Storytellers.

A tribue to Bryant Benoit

Spoken by Milton Arceneaux at the 2026 ArtSpark Awards Reception
Acadiana Center for the Arts • May 9, 2026

Bryant Lee Benoit
1971 — 2026
Artist · Collagist · Storyteller

“You may not be here in your physical anymore.
But your storytelling will outlive every one of us in this room.”

 ———————

Storytellers.

Before there were books — there were storytellers.
Before there was a written language we could call our own — there were storytellers.
Before history had a publisher, before truth had a printing press,
before the colonizer ever picked up a pen — there were storytellers.
Whether you believe in a God, or in science, or in plain human history —
they all agree on one thing.
The story came first. And somebody had to carry it.
The story was scratched into cave walls.
Stitched into blankets.
Sung at the fire.
Beaten into a drum.
Whispered down a porch line from one grandmother to the next.
The medium changed. The method never did.
And the people who mattered most —
the ones the village could not afford to lose —
were the storytellers.
For Black America — the storyteller wasn’t just important.
The storyteller was survival.
When reading was a crime.
When writing got you whipped.
When your name got changed, your tongue got cut,
your country got erased —
somebody still had to remember.
Somebody still had to say it out loud.
Somebody still had to carry it in their hands,
in their hips, in their hum,
in the way they cooked a pot of food,
in the way they raised a child.

If it had not been for the storyteller —
for the singer, the painter, the quilter, the cook,
the dancer, the preacher, the griot —
we would have lost everything.
Or worse. Somebody else would have written it for us.
Somebody else would have decided who we are.

Storytellers.

In Louisiana, the truth has been blurred for decades.
By tourism dollars.
By academics with the wrong last names writing the wrong story.
By the Cajunization of Creole culture —
where a whole people got marketed into the margins of their own home.
But the storytellers — the storytellers never stopped working.
Some told it in songs —
in Creole French, in zydeco,
in the holler of a Mardi Gras Indian on Saint Joseph’s night.
Some told it in poems.
Some told it in quilts — every patch a name, every stitch a memory.
Some told it in wrought iron — bent into the gates of a city
that wouldn’t even let them in the front door.
Some told it bead by bead, suit by suit, year after year —
until the suit was the story.
And some — some took it all.
The paper. The paint. The photograph. The hand.
They took our magazines, our family pictures,
our grocery store flyers, our church programs —
and they cut and pieced and layered
until our whole world was looking back at us from a single canvas.
That’s the storyteller Bryant Benoit was.

We depended on Bryant.
For the preservation of a culture we are still living.
For making sure it did not get stripped from our identity.
Did not get taken from our ownership.
Did not get sold back to us as somebody else’s.

Storytellers.

From generation to generation,
he carried those stories in his art.
You could stand in front of one of his pieces
and find your own answers staring back at you.
Walk away — and still hear them calling.
Come back the next day —
and somehow — see a brand-new story.

Storytellers.

Unapologetically telling our truths.
The organized chaos in every brushstroke.
The fervor in the flow.
The patient sound of a fresh exacto blade.
The click of a clean pair of shears —
slicing through a hand-selected magazine,
a curated photograph,
an old family snapshot somebody trusted him with.

Nothing was random.

Black walls — intentional.
Hues — intentional.
Hex codes — intentional.
Measurements — intentional.

Down to the millimeter,
every choice aligned so the work could leave the canvas
and dance through the room it lived in.

Storytellers.

Bryant —
You may not be here in your physical anymore.
But your storytelling will outlive every one of us in this room.

Bryant Benoit.
Storyteller.

—

In loving memory of Bryant Lee Benoit (1971 – 2026). For Joey.

 

creoleculture.com · Louisiana Creole Culture