Press & Media

“Ted Kincaid”, Art Forum

The permutations of color and image in Ted Kincaid’s photogravures raise, and politely refuse to answer, some heavy questions about modernist seriality and the identity of an individual artwork I’d be tempted to say that Kincaid’s works calculate a post-Warholian logic of pluralized identities and sameness beneath their surfaces, except that it’s nearly impossible to think that there is anything behind the ink on the paper: Like shadows, the gravures live only on the surface, which is appropriate given the light-based chemistry of the photo-intaglio process.

Read More

“Chihuly”, Arches Unbound

Much has been written about Dale Chihuly’s startling accomplishments as an artist—he is widely regarded as having single-handedly paved the way for glass to be accepted as a medium for serious art—but relatively few know about the 1963 Puget Sound alum’s Tacoma roots and his continuing commitment to his hometown.

Read More

“Gordy’s Chimerical World,” New Orleans Art Review

Robert Gordy is a quintessential visionary. A dreamer. An undauntable dweller in that violet-skied, chimerical world of aesthetic fantasy. Rarely has there been much attention given to this facet of his art; it seemed so latent over the years. But his 1981 survey, assembling twenty years of his paintings and drawings into a remarkable cohesive whole, tacitly proclaims that it is the principle facet and cannot be overlooked any longer.

Read More

“What Art Books Don’t Tell You,” The Times-Picayune Lagniappe

By the time Robert Gordy died in 1986 at age 52, he had already created two of the most original and influential styles ever to emerge from New Orleans. During his later, briefer (five year) stylistic period, he produced a long series of psychologically intense, Expressionistic portraits that represented the AIDS epidemic. He created those riveting, distorted faces of men with a then-unusual printing technique known as monotype. Monotypes are one-of-a-kind renderings produced by swiftly painting designs directly onto a Formica printing plate, then placing paper over the plate and rolling it through a printing press as if it were an etching. Gordy pioneered the now-popular method locally.

Read More

“Whiteman’s Iconic Paper Works,” Dana Standish

Ed Whiteman decided at age 17, that he wanted to be a painter, a decision that he describes as “very immediate.” It came to him in a flash one day when he was a commercial art student in upstate New York as he was looking through a book of paintings by the Zen- influenced Morris Graves. “It mirrored perfectly my experience with nature,” says Whiteman. “Up to that point I wasn’t aware there was such a thing as fine art or painting. When I saw Graves’ work I said ‘I can do that.’ In the next year and a half I painted more blind bird paintings than you could shake a stick at.”

Read More

“Willie Birch: Transforming Identities”

The journey began when a precocious child talent was recognized by “my junior high teacher, Mrs. Maxine Daniels, who took her father’s insurance money and created an art school for talented kids at the YMCA.

Read More

“Ho ho ho! A Christmas Surprise from Charbonnet”, New Orleans Times-Picayune

All art critics have some Ebenezer Scrooge in them. We wouldn’t mind at all seeing struggling artists working in their chilly, dark studios on Christmas Eve. Why should they misspend their time in the bosoms of their families, when there are paintings to be painted, sculptures to be sculpted? Art knows no holidays. As for critical generosity, bah, humbug.

Read More