Press & Media

“Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art,” Smithsonian American Art Museum

Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art presents the rich and varied contributions of Latino artists in the United States since the mid-twentieth century, when the concept of a collective Latino identity began to emerge. The exhibition is drawn entirely from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s pioneering collection of Latino art. It explores how Latino artists shaped the artistic movements of their day and recalibrated key themes in American art and culture.

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“Review: Edward Burtynsky’s Water,” Gambit

In south Louisiana, we know a thing or two about water. Not only are we surrounded by it, the air we breathe is often permeated with it, so our relationship with water is intimate. But intimate relationships often have elements of surprise, and while Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, which occupy two floors of gallery space at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), are often too spectacular to be truly intimate, they do pack a tsunami of surprises. His sweeping amphibious landscapes, whether all natural or shaped by human intervention, can be startlingly abstract, and if the proliferation of large-scale photographs in recent years has already shown us how painterly such images can be, many of Burtynsky’s works bear a striking resemblance to abstract canvases.

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“Lin Emery: In Motion,” New Orleans Museum of Art

For twenty-five years, Lin Emery’s Wave, 1988 has welcomed visitors to the New Orleans Museum of Art from the lily pond in front of the main entrance. The sleek, multi-faceted sculpture that sprung from the water is composed of seven interconnected arms, which seem to simultaneously move independently and collectively. Not only striking, the work is a study of mathematics and engineering. This fall, NOMA has moved Wave into the Cascade Garden Pool in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, which allows Emery’s signature touch of movement to be visible from both the Pine and Oak Groves.

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“Lecture and Exhibition by New York Artist Lesley Dill,” LSU College of Art + Design

Acclaimed New York artist Lesley Dill will present a lecture entitled “We Are Animals of Language” as part of the LSU College of Art + Design Paula G. Manship Endowed Lecture Series. Lesley Dill is one of a series of visiting artists participating in LSU School of Art’s 2013–14: Malleable Language exhibition season, whose theme is the visual and critical exploration of the artistic tradition of intermingling text and image. Her works in sculpture, photography, and performance use a variety of media and techniques to explore themes of language, the body, and transformational experience. Dill has called herself a “matchmaker of words and images,” and she often pulls from the poems of Emily Dickinson and other poets and writers to create sculptural costumes, mannequins, and floor-to-ceiling backdrops covered in interweaving black text and images.

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“Lin Emery by Philip Palmedo: A review by G.W. Smith”

Lin Emery (Hudson Hills Press, 2012) is, at one level, the coffee table book which every artist covets as the pinnacle of his or her career. The young artist-in-training will drool over its glossy dust-jacket, its gray cloth covers with “Lin Emery” embossed upon the front in silver (this in anticipation of generations of library shelf wear), its russet end papers, and its one-hundred and twenty-two color plates.

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“Familiar artwork installed in sculpture garden, just in time for gala,” The Advocate

When New Orleans Museum of Art guests celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden Friday night, Lin Emery’s work, “Wave,” will be on proud display in its new setting. The kinetic work by the nationally recognized New Orleans sculptor became an instant icon when it was installed in a reflecting basin in front of the museum in time for the 1988 Republican National Convention. Recently, the need to rebuild the 100-year-old basin meant moving the sculpture requiring museum staff to work with Emery to determine the perfect site for it.

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“Aerial Views of Our Water World,” Smithsonian Magazine

Throughout his career, photographer Edward Burtynsky has been on a quest to capture the impact humans have on the natural landscape. “Nature transformed through industry” is how he puts it. Burtynsky has photographed e-waste recycling facilities in China, nickel tailings in Ontario, railways cutting through the forests of British Columbia, quarries in Vermont and mines in Australia. He has also turned his lens to suburban sprawl, highways, tire piles, oil fields and refineries.

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“Apocalypse Now: Jacqueline Bishop,” Pelican Bomb

[Jacqueline] Bishop’s long career in working at the intersection of environmentalism and visual art includes not just Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, which inspires much of her work, but a longstanding relationship with Central and South America and the rainforest conservation work of the late Brazilian rubber-tapper Chico Mendes. Close to home, Bishop’s imagery has always focused on native flora and fauna, painting them with a mixture of close, attentive realism and wild, exuberant surrealism, not unlike a latter-day Hieronymus Bosch. And similar to The Garden of Earthly Delights, in much of Bishop’s work, looking at her paintings is like reading a sentence in which we recognize the words but don’t understand the grammar.

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