In 1981 Douglas Bourgeois painted Blue Christmas, a work featuring Elvis Presley lying back on a bed beside a fully lit and decorated Christmas tree. Hanging in the blue-draped window just behind him is a bushy holiday wreath.
Douglas Bourgeois hails from St. Amant, Louisiana, where he has lived and worked since 1981 and where his family has resided for several generations. That would seem to make him the kind of artist who, some years ago, would have been labeled “regional.”
Although he was raised on a small farm in the rural southern Louisiana community of St. Amant, Douglas Bourgeois grew up at a time when living in a remote area did not necessarily mean isolation from the cultural trappings of the big city.
In 1993 Whitfield Lovell sought respite from New York City at an artist’s retreat in an old Italian villa. But when he arrived, Lovell, an African American, was horrified to discover grotesque caricatures of black men and women decorating the building’s interior. Turns out the villa had been built by a prominent Italian slave trader with unusual tastes. Taking a personal and artistic risk, he began expressing his reaction in charcoal directly on the villa’s walls.
I first interviewed Jacqueline Bishop in October 1999. Nearly eleven years had passed since the murder of Chico Mendes, but the Brazilian rubber tapper and ecologist was still very much on her mind.
In the fall of 2001, New Orleans artists Stephen Paul Day and Sibylle Peretti were approached about creating a site-specific installation for the fall of 2002, to be exhibited in the Contemporary Arts Center’s First Floor Galleries.
Radcliffe Bailey’s exhibition “The Magic City” opened and closed at Blaffer Gallery on the same evening in June 2001, a victim of flooding brought about by Tropical Storm Allison. As torrents of rain closed roads and highways, causing bayous throughout the city to overflow, Bailey—unfamiliar with Houston—became stranded, and spent the night in his car before retuning to safety. All of Bailey’s paintings and installations are an intricate blend of personal experiences and historical references, and for “Tides” he has created a cycle of highly expressionistic visual tableaux that survey watery metaphors from a variety of perspectives.
For about a decade from the mid-seventies, Al Souza called his art “photoworks.” An image comes to mind of a yellow roadside warning sign with a pictograph of a photographer working, warning the viewer to beware. Souza himself is wary of photographs and, since the mid 1970s, he has rejected—in his own wry way—the notion that photographs offer a seamless representation of reality.
A Louisiana Life: Elemore Morgan Jr. An artist out-standing in the field by R. Reese Fuller, LOUISIANA LIFE When the sun is shining, Elemore Morgan Jr. stands in the rice…
As a child, artist Elemore Morgan, Jr., passed a lot of time in the colorful precincts of Cajun Louisiana. Though he lived on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, his mother’s roots were in the small town of Abbeville.