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.
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.
Each year, NOMA selects a handful of individuals to honor for their contributions to the Crescent City art scene. This year’s honorees are kinetic sculptor Lin Emery, experimental video maker Courtney Egan, abstract illusionist painter Richard Johnson, architect Grover Mouton, and action painter Amanda Stone Talley.
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.
[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.
Another Hurricane Katrina anniversary came and went, and once again global news organizations struggled to find new angles on an increasingly old story. This time, the BBC memorialized America’s megastorm by posting a video interview with New Orleans artist Dan Tague, whose prints of dollar bills folded into catchy messages like “Live Free or Die,” or, more darkly, “Trust No One,” were an indirect result of Katrina. Tague survived the floodwaters in Mid-City, where he used a pirogue to help stranded neighbors, but later found himself feeling aimless after the forced exodus. With his studio under water, he began folding dollar bills to pass the time. He eventually turned them into prints, which found their way into major museum collections, and the rest is history. The BBC piece is not only a great survivor story, it also provides an interesting angle on the role money plays in American culture.
Water covers 70 per cent of the surface of the planet and even when you can’t see it, it’s there – under your feet, as vapour in the air, buoying the 1.4-kilogram heft of your brain as it sloshes inside your skull. So when Torontonians Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky decided four years ago to make a feature-length documentary on something as immense and various as water, they knew they would be climbing a slippery slope. Or, as Baichwal put it in a recent interview, “testing how far can you take an idea, a multifaceted subject, and explore it without having it fall apart into complete generalities.”
Edward Burtynsky is known as one of Canada’s most respected photographers. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over fifty major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California.
Taming and culling artistic inspiration can often be a difficult task, but multimedia artist Lesley Dill uses a calm, organic approach toward her work. “I think of (ideas) as almost like frogs — jump-up solutions,” explains Dill from her New York studio. “You’re thinking about what to do next, then up from inside your stomach jumps an idea or a material or a medium.” A collection of the results from those ideas will be on exhibition in Baton Rouge from Sept. 6 through Jan. 19 at the LSU Museum of Art. The exhibit, titled “I Gave My Whole Life to Words,” honors Dill’s lifelong love of the written word and her tactile physical representations of her own interpretations.
Scott’s large-scale sculpture graces many public places in New Orleans. His “Spiritgate,” for instance, stands at the entrance of the New Orleans Museum of Art. In 2005, the museum mounted a career retrospective of Scott’s work, art that reflects the city’s African-American, Caribbean and Creole heritage. “John Scott is a really big name here,” said Ko, Faubourg Quartet member and chair of NOCCA’s classical instrument department. “His sculpture is everywhere. And the artists we’re presenting in ‘The Art of Music,’ they were all influenced by John Scott.”
Like Ko, Scott saw the connection between various arts disciplines.
“He always talked about the relationship between music and art,” she said. “He believed art and music are not two different genres, but actually one thing. We are using our notes and they are using their pictures to make art.”