Srdjan Loncar is making money, but it’s not about the profit. He hopes that by the time you’re reading this article, New Orleans will be consumed with blissful residents, toting around their newly acquired golden suitcases, a million dollars richer.
by Mora J. Beauchamp Byrd for John Scott Retrospective at the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, Louisiana Mora J. Beauchamp Byrd Dr. Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd is a Visiting Assistant…
New Orleans photographer Deborah Luster searched newspaper archives for the locations of murders. They weren’t hard to find in the Crescent City, one of the country’s killing capitals. With a cumbersome camera that produces odd, old-fashioned circular photos, Luster documented the weedy lots between blighted buildings, out-of-the-way roadsides and miserable hotels where people violently lost their lives.
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NOVEMBER 14, 2008
PHOTOGRAPHER DEBORAH LUSTER’S MUDERSCAPES ARE A PROSPECT.1 NEW ORLEANS REALITY CHECK
By Doug McCash
Art critic
WHEELS OF MISFORTUNE
New Orleans photographer Deborah Luster searched newspaper archives for the locations of murders. They weren’t hard to find in the Crescent City, one of the country’s killing capitals.
What a deal. Artist Srdjan Loncar will sell you $1 million for $500. He’ll even throw in a golden briefcase to help you carry away the loot.
As the nation’s largest art biennial plays out in New Orleans, we are again reminded of the complex and controversial nature of such a setting – one inseparable from the inconceivable events and aftermath of tragedy on such an epic scale. As the struggle to rebuild continues in New Orleans, many of the artists in Prospect 1 strive to put form to feeling within the troubling context of such a city. Artists like Luis Cruz Azaceta rise to the occasion, providing an insightful and engaging commentary through richly-layered pieces. In the installation, “Swept Away,” Azaceta offers an arresting personal panorama through sculpture, painting and photography.
Exhibition Dates: November 1 – November 29, 2008 Opening Reception: Saturday, November 1st from 6–8 pm in conjunction with Prospect.1 Gallery Location: Arthur Roger Gallery, 432 Julia Street, New Orleans,…
In late September 2005, Robert Polidori traveled to New Orleans to record the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and by the city’s broken levees. He found the streets deserted, and, without electricity, eerily dark. The next day he began to photograph, house by house: “All the places I went in, the doors were just open. They had been opened by what I collectively call “the army”, of maybe 20 National Guards from New Hampshire, 15 policemen from Minneapolis, 20 firefighters from New York… On maybe half of them or a third of them that I went in, I think that the occupants had been there prior. And some of them did leave certain funeral-like mementos before they left. Maybe right after the waters receded they had the chance to just–to go back to their place and just see, and realize there’s nothing worth saving.”
An internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been honored with inclusion in both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, James Drake has explored political, social, and universal themes through the media of sculpture, video, installation, photography, and drawing. James Drake, the first monograph devoted to the artist, surveys thirty-five years of Drake’s work up to 2007.
Many of the works reproduced in James Drake reflect the artist’s preoccupation with borders. Some have to do with the political border between the United States and Mexico and the inherent social and psychological tensions of people living in its extreme and unique environment. Other works explore the internal boundaries that people experience as a result of attitudes, prejudices, power, control, and arrogance. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s narrative poem Huitzilopochtli, a personal response to Drake’s work, provides a verbal counterpart to the artist’s theme of border-crossing.
