Art, meet science

by Alicia Duplessis Jasmin

In Phytoplankton: A Studio in the Woods (pictured), Pippin Frisbie-Calder, a graduate student in printmaking in the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane, accomplishes the goal of intertwining the worlds of science and art. Completed through a combined process of pen-and-ink, screenprinting and watercolor, Frisbie-Calder succeeds at uncovering the realm in which microscopic marine plants from the wetlands of Louisiana dwell.

Phytoplankton is a spherical presentation, allowing viewers to observe what a scientist would see under the circular lens of a microscope.

Frisbie-Calder said the process to obtain the microorganisms was quite challenging. Samples were collected from nearby lakes, bayous and ponds and taken to a lab for a magnified view.

[continue reading the article on Tulane New Wave]
 

Newcomb Art Department Annual Holiday Sale

Newcomb Art Department  

Holiday Sale

Open to the Public
Friday and Saturday, December 2 and 3

10 am - 4 pm

* Preview night for Newcomb Art Department Alumni and special friends

also open to Newcomb Art Museum Members

 *Thursday, December 1, 6 - 8 pm

 *RSVP with Molly LeBlanc at mleblanc@tulane.edu or 504.865-5327.  

Alums: Bring a friend! 

[photo by William DePauw]

New Art History Classes: Spring 2017

The Newcomb Art Department offers several new Art History courses available to undergraduate and graduate students in the Spring of 2017. Registration is open at classschedule.tulane.edu

ARHS 3910 Art in 20th Century Latin America
Prof. Anagnost. This course introduces students to art from Mexico to the Southern Cone from circa 1900 to the present.

ARHS 3913 Rome, The Eternal City
Prof. Geddes. For millennia, Rome has served as a nexus of power and artistic excellence rendered in service to powerful clients, from emperors to popes and the scions of the city's most powerful families.

ARHS 6410 Amsterdam as the Global Capital of the Dutch Golden Age
Prof. Porras. This course examines the visual and material culture of the Dutch Golden Age, centered in Amsterdam, as the product of global forces.

ARHS 6811 Visions of Imperial Japan: Art from Kyoto
Prof. Schweizer. This seminar concentrates on Japanese Art and architecture from and about Kyoto--the city that was an epicenter of the country's artistic production for more than a millennium.

ARHS 6812 The Meaning of Materials
Prof. Foa. In this course, we’ll explore a range of materials, substances, and everyday objects that have altered the course of art history, our region, and our daily lives.

ARHS 6814-01 Prints & Ways of Knowing
Prof. Geddes.   This new seminar on the rise of printmaking c. 1500-1800 investigates print as a new technology and artistic medium.

ARHS 6815-01 Utopias in Modern Art
Prof. Anagnost. This course examines histories of utopian thinking in the visual arts since the late 19th century, with particular emphasis on imagined cities and urban social relations.

Complete course descriptions can be viewed online at
http://www2.tulane.edu/liberal-arts/art/courses-history-of-art.cfm.

Undergraduate Juried Exhibition

On Friday, November 11th, the Carroll Gallery hosted a walkthrough of the annual  Undergraduate Juried Exhibition with Juror Emily Wilkerson, Curatorial Associate at Prospect.New Orleans. Wilkerson discussed the selected works and the curatorial process.  She highlighted the award recipients and explained why each of those works appealed to her so directly, and how they fit into the larger context of contemporary art practices. Congratulations to the following artists, recipients of the 2016 Juror's Awards: Elizabeth Carey, Untitled, Emery Gluck, Potatoes No. 1, Malcolm Kriegel, Hanging Doodle #1 (shown at left), John Ludlam, Untitled, and Lucie Taylor, Perennial Observation.

The exhibition will be on view through November 22nd.

Arlene Shechet: Working Over Time

Arlene Shechet
Working Over Time : an artist’s talk
Thursday, November 17, 7 pm
Freeman Auditorium
205 Woldenberg Art Center
reception immediately following in Woodward Way

Please join the Newcomb Art Department for the 2016 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture, Working Over Time: an artist talk by Arlene Shechet.

Arlene Shechet is a sculptor living and working in New York City and the Hudson Valley. All at Once, a major, critically-acclaimed 20-year survey of Shechet’s work, was on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2015. Sebastian Smee of The Boston Globe wrote: “It’s in the harmonies and tensions between these colors and textures, between suggestions of both order and anarchy, decay and blooming freshness, that these works cough, sputter, and sing. If they really are the great analogs to interior life that I feel them to be, it’s because Shechet knows that this life, expertly attended to, has its own folds and wrinkles, its own hollows and protuberances; that it is at once fugitive and monumental ... and ultimately unknowable.” All at Once was also hailed by The New York Times as “some of the most imaginative American sculpture of the past 20 years, and some of the most radically personal.” 

Shechet was featured in Season 7 of PBS’s ART21 in 2014 as well as Season 4 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Artist Project in 2016. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2016 CAA Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow- ship Award in 2004, the Anonymous Was a Woman Artist Award, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2010, as well as several New York Foundation for the Arts awards. 

Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference

In the spirit of the tradition forged by the late Andrew Ladis and his colleagues at the University of Georgia, an international congress of Trecento specialists will congregate at Tulane University next week to share their research formally and informally. Scholars of all ages and stages will present specific art historical problems, issues, and ideas that focus on the arts of Italy during “the long fourteenth century” (late Dugento through early Quattrocento).

The keynote speaker at the Tulane conference will be Marvin Trachtenberg, Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Dr. Trachtenberg's keynote address, "Dante and the Moment of Florentine Art" will take place in Freeman Auditorium on Thursday, November 10 at 6:00pm. The keynote address is free and open to the public.

Tulane University's Newcomb Art Department is pleased to host the inaugural Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference with the generous support of the Kress Foundation, Villa i Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South.

Spatial Grammars

Elizabeth Boone, Professor of Art History, gave the lecture “Spatial Grammars: The Union of Art and Writing in the Painted Books of Aztec Mexico” as the Distinguished Speaker in art history at the College of William & Mary, Oct. 13. She also presented a paper, “Layering Above and Below: What the Codex Ríos Says about the Aztec Cosmos at the Dawn of Creation,” at the symposium “As Above, So Below: Cosmic Roads to Mesoamerican Underworlds,” at Harvard University, Oct. 21-22.

AnnieLaurie Erickson at NOPA, ACA and NOAC

AnnieLaurie Erickson, the Ellsworth Woodward Junior Professor in Studio Art, has two exhibitions opening Saturday, October 8th and will be giving a talk at the New Orleans Photo Alliance on Tuesday, October 11th.  At the NOPA Gallery Erickson will discuss her creation of alternative modes of photographic production from interactive gallery installations using photography and eye tracking to the creation of images of radioactive residue from the first man-made nuclear reaction in 1942. This talk is in conjunction with NOPA's current exhibit MAXIMIZE WINDOW: The Expanded Photograph in Contemporary Art of New Orleans that includes works by recent alumni Sophie Lvoff, Brittan Rosendahl, and Jonathan Traviesa.

At the Acadiana Center for Arts in Lafayette the exhibition American Beauty explores the political climate of America and the many issues that fuel our current political, industrial, social and moral future. Curated by Brian Guidry and Mary Beyt, the exhibition features the work of Luis Cruz Azaceta, Heidi Cody, AnnieLaurie Erickson, Ernie L. Fournet, Sharon Jacques, Malcolm McClay, Maxx Sizeler, Dan Tague, John Isiah Walton, and Carl Joe Williams.

The Louisiana Photography Biennial at the New Orleans Arts Center features over 75 Louisiana photographers including internationally and nationally acclaimed artists. This exhibition was curated by Don Marshall former Director of the CAC and current Executive Director of the Jazz & Heritage Foundation.

Friday Life Drawing Sessions

The Newcomb Art Department is pleased to offer Open Model Sessions on Friday afternoons from 1-4pm. The drawing sessions began September 9th, and last until December 2nd.  There are two exceptions - Tulane is on Fall Break on October 14, and on Thanksgiving Break on November 25. There will NOT be sessions on those Fridays. The Open Model Sessions take place in room 216 of the Woldenberg Art Center and are free and open to the public.

Gene Koss and Skylar Fein to be honored at NOMA

NOMA’s annual fall soiree in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden will be held on Friday, September 23, 2016.

This year’s LOVE in the Garden honorees include Gene Koss, Professor of Glass at Tulane for nearly forty years, and incoming graduate student in Photography, Skylar Fein, as well as Eleanora Rukia Brown, Ashley Longshore, Alexa Pulitzer, and Josephine Sacabo.

The evening events will kick off with a Patron Party at 7 pm, Garden Party at 8pm, followed by a Late Night Party at 9pm. The New Orleans Museum of Art is located at 1 Collins Diboll Circle in City Park. For more information, see:
https://noma.org/event/love-garden-2016-presented-whitney-bank/.

Kevin Jones' solo exhibition in Tokyo

Kevin H. Jones, Associate Professor of Digital Arts and Associate Chair of the Newcomb Art Department had his second solo exhibition in Tokyo, Japan at Art Lab Akiba during the month of August.  His exhibition titled Sleight Of Hand included custom electronic and interactive artworks that examined the instability of systems related to science, magic and chance.

Wiley Aker exhibits in New York, Greece, and South Korea

Wiley Aker, MFA candidate in Digital Arts, has three exhibitions opening in September. Aker’s work in video, sound, and new media explores the psychological landscapes that mediate reality in the post-internet world. The Governor's Island Art Fair in New York, New York (shown at left)  will be open every weekend in September. The RETHink Art Festival in Rethymno, Greece, the first digital art festival realized in Crete, will run from September 9th-12th. The exhibit "Artist and Location" at the CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea will be on view from September 23rd-October 9th. This exhibition explores the concepts of location, diaspora, and globalization. Aker's work can also be viewed at: vimeo.com/wileyaker.

Michelle Foa awarded a William L. Duren ’26 Professorship

Associate Professor Michelle Foa has been awarded a William L. Duren ’26 Professorship for the 2016-2017 academic year.  She will teach a new interdisciplinary seminar called “The Meaning of Materials” in the spring semester.

Professor Foa is returning from a year’s sabbatical leave, during which she carried out research for her current book on Edgar Degas.  Her research trips over the past year included meeting with curators and studying the collections and archives of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Harvard’s Fogg Museum in Cambridge, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the municipal archives in Nancy, France.  Prof. Foa was also a faculty member in Tulane’s 4-week Summer in Paris program.

Anton Schweizer authors book on Japanese “lacquered architecture”

Anton Schweizer, Professor of Practice and Director of Asian Studies at Tulane University, has authored a new book, Ōsaki Hachiman: Architecture, Materiality, and Samurai Power in Seventeenth-Century Japan.  Ōsaki Hachiman (1607), a Shintō shrine located in Sendai, Japan, is one of only a handful of surviving buildings from the Momoyama period (1568-1615). The shrine is a rare example of “lacquered architecture”—an architectural type characterized by a shiny, black coat made of refined tree sap and evocative of transitory splendor and cyclical renewal.

The building’s sponsor, the warlord Date Masamune, was one of the last independent feudal lords of his time and remains famous for dispatching a diplomatic mission to Mexico, Spain, and Rome. Although his ambitions to become a ruler of Northern Japan were frustrated, his shrine stands as a lasting testament to the political struggles he faced, his global aspirations, and the cultural cloak by which he sought to advance these objectives.

Ōsaki Hachiman: Architecture, Materiality, and Samurai Power in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 2016) is available from the following booksellers:

(in the US) Michael Shamansky, Bookseller

(in Europe) Reimer

Jeffrey Stenbom receives Silver Academic award at Emerge 2016

Army veteran and Tulane alumnus Jeffrey Stenbom (MFA, Glass, 2015) received the Silver Academic award at Bullseye's ninth biennial exhibition, Emerge 2016.

Stenbom's sculpture of monumental kiln-cast glass dog tags titled, To Those Who Have, was first shown in his MFA exhibition at Tulane University's Carroll Gallery.

Christopher Gray (MFA candidate, 2017) was also named a finalist in the competition.

[photo courtesy of Pamela Price Klebaum]

Artist Perspective with AnnieLaurie Erickson

On Friday, June 10th Professor AnnieLaurie Erickson will present an Artist Perspective at the New Orleans Museum of Art in conjunction with Friday Nights at NOMA. 

Erickson will discuss her artistic practice involving the creation of alternative modes of photographic production. Reflecting on her own work as well as the work in the exhibition Vera Lutter: Inverted Worlds, Erickson will speak to a contemporary impetus to probe the medium of photography to disorienting and transformative ends. 

5-8 pm: Art on the Spot
5:30-8:30 pm: Music by G String Orchestra
6:30 pm: Artist Perspective with AnnieLaurie Erickson on Vera Lutter

https://noma.org/event/friday-nights-noma-14-2/

Erin McCutcheon awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship

Erin McCutcheon, PhD candidate in Art History/Latin American Studies has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies. The fellowship supports the final year of dissertation writing for PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences whose work addresses women’s and gendered issues in interdisciplinary and original ways. 

Ms. McCutcheon talks about the points of personal passion that have sustained her research:

I began my academic career at the age of 18 with aspirations of becoming a painter. Fortunately, I quickly realized I wasn’t going to hack it in that profession, yet my love for art endured. I had always been interested in art made by women, and was struck that in all of my undergraduate courses, women, and especially those from outside a Euro-American center, were absent from our discussions. Where they were included, their work was treated one-dimensionally, usually in terms of biographical details, and not given the critical analysis afforded to their male contemporaries. During this same time, I was in the middle of my own discovery of feminist theory, which gave me the vocabulary I desperately needed to voice my frustrations. I resolved to devote myself to not simply unearthing the histories of forgotten or overlooked women artists, but to forging new strategies of representation that might disrupt the structures and processes that kept these marginal histories from view.

To my amazement, roughly 15 years after beginning my academic journey, I remain on the same path. Not enough seems to have changed; however, it is encouraging to see more projects under way that resist repeating the mistakes of art history. Most recently, I was a part of one such project: the first retrospective exhibition of an artist at the center of my dissertation research, Mónica Mayer. The exhibition’s format resisted traditional tropes and mechanisms that have historically worked to exclude women artists, and instead functions as a “retrocollective.” This simple shift more accurately reflects Mayer’s own commitment to the feminist movement and numerous collaborations over the course of her career. The exhibition, “Si tiene dudas… pregunte: Una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer” will run through July 2016 at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City – a great reason to take a trip to Mexico this year!

Ms. McCutcheon’s dissertation title is Strategic Dispositions: Women, Art and Tradition in Mexico, 1975–1990.

http://woodrow.org/news/perspectives/meet-the-fellows-2016-womens-studies-fellow-erin-mccutcheon

2016 Student Art Awards

On Friday April 22nd the Newcomb Art Department hosted its annual Student Art Awards ceremony in Stone Auditorium. Dr. Michael Plante, Associate Professor of Art History, presented the Art History Awards and Kevin H. Jones, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, presented the Studio Art Awards.  Following the awards presentation, the celebration moved to the Carroll Gallery for the Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition reception featuring work by Abigail Ditesheim, Emily "Ixi" Johnson, Dakota Moe, Ann Mullin, and Darrell Schwartz. 

2016 Student Art Awards

Henry Stern Prize Paper in Art History: Dana Lynch, “Jasper Johns’ Racing Thoughts”

Outstanding Art History Major: James Newton

Nell Pomeroy O’Brien Award for a Sophomore or Junior in Art History: Nicholas Hunter Gleber

Senior Honors Scholar: Victoria Barry

Alberta “Rusty” Collier Award for Outstanding Studio Art Majors in 2-Dimensional Work: Darrell Schwartz

Alberta “Rusty” Collier Award for Outstanding Studio Art Majors in 3-Dimensional Work: Claire Beauchamp

Juanita Gonzales Prize in Ceramics: Liam Trainor

Nell Pomeroy O’Brien Award for a Sophomore or Junior in Studio Art: Lilith Winkler-Schor

Sandy Chism Memorial Award in Painting: Abigail Ditesheim

Class of 1914 Prize in Art - Drawing: Emily “Ixi” Johnson

The Abigail Frank Gerrity Award for Public Service in the Studio Arts: Yu Zou

[Photo left-right: Liam Trainor, Nicholas Hunter Gleber, Lilith Winkler-Schor, Claire Beauchamp. Victoria Barry, James Newton, Dana Lynch, Emily “Ixi” Johnson, Darrell Schwartz, Abigail Ditesheim, Yu Zou]

Two Tulane Artists in Bullseye Glass Biennial

Christopher Gray (MFA candidate 2017) and Jeffrey Stenbom (MFA 2015) have been named finalists in Bullseye Glass' ninth biennial exhibition Emerge/Evolve 2016. The award ceremony for this international juried competition will take place on June 25 at the exhibition's opening reception at Bullseye Projects in Portland, Oregon. Shown: Christopher Gray, Meander White (L);  Jeffrey Stenbom, To Those Who Have (R).

Second Saturday Shows

On Saturday April 9 The Front and Staple Goods galleries will be hosting opening receptions for exhibitions of work by Tulane University faculty and recent alumni.

The Front, 4100 St. Claude, opening reception April 9, 6-10pm

Dan Alley, Perspective Perception 
Weston Lambert, Caves of Ziran 
Patch Somerville, X 


Staple Goods, 1340 St. Roch, opening reception April 9, 6-9pm


William DePauw, Limited Space


[Weston Lambert, Untitled, Black glass and pyrite, 3 x 3 x 2”, 2016]

Andrew Ladis Trecento Conference

The Newcomb Art Department is pleased to announce that the inaugural Andrew Ladis Trecento Conference will be held at Tulane University on November 10-13, 2016.

In the spirit of the tradition forged by the late Andrew Ladis and his colleagues at the University of Georgia, an international congress of Trecento specialists will congregate in New Orleans to share their research formally and informally. Scholars of all ages and stages will present specific art historical problems, issues, and ideas that focus on the arts of Italy during “the long fourteenth century” (late Dugento through early Quattrocento).

The keynote speaker at the Tulane conference will be Marvin Trachtenberg, Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Thanks to the generous support of the Kress Foundation and other benefactors, we will not be charging any registration fees for this conference. Participants will be responsible for securing their own transportation and lodgings. More information, including options for lodgings, will be posted soon on the Tulane conference webpage as well as on Facebook. Conference registration will be on Eventbrite beginning May 1.

This will be the inaugural Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference and we are very excited! The plan is for the conference to be held every other year, with a new venue and host institution each time. The 2nd conference will be hosted by the University of Houston in Houston, TX, in Fall 2018.

AnnieLaurie Erickson at the Society for Photographic Education

On Saturday, March 12 Assistant Professor AnnieLaurie Erickson will be speaking at the National Society for Photographic Education conference in Las Vegas in a panel discussion titled: "An Uncertain Present: A Conversation on Emergent Practices in Contemporary Photography." 

Also on March 12 is the closing reception for Prof. Erickson's exhibition Data Shadows,  a photographic investigation into the physical apparatus of the Internet and digital surveillance. The show has been on display at Box 13 in Houston since January 30. 

Teresa Cole exhibits new works at whitespace in Atlanta

Teresa Cole's 3rd solo exhibition, Depth of Surface at whitespace will include handmade paper works and two installations created from hand-printed and hand-dyed Japanese paper. This show contains pieces that utilize paper in two different ways. The first way is through a group of works where the imagery and handmade papers are created at the same time. These works were produced at Dieu Donne´ Paper Mill in New York City where different colored pulps are meshed together to create both image and structure. The second way of working pushes the paper to become structural. This is manifested in installations that use Washi or Japanese paper by printing on each sheet then folding and dying  and finally forming the sheets into their own surface.  All the works employ patterned imagery as a grammar, a dialect, a language of desire.

Opening Reception: Friday, February 19th | 7 - 10 pm
Exhibition Dates: February 19th - March 26th, 2016

Tulane Contemporary Glass at St. Tammany Art Association

The St. Tammany Art Association’s current exhibit, Tulane Contemporary Glass, spotlights the energy and influence behind Tulane University's Glass program and its founder, Professor Gene Koss. On view are works from professors, graduate students and former students of the glass art program at Tulane which has inspired and shaped the New Orleans glass art movement. The exhibit features works by Gene Koss, Dan Alley, Christopher Gray, Weston Lambert, Andrew Ledford, Dakota Moe, Devon Murphy, Francine Judd Stock and Lisa Tahir.

Tulane Contemporary Glass will be on view from February 13 - April 2, 2016. The St. Tammany Art Association is located at 320 N. Columbia Street, Covington, Lousiana. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10am – 4pm and Saturdays, 11am – 4pm.

Stephanie Porras authors new book on Pieter Bruegel

The question of how to understand Bruegel’s art has cast the artist in various guises: as a moralizing satirist, comedic humanist, celebrator of vernacular traditions, and proto-ethnographer. Stephanie Porras, Assistant Professor of Art History, reorients these apparently contradictory accounts, arguing that the debate about how to read Bruegel has obscured his pictures’ complex relation to time and history.

Rather than viewing Bruegel’s art as simply illustrating the social realities of his day, Porras asserts that Bruegel was an artist deeply concerned with the past. In playing with the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, history and the present, Bruegel’s images engaged with the fraught question of Netherlandish history in the years just prior to the Dutch Revolt, when imperial, religious, and national identities were increasingly drawn into tension. His pictorial style and his manipulation of traditional iconographies reveal the complex relations, unique to this moment, among classical antiquity, local history, and art history.

An important reassessment of Renaissance attitudes toward history and of Renaissance humanism in the Low Countries, this volume traces the emergence of archaeological and anthropological practices in historical thinking, their intersections with artistic production, and the developing concept of local art history.

Pieter Bruegel's Historical Imagination, published by Penn State University Press, will be available April 15, 2016. 

Kevin H. Jones at CAM Raleigh

Kevin H. Jones, Broadcasting to Unknown Points  #2, 2016, paint and electronics, 6' x 9'
Photo by Aaron Zalonis, courtesy Kevin H. Jones

Kevin H. Jones, Associate Professor of Digital Arts, is participating in the group exhibition super-vision at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina opening on Thursday, January 28, 2016.

Visiting Artist Lecture: Cullen Washington, Jr.

The Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund for Recent Trends in Contemporary Art presents a free public lecture by visiting artist Cullen Washington, Jr. on Wednesday, January 27th at 6:00pm in Stone Auditorium, room 210 Woldenberg Art Center.  

Washington,  a Louisiana native, is currently an instructor at SUNY Purchase. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States, as well as in solo shows in London and Tokyo. He has partaken in several well known residency programs including the Skowhegan School of Painting in 2010 and was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award in 2009. His lecture will focus on his personal artwork which explores human interconnectivity through mixed media and found object paintings. 

Exhibit by glass master Gene Koss inspired by NOLA

From a Distance, Photo by Owen Murphy

Inspired by views of the Crescent City and the rural Wisconsin landscapes of his youth, Tulane University glass professor Gene Koss has crafted sculptures from cast-glass forms and found or fabricated steel for his latest exhibition at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans.

With sculptures ranging from small-scale pedestal works of glass, steel and found objects, to monumental pieces, some weighing several tons, the exhibit “From a Distance” will be on view through Feb. 27 at the gallery, 432 Julia St.

“My goal has been to make glass fine art, not craft,” Koss says. “I use glass as a medium of pure sculptural expression resulting in monumental sculptures of cast glass, steel and light.”

The signature sculpture titled From a Distance was inspired “by this city I’ve loved for 40 years,” says Koss, who travels frequently across the Crescent City Connection bridge from his studio in Plaquemines Parish.  

“The view of the city from the bridge is amazing and inspirational — the architecture, the movement of the water in the river, the way the light reflects off the buildings, the ships and barges traveling up and down the Mississippi,” he says. “The cantilever of the sculpture addresses the precarious feeling of being suspended over the river.”

Koss leads the glass program in the Newcomb Art Department and is teaching courses to both undergraduate and graduate students this semester. This video shows Koss and students at work in the Pace-Willson Glass Studio.

His work has been exhibited at the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans; the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, Louisiana; the Sculpture Center in New York City; and the International Biennale for Contemporary Art in Florence, Italy. His work is in many prominent collections including the Pan American Life Collection in New Orleans and the Corning Museum of Glass in New York.

[Tulane New Wave, January 8, 2016]

'Adventuring with the image’ defines Aaron Collier’s art

Artist, alumnus and assistant professor Aaron Collier works to develop images that engage viewers in his colorful paintings. The Tulane University community will have a chance to view Collier’s works when the Carroll Gallery opens a solo exhibit of his paintings on Jan. 12.

Entitled “Something There,” the exhibit runs through Feb. 5. To celebrate the opening, a reception is planned for Jan. 14 from 5:30 until 7:30 p.m., with a walk through with the artist at 6 p.m.

[read more >>> Tulane New Wave, January 7, 2016]

Jeffrey Stenbom's MFA exhibit in Top 10 best shows in 2015

Jeffrey Stenbom's MFA exhibition, "Thank You," was selected by Doug MacCash as one of the Top 10 New Orleans Art Exhibitions in 2015. MacCash interviewed Stenbom in March and recorded a video of the exhibition in the Carroll Gallery. Stenbom's thesis exhibit included  installations of cast glass military boots, bootprints and monumental glass dog tags. MacCash wrote, "Stenbom, who was a combat soldier during the Iraq War, said that for him, producing (glass) sculpture is key to coping with post traumatic stress disorder. 'More than talking in a group or something or taking medication, making artwork's been my therapy,' he said. In short, he said, 'art saved my life.'"

The original article and video can be viewed on nola.com.

Gene Koss: "From a Distance" opens at Arthur Roger Gallery on January 9