It is the first day of the second weekend of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and I am in my car with John Alexander. Like most of the music-loving tourists in town, he is dressed in jeans and sneakers and armed with a camera bag, but unlike them, and pretty much everybody else we both know, we are not headed in the direction of the fairgrounds.
Minimalism, despite its nomenclature, has been teaching us for decades that there is more to simplicity than meets the eye, even if what meets the eye is sometimes barely much of anything at all.
A suite of new, large-scale paintings by Jim Richard reveals an artist at the height of his powers of composition and technique.
Circuses are quite disturbing. They are places of wonderment, but as children we were both terrified of clowns. It is all sweat and sawdust, and also like a parallel universe.
Allison Stewart says she entered the art world through the back door, and there’s truth in the statement. When Stewart began a master’s program in painting at the University of New Orleans, her prior exposure to the visual arts was through her undergraduate studies — in biology.
The work of Bosnian-born painter Amer Kobaslija, who lives in Florida, slips smoothly into the long-flowing Bay Area art current of intimate figuration.
THE WORKS OF Pard Morrison are poetically titled chromatic studies that mimic the layout of the ivories and ebonies of a keyboard. Sequences of colors and regular shapes define the rhythm and measure of compositions that could be used as an improvisational composition by a skilled jazz musician. Area, saturation, and juxtaposition mirror the notes, rhythmic patterns, chords, and harmonies of musical scripts.
Luis Cruz Azaceta (Havana, 1942) is an artist whose work carries the indelible imprint of displacement. The solitude, cultural and linguistic isolation, and the certainty of no longer belonging anywhere has marked his view of the world since he immigrated to the United States from Cuba at the beginning of the sixties. Throughout his career his works have continually exuded that feeling, whether veiledly or explicitly His perspective is that of a displaced individual attempting to find a personal route in the midst of that strange labyrinth that is identity.
Inspired by the Southern landscape, the work of visionary “outsiders,” agriculture, social and environmental ironies, New Orleans artist W. Steve Rucker specializes in creating imaginative installations.
