“The 6 shows not to miss at White Linen Night 2013,” The Times-Picayune

Bruce Davenport Jr. has taken his passion for New Orleans high school and college marching bands and translated it into a multi-layered personal language. Stand 10 feet from one of Davenport’s drawings and you will be struck by the artists’ command of stark geometric composition. Stand five feet from his drawings and you will be fascinated by his amazingly complicated hieroglyphic interpretation of Crescent City parades. Lean in for a close look and you’ll be able to read his personal and political musings, delivered with rap swagger. The whole effect is fascinating.

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Gene Koss: Sunrise

Gene Koss blends simple process with advanced fabrication techniques to create glass sculptures that reveal the constant inspiration provided by the rural landscapes of his youth and life. The internationally known artist’s vision remains profoundly humanist, yet this recent work presents an intentional rawness. Several of the works in this exhibition incorporate found object pieces that have been woven in with the artist’s own dialogue. The work ranges in scale from large cast glass and steel sculptures to smaller blocks dubbed “glass drawings.”

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Bruce Davenport, Jr.: Bruce Jr. Does the Parades

Bruce Davenport, Jr.’s vivid color marker drawings provide detailed reenactments – the bands in precise number and formation and the multitude of spectators surrounding them. The small- and large-scale works on paper are flecked with the artist’s thoughts and tributes, interspersed between the crowds and streets. The rendered still moments evoke the energy and ceremony of the entire procession. The artist has been described as, “not so much a self-taught artist as he is a self-taught anthropologist.”

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“The Truisms of Robert Colescott by Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins,” NYU Black Renaissance Noir

In The Legacy of the Black Arts Movement, author Trey Ellis suggests that the New Breed of Black artists, writers and critics advanced a broad range of aesthetic positions that pointed to an awareness and acceptance of their “cultural mulatto” status and recognized their immersion in and indebtedness to “a multi-racial mix of cultures.”[2] The New Breed Artists regularly employed popular culture as both a playground and a tool of empowerment, using highbrow and lowbrow references that were easily interpreted by all sectors of Black society. Ellis was particularly interested in the tensions these artists experienced between their competing desires to adhere to European and American aesthetic norms and to present an alternative view of Americans whose heritage included a history of enslavement and miscegenation. This double consciousness often invited a collision between content and style, but sometimes, as in the work of Robert Colescott, this twin consciousness became inextricably intertwined as it informed form and materiality.

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“Field Hands,” The Urban Glass Art Quarterly

Thirty miles east of Minneapolis, across the upper Mississippi River that defines the Minnesota-Wisconsin state border, the campus of the University of Wisconsin at River Falls sprawls over more than 400 acres and includes two laboratory farms. The reason for the large agricultural education program becomes clear if you continue eastward, where very quickly you are engulfed in large tracts of farmland. It was here in Midwest farm country, in 1965, that sculptor Doug Johnson, fresh from his graduate studies with Harvey Littleton at University of Wisconsin at Madison, was hired to start a glass program within the well-regarded art department, which draws equally from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and the farming communities of rural Wisconsin.

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“Review: Works by Willie Birch and Eudora Welty,” Gambit

In the 70-year journey that has taken him from the New Orleans housing project where he grew up to having his work exhibited in some of the more hallowed halls of the New York art world and back to New Orleans again, Willie Birch has always been outspoken. Even so, his current Arthur Roger Gallery show can seem very quiet. Unlike his earlier 7th Ward street scenes, there are no second lines, stoop sitters or funerals in these big black-and-white works on paper, only stark, empty vistas where ragged buildings and rickety fences initially suggest a social realist view of his hardscrabble neighborhood. But like a back street Pompeii, these scarred, unpopulated vistas have their own tales to tell, and if they lack local charm in the usual sense, they are not without dignity. Rendered with eloquent simplicity, they reveal through their subtle luminosity a resonant depth of presence. “It is what it is,” they seem to say, but like the area’s residents, there is clearly more to them than what is seen on the surface.

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“Auction set to benefit iconic New Orleans artist George Dureau,” Times-Picayune

Friends of New Orleans artist George Dureau have organized a benefit auction to help defray costs of nursing and medical care for the 82-year-old French Quarter icon. Dureau, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, is confined to a nursing home. Dureau’s personal effects will go on the block at Crescent City Auction Gallery, 1330 St. Charles Ave. The July 13 auction begins at 1 p.m. and features both the studio props that appeared in Dureau’s acclaimed photographs, and a host of domestic objects. Highlights include a 19th century walnut bed; a pair of modernist chairs by Bertoia, and a cypress refectory table that Dureau, a grand entertainer, once used for dinner parties.

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“Oil on Canvas,” The Advocate

When the Macondo well blew in April of 2010, killing 11 men and setting off the worst oil discharge in U.S. history, Jacqueline Bishop’s initial reaction was one of action. After all, the New Orleans-based visual artist has spent decades highlighting environmental issues in exotic locals like the Amazon. Yet here was a major man-made disaster in her own backyard. Bishop spent many weeks during the spill working at Grand Isle State Park cleaning oil from beach-hugging hermit crabs and reintroducing them to the water. It was something to do at a time when those in charge searched, seemingly in vain, for ways to stop the torrent of oil flowing from the Gulf floor.

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