To fix someone in memory has always been the purpose of portraiture. But how does portraiture figure in a culture that likes its images fast, cheap and disposable, as ours does?
Nature is a master of multiples, manifesting her prowess with seemingly endless rounds of encore performances. A tree’s bounty of leaves, flowers and fruits not only conveys a sense of well being, but ensures future survival.
LOUISIANA’S PENCHANT FOR easy money and good times trickles down to the melodrama of its citizenry in Francis Pavy’s metal cutout images at Arthur Roger Gallery. These paintings deftly illustrate the ever-increasing urban- and suburbanization of Acadiana.
Clyde Connell, who became a full-time artist only in her 60’s and who was known for totemic sculptures, imposing wall reliefs and runelike drawings, died on May 2 in a hospital in Shreveport, La. She was 97 and lived in Lake Bastineau in northwestern Louisiana.
To be coarse, today’s souvenirs suck. Nothing you get anymore as a memento from a vacation or of some event is imbued with any significance or feeling. What was the last souvenir you bought that you will keep a lifetime?
Radcliffe Bailey creates lavish, painterly homages to black American experience in the form of socially inflected, somewhat elegiac sculptural wall assemblages. The pieces, which are made of mixed mediums on wood and are often shaped, function as platforms for Bailey’s ruminations on culture and history.
Ida Kohlmeyer would have turned 85 this month. She was arguably the best-known female artist in the South, and her death early this year came as a shock because, in spite of her age, her presence in the art community seemed timeless, unquestioned, a given.
When the 47th Venice Biennale commences in mid-June, the U.S. pavilion will offer the world’s oldest, most Prestigious festival a display of 18 artworks by Robert Colescott.
“Landscape Reclaimed,” a consistently smart show comprising the responses of conceptual artists to “landscape” and curated by Harry Philbrick, took full advantage of its site: a museum surrounded by aging, under-appreciated Minimalist sculpture and sweeping suburban lawns – in short a site just waiting for Komar & Melamid to stage a local version of their America’s Most Wanted, 1994.
John Alexander, a Texan, first gained prominence as a regionalist specializing in lush, painterly depictions of swamp and cartoonish paintings of humans and animals that satirized the conflict between civilization and the wild. His new landscapes, painted over the last two years, look back at the bayou but also study the woods and waters around eastern Long Island, his current home.