Dallas artist David Bates may be the finest painter his hometown has ever produced, but when it comes to his favorite sport, he heads to Louisiana and the remote extremities of Plaquemines Parish. While the paintings in this Down Highway 23 series reflect the everyday lives of fishermen, they were inspired by a trip he made in 2010, when instead of the usual scenes of shrimpers, oystermen and boats laden with the day’s catch, he encountered a coastal dystopia defined by reporters, politicians, tar balls, oil slicks and clean up crews in hazmat suits. Evidence of the BP oil disaster was everywhere in a coastal landscape transformed into something nightmarish, but amid the chaos he began to spot the familiar faces of those who derived their living from those waters. What he saw in them was not defeat but the same resilience that had faced many hurricanes and come back for more.

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From Oxford American, “Out of overwhelming curiosity, we wanted to discover the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South. So we enlisted a range of Southern experts (gallery owners, curators, critics, artists) to help us find them. To make things manageable, we limited our interest (for the time being) to those who paint, photograph, and draw.”

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Firmly rooted in the culture of south Louisiana, Lafayette artist Francis X. Pavy (b. 1954) arranges archetypal images into patterns within his paintings, block prints and sculptures. His colors and shapes walk the line between complementary and discordant, resulting in a variety of iconic yet contemporary Cajun imagery, all battling on his canvas for attention, in the same way daily aspects of Cajun culture – food, music, and art — resist hierarchical alignment.

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Renowned artist John T. Scott’s colorful kinetic sculpture captured the New Orleans spirit. In 1992, Xavier University art professor Scott, who lived from 1940 to 2007, was awarded a $315,000 John D. MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as a genius grant. It was a career-capping acknowledgement of Scott’s devotion to artistic experimentation and education that made him the city’s most influential modernist. Large-scale sculptures by Scott can be found in DeSaix Circle, City Park and at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

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Having an opportunity to view a gathering of Elemore Morgan paintings and drawings is like having an opportunity to visit with an old friend. Coming face to face with works ranging from small scale eight by five inch gouaches on paper to thirty-four by sixty inch acrylics on masonite offers an intimate experience infused by memories extending over more than fifteen ago when I first met the artist and his work soon after having moved to Louisiana from Ohio by way of Wyoming, New Mexico and California.

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Lesley Dill’s Poetic Visions: from Shimmer to Sister Gertrude Morgan focuses on two bodies of work by the versatile artist: one is metallic sculpture and the other is an installation inspired by the late folk artist, preacher, and New Orleans phenomenon Sister Gertrude Morgan. This exhibit is what you dream those dusty Smithsonian displays could be. It is history gone wild; a show of visual might that makes one feel like a child entering Disneyland.

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