Home Alone, the walk-in closet-sized Franklin Street gallery whose name was inspired by the record-setting copy of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” — which goes on view today at MoMA — and its likeness to Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone,” is currently host to a comic installation by the irreverent and resurgent art star Mark Flood.
Did Sister Gertrude’s life really make a real difference? God alone knows, but she has become an unlikely muse to at least a few artists in the secular world in spite of her oddness and the always unpopular message of impending doom barking at her heels. One of the most interesting is artist Lesley Dill and her magnificent installation, first at Arthur Roger Gallery and still circulating: “Hell Hell Hell Heaven Heaven Heaven: Encountering Sister Gertrude Morgan & Revelation” (2010). Dill is well known for her fascination with Emily Dickinson and incorporation of lettering, poetry and literature into feminist and spiritual themes.
For her first solo exhibition in New York, Brooklyn-based painter Amy Feldman installed four large canvases (all 2012) snugly within the small gallery’s space. These paintings—as big as 8 feet high or wide—present a simple visual grammar that offers a counterpoint to the effusive visual cacophonies of Feldman’s earlier work.
Earlier this summer, Higher Pictures in New York exhibited a selection of George Dureau’s photographs of New Orleans locals shot between 1973 and 1986. Dureau traveled in both the high art world and allowed his work to be displayed in the legendary leather/SM magazine Drummer. With a cult-like following, George Dureau’s photographs are a striking…
The Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women is a collection of approximately 400 works of art (including paintings, photographs, drawings, watercolors, pastels, collage, prints, fabric pieces, ceramics, bronze, wood, and sculpture in other media) by over 150 artists. It came to PAFA as a gift in December 2010 from Linda Lee Alter.
Richard Baker is best known for his still-life paintings of tabletops, often tilted at impossible angles and covered with out-of-print art books and other bric-a-brac, such as ceramic pots, to-go food containers, candy bars, and tulips. Ranging from the lowbrow Learn to Draw by Jon Gnagy (Mr. “Learn-To-Draw”) to the hefty catalogue of the exhibition Paris-New York (1977) — the year the artist graduated from high school — Baker’s non-hierarchical representations form an inventory of the books that have, at different times, been central to his ongoing education, stretching from when he was a teenager until the present.
The New Orleans-based kinetic sculptor conjures up the mechanized hum of another world through her theatrical plug-in pieces at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in an exhibition that includes everything from roving robots to the clang and thump of motorized music. While these installations are certainly electric, they’re decidedly different than Emery’s wind and water-driven creations that might be more familiar to the city’s residents.
Birch moved back to the Crescent City in the early 90s after receiving a Guggenheim grant to produce a body of work based on growing up in New Orleans. He bought and gutted a property on N. Villere Street, which eventually became his studio space. The old stomping grounds of Mardi Gras Indian Chief Tootie Montana and jazz legend “Jelly Roll” Morton, Birch couldn’t have felt more at home. He began compiling life-sized color portraits of African Americans, but his work has since evolved into black and white through use of acrylic and charcoal on canvas.
Gordy was born into a fairly well-off Louisiana family. His father took over a family business in New Iberia—salt mining—when Gordy was seven and the family moved to this seeming isolation. Gordy was already dreaming of becoming an artist at this early age, and New Iberia was to deliver a lucky stroke for Gordy when he was taken under the wing of Weeks Hall, a New Iberia resident who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy and in Paris. Hall educated Gordy about the world of art. By age 15, Gordy was winning awards for his art in Louisiana, and a Scholastic Gold Key at 18. He received a BFA and MFA from Louisiana State University.
