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.
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…
In 2012, Higher Pictures in New York exhibited a selection of George Dureau’s photographs of New Orleans locals shot between 1973 and 1986. Dureau traveled in the high art world but also allowed his work to be displayed in the legendary leather-S/M magazine Drummer. That exhibit, thankfully, sparked renewed interest in Dureau’s work, which led to a new monograph, George Dureau: The Photographs, published by Aperture in June of this year.
Since the late 1970s, New Orleans artist Jim Richard has been making paintings, drawings, and collages in which art-stuffed modernist interiors melt into multihued graphic fields. Devoid of inhabitants, his signature claustrophobic spaces are visual essays on taste and influence, composed as if with maximum disorientation in mind.
James Drake is interested in systems, the micro- and the macrocosmic. Having recently opened the show Drawing, Reading, and Counting at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans (May 7 – June 18), the Texas-born, Santa Fe-based artist is still at work within a system he created for himself over four years ago; creating numbered drawings on nineteen by twenty-four inch paper every day.