Ida Kohlmeyer’s love for her native New Orleans and in some instances her Jewishness comes out in her abstract expressionist art. The New Orleans Museum of Art is honoring her memory with “Ida Kohlmeyer: 100th Anniversary Highlights.” The exhibit features significant pieces of hers from NOMA’s permanent collection in an exhibition running through April 14.
Ida Kohlmeyer continues to be an important part of NOMA’s history and art history in New Orleans; to honor her 100th anniversary, NOMA is presenting an exhibition of key pieces from the permanent collection, including a recent promised gift from Arthur Roger.
Ida Kohlmeyer continues to be an important part of NOMA’s history and art history in New Orleans; to honor her 100th anniversary, NOMA is presenting an exhibition of key pieces based on the permanent collection holdings. Ida Kohlmeyer: 100th Anniversary Highlights will be on view in the Weisman Galleries October 12, 2012 through February 10, 2013.
The remarkable exhibition now at the Newcomb Art Gallery — a retrospective of Ida Kohlmeyer’s painting and sculpture — does much to cement her position among our major artists. Curated by Professor Michael Plante, the show clarifies, especially, Kohlmeyer’s commerce with Abstract Expressionism — her debt to certain of the movement’s pioneers and, notably, her singular protraction of its imperatives.
Fans of Ida Kohlmeyer, almost certainly this region’s best known abstract contemporary artist before her death in 1997, have two — no, make that three — good reasons to rejoice this autumn. Or maybe even four, the most immediate being this System of Color retrospective of iconic selections from her vast output.
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.
Ida Kohlmeyer would have turned 85 this month. She was arguably the best-known female artist in the South, and her death early this year came as a shock because, in spite of her age, her presence in the art community seemed timeless, unquestioned, a given.
Ida Kohlmeyer, an abstract painter known for colorful pictographic canvases, died on Friday at the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans. She was 84 and lived in Metairie, La., a suburb of New Orleans.
Ida Kohlmeyer was a fine golfer and a 37-year-old mother of two with a businessman for a husband when she began studying art at Newcomb College in the 1950s.
At her studio-home in old Metairie, energetic Ida Kohlmeyer creates monumentally successful sculpture and painting. In her youth (which she says lasted until her 75th birthday), the success was the plum she sought, as she strove “to be accepted, and to be acceptable.”