The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words turns tangible in the summer exhibitions at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, where poetry pops off the page and into three dimensions.
I first met Jacqueline Bishop down in Cuba, where we both found Havana reminiscent of her own hometown, New Orleans. A seasoned traveler and visual artist, Jacqueline takes her inspiration from the natural world and its wettest places, be it Bangladesh, the Amazon, or her own beloved Louisiana swamps.
Like artists who work with paint or marble, Lesley Dill and Ian Hamilton Finlay use words, signs and poetry to fashion intriguing art that explores the nature and meaning of language itself. Sharing little but a willingness to provoke, they are exhibiting challenging bodies of work fashioned from wildly varied material at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.
No American artist captured the devastation of Hurricane Katrina more forcefully than Dallas’ own David Bates in his stunningly powerful 2008 exhibition “The Storm.”
“Cartoonists take the salient features of the seemingly mundane which normally escape our attention, and blow them up to larger than life proportions, forcing us to acknowledge their emotive qualities.”
Artist George Valentine Dureau Jr. died April 7. He was a magnificent New Orleans painter and photographer, known for his wit and bohemian values. On Friday (April 18), Dureau’s friends and fellow members of the Crescent City art community gathered in the Ogden Museum of Art’s splendid Richardson library to remember the great man.
Robert Polidori has the keys to the palace. But not the perfectly-polished, museum-ready palace we’re used to seeing from behind the velvet ropes.
The Vieux Carre’s figurative freak flag dropped to half-staff last week when news circulated that one of the district’s last remaining embodiments of local color had faded to black. George Dureau, one of the city’s most nationally recognized artist and a major player in the local arts scene from the 1970s through the ’90s, was dead at 83, having succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease.
NEW ORLEANS — When news of George Dureau’s death was announced by his gallery this past Monday afternoon, word traveled quickly among my extended circle of friends and professional acquaintances in New Orleans. Within a few hours, my Facebook feed was full of images of Dureau’s work, personal reminiscences, and links to quickly sketched obituaries (the longer tributes would come later) in the New Orleans Advocate and Times-Picayune.
The artist and photographer’s work ranged from the erotic to the unsettling. He was a mentor of Mapplethorpe and a long-time contributor to Drummer magazine. Long-time icon of the creative world of New Orleans, George Dureau died Monday (April 7) morning at the Walden Healthcare Center in Kenner according to NOLA.com. He was 84.