George Dureau was born in 1930, raised and, for the most part, stayed in New Orleans his entire life – leaving only to serve in the army and also to briefly study architecture. He began drawing when he was young, encouraged by his mother to capture courtyard scenes and magnolias. As an adult, he moved to the French Quarter and lived as one might have in Paris at the same time.
Face to Face features work by twelve nationally and internationally acclaimed artists working in a variety of media. It includes Willie Birch, Douglas Bourgeois, George Dureau, Elizabeth Kleinveld & Epaul Julien, Aubrey Edwards, Deborah Luster, Rashaad Newsome, Tameka Norris, Gina Phillips, Jennifer Shaw, Jonathan Traviesa, and Heather Weathers.
New Orleans sculptor Lin Emery’s career began on a whim as feather-light as the movement of the dancing metal sculptures that can be seen across the world. At 23, she wandered into a famous sculptor’s Paris studio and asked about lessons. He took her on as a demonstration to show his more advanced students how to teach total neophytes.
Natural Discourse and the Los Angeles County Arboretum present a spectacular evening of animation, light and sound in the garden. A group of acclaimed contemporary artists have been invited to project their work onto the rich canvas of the botanical garden. With themes as diverse as invasive exotics, natural pigments, plant tropism and an ancient Chinese poem, these digital and video works explore the intersection of horticulture and technology.
Two years after his death, George Dureau is finally getting the recognition he deserved but never really pursued. For an art photographer, having an Aperture Foundation large-format monograph devoted to your work is the gold standard of recognition, and when Aperture published George Dureau, The Photographs last month, it assured his place in photography’s pantheon, a position further enhanced by his inclusion in upcoming museum symposiums at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere.
Here in New Orleans, contemporary galleries glisten with the wares of artists’ contemplations, beckoning us to sample different paths of logic. Along the Warehouse District’s Julia Street, a seemingly wide range of concerns is evident with a deployment of everything from discarded boxes and Ninth Ward Yats to 3D glasses and mythical organics
August 2016 Openings / White Linen Night at Arthur Roger Gallery
Seventy-eight original works, 48 artists: the 2016 Louisiana Contemporary presented by the Helis Foundation debuted at a VIP reception at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art on Friday (Aug. 5). The exhibition officially opens tonight during Whitney White Linen Night.
Dureau was born in New Orleans’ Irish Channel neighborhood in 1930, about four miles from the city’s French Quarter, where he spent the majority of his life making paintings, sculptures, and photographs — both in the studio and on the street. Forty years of Dureau’s portraits have recently been published in a new Aperture book, The Photographs, a volume that arrives over 30 years after Dureau’s only other book was published in 1985.
[George] Dureau began taking pictures in the nineteen-sixties, with a Hasselblad. He did not think of photography as a “total” artistic medium, the way drawing and painting were, but his photographs are his best work, maybe because it’s the work he cared less about. His drawings and paintings are romantic in a different way; they are too suffused with his sensibility, or self-regard. The camera gave him a certain distance, and the pictures a moral ambiguity or weight that’s missing in his other work…