With John T. Scott’s preferred jazz tunes playing in the background, the Louisiana Art and Science Museum downtown Baton Rouge invites the visitor to look at the artist and his colleagues’ works during the exhibition Rhythm and Improvisation: John T. Scott and his Enduring Legacy.
About ten years ago American Legacy featured an artist named Whitfield Lovell in an article titled “Whispers from the Walls.” The Bronx-born Lovell, whose three-dimensional tableaux—life-size charcoal portraits on pine board, punctuated with everyday (and not so everyday) objects found in flea markets and antique malls, tel the life stories of ancestors, family, and once anonymous individuals from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Stephen Paul Day has chosen to be both creator and curator for Blame It On Vegas – Collecting Meta Modern, his seventh exhibition with the gallery. Sculpture, neon and paintings make up this collection of new, engaging works that oscillate between humor and horror, history and the present and also between the artist’s vocabulary – color, form, and significance of materials – and his viewpoint – how one engages the viewer to make sense of the vision he is presenting. Grouped together as they would be in a museum, there is an intentional ambiguity as to who made each work. Day describes himself as a “Disney kind of collector, putting together a ‘wunderkammer’ of excellent art, artifacts, and story.”
Robert Gordy is considered one of the most original and creative Southern painters of the twentieth century. His unfortunate death from AIDS in 1986 at the age of 52 was an enormous loss. The paintings in this exhibition, on both canvas and paper, date from between 1954 and 1981. Many of the works contain the artist’s clean-edged and stylized forms, melodic patterns and flawless color harmonies so characteristic of his work prior to 1982.
Currently at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, two Lafayette, LA artists who bring pattern to the fore in their own works are exhibiting: Stephanie Patton and Troy Dugas. Within both bodies of work, the two artists begin with a simple premise, a minimum of materials, and a highly repetitive process. However, their finalized works speak to the complexity, beauty and meaning that can unfold from such humble and rudimentary origins.
The “art world” might revolve around cities such as New York City and Paris, but a world-renowned Texas-born sculptor plans to stir interest in East Texas. James Surls, 69, a modernist sculptor, has shown his art in the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He has pieces on display in museums around Texas, the nation and globe. Surls has made his name and enjoyed critical success spanning more than four decades. He isn’t interested in critics. Public interest in art interests him, he said.
In the art world, some people wonder if this is the worst or the best of times. Neither of the leading art capitals, New York and London, have produced any truly exciting new art or artists in ages, but the silver lining is that tedious trends like postmodernism no longer rule, and vital regional art scenes like New Orleans and Los Angeles have never been more highly regarded. This quiet revolution that transcends the prevailing “isms” is exemplified in Acadiana-based Troy Dugas’ large cut-paper collages.
Stephanie Patton’s Private Practice show continues her exploration of psychic and physical healing in padded white vinyl wall hangings, fanciful soft sculptures that evoke the convolutions of the brain or even padded cells — or maybe what might have happened had a bedding company hired Salvador Dali as a designer.
Meant to instruct in the art of attentiveness, a mandala is a visual aid used in Hindu and Buddhist meditation. In classical form, the design contains four “gates” that guard a central circle. An honest rhetorical question then: do make-your-own-mandala websites and Urban Outfitters’ mandala bedspreads undermine the significance of this mystical emblem? This isn’t to scoff at the mandala’s new pop-Zen identity, but to witness the mandala moment while trends, and the technologies that are their silent backdrop, become increasingly antithetical to its symbolism and utility is bizarre.
Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., Ted Kincaid grew up in Dallas from the third grade on. And the pattern was always the same. “I was the kid who got in trouble for drawing all the time,” says Kincaid, 47. “I would turn in papers in elementary school with drawing all over them. And somewhere in the middle of it was my homework.”