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BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - Inside Lavish Hair Gallery off O’Neal Lane in Baton Rouge, works of art come together. Not paintings or sculptures, but hairstyles.

It’s Aungelle White’s passion.

”When I think of hair, it’s a way to express yourself,” said White, the salon’s owner.

White has been helping people express themselves for eight years, seeing firsthand how a hairstyle can transform someone.

”I do enjoy when I do have those clients that go over the top… They be like, ‘Ohhh, it’s a new person. Oh, my husband got a new wife.’ Just stuff like that. That does something to me. I love it,” White said.

She does all hair types and said her specialty is healthy hair, but she loves locs.

White expained, “The best part about doing locs right now, just seeing from how it transformed in the eye of, let’s just say, the corporate eye because you know, once upon a time, locs was looked down on.”

Many non-European-type hairstyles are being more accepted in the mainstream. In 2021, the Louisiana legislature passed the CROWN Act. CROWN is an acronym for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.” Basically, you can’t get fired based on your hairstyle, meaning braids, twists and natural hair are natural fits in the workplace.

”It can give people inspiration to even just go and want to be themselves even more,” said art curator John Alleyne.

John Alleyne has been growing his hair for more than ten years and is an expert on other types of art. He curated an exhibit at the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge called “Protective Styles: Narratives on Black Hair within Contemporary Art”.

Photographer Rita Harper is one of 22 artists showing their work in the exhibition. Her piece called ‘Sanctuary’ shows a couple entranced in each other at a park. It catches your eye as soon as you walk into the room.

”The first thing I noticed, like I said, was just their synchronicity. Her individual box braids and his cornrows, and I just think it expresses just the freedom that we have to express ourselves in whichever way we want to in society,” Harper said.

The exhibit is filled with photography, paintings and even three-dimensional art, like one piece with a mirror surrounded by a frame of braids and gold Afro picks.

You can see the exhibit “Protective Styles: Narratives on Black Hair within Contemporary Art” in the Shell Gallery at the Cary Saurage Community Arts Center at 233 St. Ferdinand Street in Downtown Baton Rouge. It is open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The exhibit closes on Thursday, February 29.

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