out of time (and money) trying to find more. Suddenly, one day, you’ll look up and realize that you’ve met all these amazing people, read all these books, watched all these great movies and that you’ve got some pretty cool work to show for it. And that work doesn’t even have to be “capital ‘A’ Art,” it could be a book club, or a political movement, or a romantic relationship. Community IS creation, and an art circle is no different, so I’ve been really focused on these in-person connections recently. Maybe this is pessimistic, but I think that social media has been compromised by outside interests to such a degree that it’s not really possible to construct genuine, artistic connections or community anymore, save for small corners of the internet. I’m always in search of these digital back-alleys, so if you’re reading this and you’re aware of one, please let me know!
What value do you see in having a creative community?
Community without creativity is death. Any community that rejects and suppresses human creativity is fundamentally anti-human and is, at its core, an absurd and hollow performance. This performance is like a circus – it reduces and commodifies all novel things into spectacle with no regard for suffering, both human and non-human. Having a creative community in which artists, by which I mean everyone, are allowed to express themselves, collaborate, and be human – well, that’s simply worth more than anything. It’s essential to our very future.
How does your artistic approach contribute to your community?
My hope is that by becoming aware of the ways in which vast, complex forces work through me and my life, I can manipulate and channel those forces into art that’s meaningful. I want to make work that needs to be made, both for my local community and the world as a whole.
Our weekly Art Circle series profiles artists throughout the community and is sponsored in part by Lafayette Visitor Enterprise Fund managed by Lafayette Travel
