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.
George Dureau, The Photographs is an album of the great photographic portraits made throughout the forty years of Dureau’s artistic career—a New Orleans romance between the photographer and his subjects.
Dapper Bruce LaFitte, formerly Bruce Davenport, Jr., at the Atlanta Contemporary | May 19 – August 7, 2016
Jacqueline Bishop: Climate Strange – a FestivalSpeaks! lecture at the University of Southern Mississippi | June 3, 2016
Jim Richard’s ninth exhibition at Arthur Roger Gallery brings together four of his former students—Cheryl Donegan, Amy Feldman, Wayne Gonzales, and Lisa Sanditz—to share the gallery space with him. It has the collegial feeling of a school group project, with the artists putting in their own individual contributions, but this is one where the teacher joins in too.
Arthur Roger Gallery introduces the 2016 Chihuly Workshop Studio Editions, Jade Green Seaform, Mandarin Yellow Persian, Nordic Blue Macchia, and Star Fire Seaform
For most of his career, Jim Richard’s paintings amounted to “art about art,” only instead of art history, they suggested settings for short stories where the artworks themselves were the protagonists. These new works are similar but they also allude to the way digital technology now makes everything in the world seem more accessible yet somehow less real, as elusive as pixels on a computer screen.
Red is certainly not the only color Cubans express themselves with, however—a country with a famously colorful personality, Cuba embodies a wide-ranging palette in its lively architecture, people, cuisine, and vegetation. The artist Luis Cruz Azacata captures this vibrancy in his swirling, playful work, Swimming to Havana VIII. It’s easy to imagine the rainbow-streaked streets of Havana when looking at this artist’s oeuvre, so let this painting be a reminder for you to not miss out on the colorful experiences now available to you in Cuba.
