Art Pick of the Week BY PETER FRANK “New Orleans based-artist Dawn DeDeaux suggest that the expected source of the ‘trouble’ is itself troubled, yet manifests its own tragic nobility. The focus of her darkly dramatic Soul Shadows: Urban Warrior Myths is the young African-American male. She populates the corridors of her catacomb-like – or…
This will be a boring review. The reasons for its being boring are, however, exceptionally good.
Clyde Connell began making art when she was almost 50 years old — she is now 91 — and the contemporaries who most influenced her span several generations. Adolph Gottlieb’s paintings, new when she saw them, stirred her interest in pictographic forms; the example of Eva Hesse’s work a few decades later encouraged her pursuit of sculpture in low-art materials.
At her studio-home in old Metairie, energetic Ida Kohlmeyer creates monumentally successful sculpture and painting. In her youth (which she says lasted until her 75th birthday), the success was the plum she sought, as she strove “to be accepted, and to be acceptable.”
George Dureau: The Modern Heroic Figure BY TERRINGTON CALAS NO ONE WHO has seen — not merely noticed — great Mannerist or Baroque painting, can be unmoved by the sly and brilliant allusions to them in George Dureau’s new work (recently at the Arthur Roger Gallery). The allusions are perhaps unwitting, but they are there…
Artists in Search of Timeless Things BY ROGER GREEN EXCERPT Monumental drawings Dureau is known primarily as a painter and photographer. Lately, however, he has been working on a monumental sculptural project: a set of metal gates, with allegorical figures, for the New Orleans Museum of Art. The ornamental gates, on which he is collaborating…
When his car was stolen recently by a 4-foot-8, 24-year-old “boy,” George Dureau already had photographs of both boy and car. Dureau explains that in his art work he uses people he likes, “like the boy who stole the car.”
If you wander into the back room at Jamison/Thomas Gallery this month, you might be in for a shock. Lined up over the gallery’s storage racks are a series of boldly composed photographs of nude black men and portraits of men with congenital deformities.
Consider some sad facts of contemporary life in the United States. Violence has replaced communicable diseases as the leading cause of death among young people in the United States during the past generation. Young African-American men are about nine times as likely as European Americans to be victims of homicide. About nine out of ten of African-American victims are killed by other African-American youths. Moreover, the prison population of African-American youths has been mushrooming. Because of such statistics, social commentators have been concerned about “the vanishing African-American male.”
Voodoo traditions and New Orleans’ strongly Roman Catholic heritage go some way toward explaining the city’s bizarre emotional energy. New Orleanians, while they love earthly excesses-witness Mardi Gras-also lead exotic spiritual lives.