by Doug MacCash for The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate The year 2020 has been a tangle of medical, political, social, economic and ecological trouble. There’s no getting around it. But down on Julia Street, the group exhibit “Art in the Time of Empathy” at Arthur Roger Gallery brings a touch of solace to the situation…
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’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.
Creative Spaces | A Tour of Innovative Workplaces DELOITTE’S NEW OFFICE Artist commissioned to capture the flavour of Canada by SARAH TRELEAVEN When accounting firm Deloitte refurbished its five-storey national office in Toronto’s financial district, the firm wanted to display art that would reflect its presence across the country. John Kelly, of interior design firm…
John Hartman’s painted cities are the ones parents tell their wide-eyed children about, the astounding metropolises formed by almighty rivers and buildings that ignore gravity as they make their way to the moon. They’re Oz or Xanadu’s pleasure dome.
Eighty percent of Canadians live in cities, but you wouldn’t know it from our art collections. From the Group of Seven in the east to Emily Carr in the west, the canon depicts our land as one of wilderness and farms, not freeways. It’s this absence of the pictured urban, in part, that makes John Hartman’s Cities series so affecting: It shows we can have beautiful paintings of Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto, rather than just the parks adjacent to them. Yet Hartman doesn’t rehash clichéd, neon-flashed, bass thumping visions of urban life. Rather, he portrays cities as organic entities. Leah Sandals spoke to Hartman at his Lafontaine, Ont., abode.