Exhibition Dates: November 3–December 22, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 3 from 6–8 pm
Gallery Location: 434 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm
Contact Info: 504.522.1999; www.arthurrogergallery.com
The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present Send It On Down, an exhibition of photographs by Deborah Luster. The exhibition will be on view at Arthur Roger@434, located at 434 Julia Street, from November 3 through December 22, 2012. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist in attendance, Saturday, November 3 from 6–8 pm.
Sunday Morning, 1993. Silver gelatin print, 24 x 24 inches.
Deborah Luster’s documentary photographs impart the community, culture and landscape of the South. Working with medium format cameras, she presents the rituals of daily life, the life forces in objects and the inner spirits of her subjects. As poet C.D. Wright describes, “She offers no theory, adheres to none; none stick back. She studies compulsively and applies in the particular, what works then and there.”
Send It On Down is a collection of the artist’s early work, primarily drawn from two projects. The Lost Roads Project was begun in 1990 in collaboration with poet C.D. Wright. Black and white photographs document the ceremony of Sunday church services; the conventions of local fishing, boat building and farming industries; and the writers, street magicians and other eccentric personalities of the local community. These images along with literary works were published in The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas (University of Arkansas Press, 1994). Send It On Down also contains work from The Rosesucker Retablos (with poems by C.D. Wright).
Luster’s awards include the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (with C.D. Wright); the first Baum Award for An Emerging American Photographer (in conjunction with the Friends of Photography); a John Gutmann Photography Fellowship; a Peter S. Reed Fellowship; and an Anonymous Was A Woman Award.
Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of America Art; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Smithsonian Museum and the New Orleans Museum of Art, among others.
Luster has published two monographs, both with Twin Palms Publishing, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), and Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish (2011).
Raised in the hill country of northwest Arkansas, Deborah Luster studied literature and creative writing at the University of Arkansas. She now lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.