Ogden show explores a range of abstract art by Southern women
BY JOHN D’ADDARIO | Special to The Advocate MAR 27, 2018 – 2:00 PM The nearly two dozen artists in the Ogden Museum’s “The Whole Drum Will Sound: Women in…
BY JOHN D’ADDARIO | Special to The Advocate MAR 27, 2018 – 2:00 PM The nearly two dozen artists in the Ogden Museum’s “The Whole Drum Will Sound: Women in…
Over the years, Arthur Roger nurtured artists through his art gallery opened in 1978 and in doing so, helped shape and promote the art scene of his native city. Joining the list of benefactors, he recently gifted his sizable art collection accumulated over four decades to the New Orleans Museum of Art. The eighty-seven objects, including paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, are on display this Summer for the exhibition Pride of Place: The Making of Contemporary Art in New Orleans, curated by Katie Pfohl, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at NOMA.
[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.
Last April, one month before she died at the age of 96, the state of Louisiana designated its native daughter, sculptor Clyde Connell, a “legend.” According to the program notes for the Eighth Annual Louisiana Legends Award Banquet, “The person she is, the objects she creates, the moral beliefs she shares and the land she lives on integrate into one common strong impact on the individual seeing her work or visiting with her in her studio.”
Clyde Connell, who became a full-time artist only in her 60’s and who was known for totemic sculptures, imposing wall reliefs and runelike drawings, died on May 2 in a hospital in Shreveport, La. She was 97 and lived in Lake Bastineau in northwestern Louisiana.
Clyde Connell began making art when she was almost 50 years old — she is now 91 — and the contemporaries who most influenced her span several generations. Adolph Gottlieb’s paintings, new when she saw them, stirred her interest in pictographic forms; the example of Eva Hesse’s work a few decades later encouraged her pursuit of sculpture in low-art materials.