All posts by staff

“Carnival Craft,” NOLA Defender

Bruce Davenport’s meticulously plotted Bruce Jr. Does the Parades involves ten gloriously large diagrams of revelers and marching bands from an aerial perspective, and seven specifically hung 11×14 details of Mardi Gras. Each framed paper piece is a crisp 60×40 and they are hung in regimented order, like their subjects are arranged in marching band formation. Davenport worked in marker and pen, but the resulting work feels like a reliquary document instead of a teenage notebook. Davenport takes the viewer through the stories of black New Orleanians by narrating the scenes in ballpoint pen.

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“The Truisms of Robert Colescott by Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins,” NYU Black Renaissance Noir

In The Legacy of the Black Arts Movement, author Trey Ellis suggests that the New Breed of Black artists, writers and critics advanced a broad range of aesthetic positions that pointed to an awareness and acceptance of their “cultural mulatto” status and recognized their immersion in and indebtedness to “a multi-racial mix of cultures.”[2] The New Breed Artists regularly employed popular culture as both a playground and a tool of empowerment, using highbrow and lowbrow references that were easily interpreted by all sectors of Black society. Ellis was particularly interested in the tensions these artists experienced between their competing desires to adhere to European and American aesthetic norms and to present an alternative view of Americans whose heritage included a history of enslavement and miscegenation. This double consciousness often invited a collision between content and style, but sometimes, as in the work of Robert Colescott, this twin consciousness became inextricably intertwined as it informed form and materiality.

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“Field Hands,” The Urban Glass Art Quarterly

Thirty miles east of Minneapolis, across the upper Mississippi River that defines the Minnesota-Wisconsin state border, the campus of the University of Wisconsin at River Falls sprawls over more than 400 acres and includes two laboratory farms. The reason for the large agricultural education program becomes clear if you continue eastward, where very quickly you are engulfed in large tracts of farmland. It was here in Midwest farm country, in 1965, that sculptor Doug Johnson, fresh from his graduate studies with Harvey Littleton at University of Wisconsin at Madison, was hired to start a glass program within the well-regarded art department, which draws equally from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and the farming communities of rural Wisconsin.

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“Oil on Canvas,” The Advocate

When the Macondo well blew in April of 2010, killing 11 men and setting off the worst oil discharge in U.S. history, Jacqueline Bishop’s initial reaction was one of action. After all, the New Orleans-based visual artist has spent decades highlighting environmental issues in exotic locals like the Amazon. Yet here was a major man-made disaster in her own backyard. Bishop spent many weeks during the spill working at Grand Isle State Park cleaning oil from beach-hugging hermit crabs and reintroducing them to the water. It was something to do at a time when those in charge searched, seemingly in vain, for ways to stop the torrent of oil flowing from the Gulf floor.

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“Tattings & Tessellations,” New Orleans Art Review

The shape of Relics, presenting new work by artist Troy Dugas, provides a fascinating, intriguing, and interesting experience for viewers familiar and new to the artist’s work. Those for whom the artist’s work is new will have the delightful experience of exploring their way through the intricately patterned iterations of these amazing tessellations for the first time. Those in the know, already familiar with the artist’s earlier work, will have the satisfaction of the insider witnessing the evolution of earlier themes into new variations of recursive patterns. Of interest to both will be the artist’s radical essays into the new subjects of portraits and still lives with their historical and representational references and new ways of working with materials. New expressions of the intricately patterned mandala idea focuses one’s attention away from peripheral distractions and into the minutiae of their making, into meditation on visual pattern and movement as the eye becomes involved in deciphering the complex interrelationships among patterns, rhythms, and repetitions.

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“Dureau,” New Orleans Art Review

You enter the George Dureau exhibition expecting the celebrated interpreter of the human form, an artist who in his paintings, drawings and photography transforms the figure, even when physically compromised, into a thing of exalted beauty. You leave with that impression confirmed, but with another: an impression of timeless technical ingenuity that transcends mere talent, and, more important, a genuinely moving density of meaning.

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“Pop Cultural Memories and Nature of Nature,” New Orleans Art Review

[T]he paintings of Allison Stewart are the refined expression of the artist’s poetic vision of nature through art. There are three major themes represented in the current exhibition of Stewart’s work at the Arthurs Roger Gallery, each involving the thoughts and feelings of the viewer varying according to the empirical experiences of each as images, ideas, and facts commingle in the experience of the artist’s work: the elegiac idylls of Fading Dreams, the ontological poetics of Wicked Beauty, the symphonic movements of Natural Wonders, and three minor subthemes that comfortably fit within the rubric of Natural Wonders: Bloom, Silent Tide, and Air Borne.

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“Inspired by Nature, Tweaked With Satire,” New York Times

On a sunny afternoon last month, John Alexander sat in his studio in Amagansett, surveying a boatload of motley figures on a large painting in progress he had titled “Lost Souls.” It was not a group you would want to encounter on your next cruise. The passengers of this open vessel — some of them wearing strange, beaked masks — included a fellow in a kind of dunce cap; several monkeys, who appeared terrified or glum; and a man with a dyspeptic expression who was — it merited a double take — urinating overboard. “It’s always a similar cast of characters,” Mr. Alexander said of the figures, which have appeared, in various guises, in some of his other satirical works. These tend to include “anybody I perceive as dishonest, hypocritical or just generally up to no good,” he said.

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“Guild Hall Summer Season Starts Out Strong,” EastHampton Patch

An exhibit of Amagansett based artist John Alexander’s paintings also opened on June 15. The colorful, semi-surrealist work demonstrates both a fascination with the natural world — birds in particular — and a satirical sense of humor that pokes fun at the themes of culture. The largest work in the exhibit, which faces the visitor as he enters the gallery, is “Lost Souls”, a cartoonish pastiche that is part Washington Crossing the Delaware, part Raft of the Medusa, with monkeys, beaked carnival masks, and a healthy roasting of organized religion. Alexander, who has also played in the Artists & Writers Softball Game, is represented in both shows.

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