Welcome to the witty, whimsical world of Holton Rower’s Love Heals where dynamically asymmetric compositions composed of concentric, cruciform waves of color with sometimes wacky and delightfully zany names as simple as Birthday Apple and Ontological Relief and as enigmatic as Too Many Zippers Till Being Naked Just Plain Saved Time and Ice Packs And Advil Sure Help But Emotional Calm Is A Deeper Remedy with dimensions ranging from a minimum of fifty-eight inches in one dimension by a maximum of one hundred forty-four inches in another and one and one fourth to eleven and one half inches in depth.

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Send It On Down is an exhibition of photographs by Deborah Luster related to The Lost Roads Project: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas and The Rosesucker Retablos from the nineteen nineties that rewards the viewer with the sense of having that firm grasp on reality that characterizes the best straight photography and the intellectual satisfaction that comes from technical mastery of the medium and the artist’s sense of design. Although obviously posed and composed, Luster’s photographs have an elusive quality that challenges one’s ability to stay focused on the photographs themselves and their subjects and not to wander into the miasma of interpretation. Like the work of predecessor southern photographers Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, and Thomas Eggleston, Luster’s work evidences a world hitherto unknown to the typical viewer for whom the photographs are surrogate experience in the best tradition of documentary photography. The clarity of the artist’s vision leads one to trust the integrity of the photographer and the photograph, finding interest in what the subjects would consider as ordinary and everyday, an interest that makes the ordinary and everyday something special.

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When art is word and word is art, what does it signify, where does meaning lie, or need there be meaning at all? Quiver is an exhibition of ambiguous works accessible through multiple interpretations. Words and phrases are as if written on the walls like graffiti written by someone who does not have control of her medium, who may not understand the implications of the words and phrases that are written, floating signifiers existing sans explicit or implicit semantic context, art objects as well as ideas.

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Guild Hall announced its 28th annual Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Awards will honor John Alexander for Visual Arts, Walter Isaacson for Literary Arts, Nathan Lane for Performing Arts, and Melville (Mickey) Straus, who will receive the Special Award for Leadership and Philanthropy.

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Out of the more than 400 commercial galleries were surveyed this month, more than 70% had painting shows on view. Among them are two dozen solo exhibitions by New American Paintings alumni. New Orleans native Nicole Charbonnet, who was featured in one of our earliest issues, presents new work at the venerable Arthur Roger Gallery.

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Jacqueline Bishop practices a kind of unnatural naturalism, fantastical in its imagery even as it concentrates on the natural world. In fact, Bishop tends to be faithful to the rendition of actual animals – especially the fish and fowl that populate these meditations on aqua-ecology – while elaborating their surrounding conditions, including flora, weather, and water itself, in a surrealistic manner that effectively dramatizes their situation. Bishop comments pointedly on ecological conditions, but what she stresses is the sensation of nature itself and the delicate yet vital role and presence within it of its sentient creatures.

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Jim Richard’s “Make Yourself at Home,” on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art through February 24, 2013, remains one of the best shows of the year. A modernist journey through the colorful interiors of homes filled with a mix of high art, tchotchkes, and period furniture, Richard’s twelve-work exhibit showcases his deep knowledge of contemporary and historical art alongside refined technical skill, and pokes a little fun at modern art in the meantime.

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More than any other medium, photography is about time and time’s relationship to light and circumstance. In the hands of three Southern photographers, the results are often poetic. Deborah Luster’s early works, on view at Arthur Roger Gallery, predate her more famous images of Louisiana prisoners and crime scenes, but the same insightful whimsy illuminates views that include rural children posed with captive eels or dressed in their Sunday best amid fields of billowy cotton.

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Does anyone seriously doubt global warming anymore? Some people who used to ask why we live in such a vulnerable place had a rude awakening when Hurricane Sandy made it clear that vast storms are no longer confined to the tropics but now threaten even New York’s financial district. Perhaps climate change is a reminder that we have become alienated from our origins. Jacqueline Bishop has been addressing such questions in her paintings and mixed-media work for many years, and her new show at Arthur Roger Gallery is startling, not simply for its meticulous virtuosity, but also for its scope.

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