All posts by Stephen Hawkins
Drawn to the Stage A Collection of Drawings by Elemore Morgan, Jr.
Elemore Morgan, Jr. was a constant presence at the foot of PASA’s stages, drawing quietly as he observed and absorbed the great performances that have marked PASA’s 20 year history. Drawn to the Stage collects over 50 of these unique, rarely seen works in one simple presentation that reflects the generosity of spirit that characterized Elemore’s artistry and his leadership of the arts community in south Louisiana.
Elemore Morgan, Jr.
Yesterday’s Doorway: John Scott’s Iconographic Portraits of New Orleans
by Mora J. Beauchamp Byrd for John Scott Retrospective at the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, Louisiana Mora J. Beauchamp Byrd Dr. Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd is a Visiting Assistant…
Robert Polidori: After the Flood
In late September 2005, Robert Polidori traveled to New Orleans to record the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and by the city’s broken levees. He found the streets deserted, and, without electricity, eerily dark. The next day he began to photograph, house by house: “All the places I went in, the doors were just open. They had been opened by what I collectively call “the army”, of maybe 20 National Guards from New Hampshire, 15 policemen from Minneapolis, 20 firefighters from New York… On maybe half of them or a third of them that I went in, I think that the occupants had been there prior. And some of them did leave certain funeral-like mementos before they left. Maybe right after the waters receded they had the chance to just–to go back to their place and just see, and realize there’s nothing worth saving.”
James Drake
An internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been honored with inclusion in both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, James Drake has explored political, social, and universal themes through the media of sculpture, video, installation, photography, and drawing. James Drake, the first monograph devoted to the artist, surveys thirty-five years of Drake’s work up to 2007.
Many of the works reproduced in James Drake reflect the artist’s preoccupation with borders. Some have to do with the political border between the United States and Mexico and the inherent social and psychological tensions of people living in its extreme and unique environment. Other works explore the internal boundaries that people experience as a result of attitudes, prejudices, power, control, and arrogance. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s narrative poem Huitzilopochtli, a personal response to Drake’s work, provides a verbal counterpart to the artist’s theme of border-crossing.
Katrina: Catastrophe and Catharsis
Katrina: Catastrophe and Catharsis, originally curated by Arthur Roger in the fall of 2006, was the first group exhibition dedicated to works by artists responding to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In early 2007, the exhibition traveled to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center where it was favorably received. The 2008 exhibition of Katrina: Catastrophe and Catharsis at the Arthur Roger Gallery Project will feature additional storm-related works by artists that were not included in the original exhibition and also many artists not affiliated with the Arthur Roger Gallery.
Chihuly: The Art of Dale Chihuly
Dale Chihuly is the most famous and influential artist working in glass today. For more than four decades, he has been the leading figure in this unique art form, fusing traditional craft with fine art, fabrication with the natural environment. Now, in his first major San Francisco exhibition, Chihuly displays a vast array of artworks from many of his signature series (including the Baskets, Seaforms, Persians, Venetians, and more) at both the de Young and Legion of Honor museums. A career-spanning biographical essay by curator Timothy Anglin Burgard and stunning color photography of the works will captivate Chihuly’s myriad fans both new and old.
David Bates | Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
The exuberant paintings and sculptures of maverick Texas artist David Bates (born 1952) combine modernist ideas about visual representation with American eclecticism, resulting in a body of work that is at once sophisticated, soulful and accessible.
“Painted cities layered in meaning,” Toronto Star
John Hartman’s painted cities are the ones parents tell their wide-eyed children about, the astounding metropolises formed by almighty rivers and buildings that ignore gravity as they make their way to the moon. They’re Oz or Xanadu’s pleasure dome.