Dallas artist David Bates may be the finest painter his hometown has ever produced, but when it comes to his favorite sport, he heads to Louisiana and the remote extremities of Plaquemines Parish. While the paintings in this Down Highway 23 series reflect the everyday lives of fishermen, they were inspired by a trip he made in 2010, when instead of the usual scenes of shrimpers, oystermen and boats laden with the day’s catch, he encountered a coastal dystopia defined by reporters, politicians, tar balls, oil slicks and clean up crews in hazmat suits. Evidence of the BP oil disaster was everywhere in a coastal landscape transformed into something nightmarish, but amid the chaos he began to spot the familiar faces of those who derived their living from those waters. What he saw in them was not defeat but the same resilience that had faced many hurricanes and come back for more. Read More
Gallery News
Review: Paintings by David Bates
April 12, 2012
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Willie Birch leads tour of HARD TRUTHS: THE ART OF THORNTON DIAL at NOMA Friday, April 20, 2012
April 4, 2012
Join artist Willie Birch at the New Orleans Museum of Art for a tour of HARD TRUTHS: THE ART OF THORNTON DIAL, Friday, April 20, 5pm to 9pm. Read More
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Willie Birch at Exit Art’s final exhibition “Every Exit is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art”
March 29, 2012
Exit Art announces its final exhibition EVERY EXIT IS AN ENTRANCE: 30 YEARS OF EXIT ART. Founded in 1982 by Executive Director Jeanette Ingberman and Artistic Director Papo Colo, Exit Art has grown from a pioneering alternative art space into an innovative cultural center. We have supported and fostered a vibrant, interdisciplinary artistic community in New York, organizing over 200 exhibitions, events, festivals and programs featuring more than 2,500 artists. Consistently challenging social, political, aesthetic and curatorial norms, Exit Art has organized historical exhibitions; presented the work of young, emerging, under-recognized and mid-career artists; produced experimental theater and performance works; and organized national and international film and video programs. Committed early on to experimenting with the intersections of film, video, performance, music, publications, design and visual art, Exit Art remained steadfast in its mission to provide new possibilities and opportunities for both artists and audiences alike. Read More
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Review: Luis Cruz Azaceta, Gambit
Excerpt from “Review: Luis Cruz Azaceta and Ivan Navarro” by D. Eric Bookhardt, Gambit
Change happens. That’s not news, but lately the pace seems to be picking up in often perplexing ways. Such is the proposition that propels Luis Cruz Azaceta in his Shifting States expo at Arthur Roger Gallery. As a child, the Havana-born painter escaped Cuba in 1960 with his family. Ensconced in Uptown New Orleans for the past 20 years, his lifelong themes of displacement and alienation are as relevant now as ever. Shifting States is an apt title in an age when revolutions are launched with cell phones and enemies are stalked and assassinated by remote-controlled drones. Blood Line (pictured) suggests a Rorschach blot studded with the oddly similar forms of mosques, minarets, radar and microwave towers in a bristling nimbus of potential mayhem. Surveillance is a maze of circuits attached by electronic umbilical cords to lethal-looking pods in improbable candy colors. All sprout ominous appendages and the effect is unsettling, as if economic, religious and military conflicts had assumed autonomous lives of their own in which mere individuals are all but powerless.
Shifting States
Through Feb. 18, 2012
Arthur Roger Gallery, 434 Julia St., 522-1999