In 1950, Gordon Parks was the only African-American photographer working for Life magazine, a rising star who was gaining the power to call his own shots, and he proposed a cover story both highly political and deeply personal: to return to Fort Scott, Kan., the prairie town where he had grown up, to find his 11 classmates in a segregated middle school.
Painter Douglas Bourgeois is talking specifically about works that are on display in the Contemporary Arts Center as a part of Prospect.3, but also his paintings in general.
With 18 different venues spread throughout New Orleans from small arts spaces in Treme and Central City to major museums such as the New Orleans Museum of Art, the contemporary art biennial Prospect.3 certainly doesn’t make it easy for an individual to stand out from the over 50 participating artists in the show. But Southern Louisiana artist Douglas Bourgeois does that with his bizarrely beautiful paintings…
In the city of New Orleans, two exhibitions that ran concurrently, as cogeneration extends from one source, appeared as if an intrinsic grandfather birthed the concepts presented.
In New Orleans, Bourgeois has long been one of the most celebrated of contemporary Louisiana painters. Over the years, he’s had 10 solo shows in Louisiana and four outside the state, and he’s been part of more than 40 group shows. Local curators, critics and other art-minded people remain ardent supporters. It’s easy to see why.
Louisiana master Douglas Bourgeois’ soul-satisfying paintings of pop stars and passionate music lovers may be the No. 1 crowd-pleaser at New Orleans’ international art festival, Prospect.3.
As the first impressions of standing amid a chaotic sea of colors and shapes was slowly beginning to resolve itself into individual entities and images, I began to sense an empathy between a vaguely discerned memory rising from within me and the artist’s work: that this was like an experience that had happened before, when first arriving and feeling overwhelmed by the oxymoronic diversity of this polysemous aggregation of cultures that is southwest Louisiana.
For artists, a casual stroll through most any New Orleans neighborhood is a lesson in habitual beauty: the ethereal mid-afternoon light, the sprawl of vegetation, the bright colors of the homes, even the elegance of decayed wood.
People crowded around the displayed piece to take photographs of its artist next to the logo for next year’s festival.
