BY JOHN D’ADDARIO | Special to The Advocate MAR 27, 2018 – 2:00 PM The nearly two dozen artists in the Ogden Museum’s “The Whole Drum Will Sound: Women in Southern Abstraction” are — as advertised — women from the South who make abstract art. But their similarities end there. In one gallery, Shawne Major’s…
Ida Kohlmeyer, “the Grand Dame” of color, is known for her colorful abstract pictographs as well as her sculptures. She studied at Newcomb College and the John McCrady school of art before enrolling in the Hans Hoffman school in Massachusetts, where New Orleans’ artist Fritz Bultman had also attended. Though she had opportunities, Kohlmeyer would not leave New Orleans. She taught at Newcomb College from 1956 to 1964 and it was during this time her work was influenced by Mark Rothko, who was a visiting artist at Tulane University.
Pride of Place: The Making of Contemporary Art in New Orleans celebrates art collector and gallery owner Arthur Roger’s transformational gift of his entire personal art collection to the New Orleans Museum of Art. Spotlighting one of the city’s most groundbreaking contemporary art collections, the exhibition (on view June 23–September 3, 2017) explores the rise of modern and contemporary art in New Orleans.
The Julia Street gallery owner donated his art collection to NOMA, and the show says as much about Roger as the art he has collected.
You don’t need to be an art buff to appreciate the New Orleans Museum of Art’s most recent exhibition: “Pride of Place: The Making of Contemporary Art in New Orleans.” Pride of Place celebrates art collector and gallery owner Arthur Roger’s personal collection that he gifted to the museum.
The New Orleans Museum of Art is about to begin a John Waters film festival to celebrate a gift of photographs and a sculpture by the movie maker – part of a much larger gift from gallery owner Arthur Roger.
Over the years, Arthur Roger nurtured artists through his art gallery opened in 1978 and in doing so, helped shape and promote the art scene of his native city. Joining the list of benefactors, he recently gifted his sizable art collection accumulated over four decades to the New Orleans Museum of Art. The eighty-seven objects, including paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, are on display this Summer for the exhibition Pride of Place: The Making of Contemporary Art in New Orleans, curated by Katie Pfohl, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at NOMA.
When Arthur Roger launched his gallery in 1978, there were only a handful of others focused on new art. The scene has expanded greatly since then, but Roger has more than kept abreast of the ever-changing art world through the years, as we see in this sprawling new exhibition of works from his personal collection, which he donated recently to the New Orleans Museum of Art.
[Arthur Roger’s] donation — paintings, sculpture and photography by local and national luminaries of modern art — comprises a new NOMA exhibit, “Pride of Place: The Making of Contemporary Art in New Orleans.” The exhibit opens Friday and runs through Sept. 3. In the exhibit’s 143-page catalog, museum Director Susan M. Taylor describes the gift as “transformational.” It “significantly expands” NOMA’s contemporary art holdings and “reaffirms the museum’s commitment to the work of local New Orleans artists,” she said.
On June 1, Arthur Roger’s personal collection of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and mixed media pieces will be taken off his walls, packed away and carted over to the New Orleans Museum of Art. He recently donated more than 80 pieces to the museum, including works by national and regional artists such as Luis Cruz Azaceta, Willie Birch, Douglas Bourgeois, Robert Colescott, George Dureau, Robert Gordy, Deborah Kass, Catherine Opie, Robert Polidori, Holton Rower and John Waters, among others.