Just as the recently renovated Renaissance Arts Hotel makes a strong statement about the relevance of preservation in New Orleans so too does Luis Cruz Azaceta’s mesmerizing Yellow Wall 2 that hangs in the lobby. Composed of 565 photos taken on and around Tchoupitoulas Street, the montage reveals the fortitude that is demanded in order to preserve New Orleans’ heritage.
Luis Azaceta, a warm and rational Cuban exile, doesn’t strike you as a man who would ever hold a gun or a knife to his own head or the head of anyone else. But he has done this. He tells the very funny story of posing before a mirror in his New York apartment with a gun and then a knife held to his head to get the right image for a painting dealing with urban violence. A woman in a nearby apartment in his Italian neighborhood observed him through the window and sent someone rushing to the rescue. It’s an amusing tale, but behind the humor is the ever-present specter of loss, chaos and alienation that has defined his work for the last thirty years.
It was like meeting an old friend in a new and unfamiliar place. In this case, the old friend was Ida Kohlmeyer, or, rather, her paintings and sculpture. When she died six years ago at 84, she was probably New Orleans’ best- known artist, having been shown routinely here as well as New York, London and other world culture capitals for several decades.
The new Arthur Roger Gallery Project space at 730 Tchoupitoulas Street is presenting paintings and sculpture by Ida Kohlmeyer as its inaugural exhibit.
Jacqueline Bishop speaks with Mary Jane Parker on 89.9 WWNO Louisiana Artist in September 2003.
Exhibition Dates: June 7 –August 30, 2003 Opening Reception: Saturday, August 2, 6 – 8 pm Location: Arthur Roger Gallery, 432 Julia St., New Orleans, LA 70130 Gallery Hours: Tuesday…
Gene Koss sits in his glass studio in New Orleans, working on vast glass sculptures and wondering how he ever got this far from the farm.
Renowned American figurative painter Robert Colescott died on June 4, 2009 at his home in Tuscon, Arizona at the age of 83.
I appreciated Stephen Sollins’s recent works at Brian Gross Fine Art for their sense of discovering poetry in everyday sources – and the artist’s labor-intensive techniques.
