Big Easy living made even easier, thanks to Brockschmidt & Coleman. BY NANCY HASS AND STYLED BY BEBE HOWORTH for ELLE DECOR The journalist Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time magazine and…
You don’t need to be an art buff to appreciate the New Orleans Museum of Art’s most recent exhibition: “Pride of Place: The Making of Contemporary Art in New Orleans.” Pride of Place celebrates art collector and gallery owner Arthur Roger’s personal collection that he gifted to the museum.
Arthur Roger likes people who live on the fringes, the areas that orbit dominant society. “It is where I’ve discovered the most, and it’s the place I’ve found most interesting,” he says. The pull of the unconventional led him to purchase an unusual home in New Orleans’s French Quarter and amass a stunning collection of provocative art. And once he’d filled the walls with remarkable pieces, he gave them all away, leaving the white walls empty. This story looks at the moment just before that happened, capturing a snapshot from a lifetime of collecting.
[Arthur Roger’s] donation — paintings, sculpture and photography by local and national luminaries of modern art — comprises a new NOMA exhibit, “Pride of Place: The Making of Contemporary Art in New Orleans.” The exhibit opens Friday and runs through Sept. 3. In the exhibit’s 143-page catalog, museum Director Susan M. Taylor describes the gift as “transformational.” It “significantly expands” NOMA’s contemporary art holdings and “reaffirms the museum’s commitment to the work of local New Orleans artists,” she said.
On June 1, Arthur Roger’s personal collection of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and mixed media pieces will be taken off his walls, packed away and carted over to the New Orleans Museum of Art. He recently donated more than 80 pieces to the museum, including works by national and regional artists such as Luis Cruz Azaceta, Willie Birch, Douglas Bourgeois, Robert Colescott, George Dureau, Robert Gordy, Deborah Kass, Catherine Opie, Robert Polidori, Holton Rower and John Waters, among others.
The Arthur Roger Gallery is very pleased to be a part of Art Miami this year. At Booth B100, we are exhibiting works by John Alexander, Luis Cruz Azaceta, David Bates, Jacqueline Bishop, Douglas Bourgeois, Robert Colescott, Stephen Paul Day, Lesley Dill, James Drake, Troy Dugas, George Dureau, Lin Emery, Vernon Fisher, Tim Hailand, Whitfield Lovell, Deborah Luster, Gordon Parks, Holton Rower, and Amy Weiskopf.
The Department of Art at Lamar University will honor internationally celebrated artist and LU alum John Alexander (’68) with a naming and dedication of the John Alexander Painting Studio on Thursday, Oct. 8, at 5:30 p.m. in the Art Building. The event is free and open to the public.
At 69, John Alexander has lived an extraordinary life. He sails the Caribbean with rocker Jimmy Buffett and counts among his other pals such Saturday Night Live luminaries as Lorne Michaels and Dan Aykroyd, his partner in a prosperous venture that serves vodka in skull-shaped drinking vessels. He spends his summers on Amagansett, Long Island, but for 35 years has occupied a SoHo loft in New York City, where he long ago established a reputation as a mesmerizing artist, one with a social conscience.
John Alexander nearly presses his nose against a charcoal image of a lobster and laughs when he says looking into the drawing’s eyes reminds him of his dog. We’re in the downstairs gallery where a series of drawings serve as a prelude to the exhibition at the Meadows Museum, Human/nature. The Ridiculous and Sublime: Recent Works by John Alexander. Alexander jokes in his rich Texan drawl that his assistant had to explain to him what “prelude” meant. Certainly these beautiful, mysterious charcoal drawings of deceptively simple subjects — the lobster, an array of lily pads, a jellyfish and oyster shells — set the tone for the paintings that follow.
John Alexander is being honored with an exhibition of his work at the Meadows during the museum’s 50th anniversary year and the university’s centennial. “Human/nature. The Ridiculous and Sublime: Recent Works by John Alexander” opens next Sunday and continues through June 28. The show’s 35 paintings and drawings are on loan from 26 lenders, including 12 in Texas.
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