Degas, New Orleans, and the Transatlantic Cotton Trade

On September 14th at 6pm, Dr. Michelle Foa will present on the influence of Degas' visit to New Orleans and the centrality of the cotton trade to his work. This in-person lecture will take place at the Gallier House, 1132 Royal Street, New Orleans. Registration is required through eventbrite. 

About this event

Join Dr. Foa in-person at the September Gallier Gathering as she discusses the French painter Edgar Degas' visit to New Orleans and the centrality of cotton and the transatlantic cotton trade to his work and European society at large.

About this Event

Edgar Degas’s stay in New Orleans in 1872-73, which marked his only visit to the New World, resulted in two remarkable paintings of a cotton office. Linking Southern cotton to the textiles in his countless pictures of dancers, laundresses, and bathers and to his works’ paper supports, this lecture will demonstrate the centrality of the material to the artist’s body of work. More broadly, Degas’s Cotton Office paintings, as well as drawings and correspondence from his time abroad, reveal that the artist had begun thinking about the world, his work, and the subjects depicted therein in more geographically expansive and interconnected terms. These pictures and letters reflect his newfound understanding of the ties that joined the Old and New Worlds to one another and the global circulation of people, goods, and communications in the later nineteenth century.

Michelle Foa is Associate Professor of Art History in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University, and her research focuses on nineteenth-century French art and visual and material culture. Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, was published by Yale University Press in 2015. She is currently at work on a book on Degas, and part of this research published in The Art Bulletin was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize in 2021. Her research and teaching have been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This event is made possible by funding from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Funding for 2021 Rebirth grants has been administered by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) and provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and the NEH Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) initiative.

Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Faculty spotlight: Michelle Foa

Michelle Foa has received several research and teaching fellowships, prizes, and grants in the past year.  She is at work on a book on Edgar Degas, and an article drawn from this research published in The Art Bulletin and titled “In Transit: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton, between New World and Old,” received the annual article prize from the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.  She also received a grant from the National Endowment from the Humanities to undertake a major environmental humanities curricular initiative at Tulane.  A Studio in the Woods and the ByWater Institute awarded her a scholarly residency to be completed during the upcoming year.    

 

At commencement this past May, Professor Foa received the Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellowship for Undergraduate Education, the university’s top undergraduate teaching prize. She was also recently appointed as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Solon R. Cole, MD, and Siegel Professor in Social Entrepreneurship at the Phyllis M. Taylor Center.  Venues of recent and forthcoming lectures on her research include the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, Saint Andrews University in Scotland, University of Virginia, College of William and Mary, Cleveland Museum of Art and Case Western University, and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Lecture Series at Gallier House.  She chairs the virtual speaker series for the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art and continues to serve on the Board of Directors of the National Committee for the History of Art.

RECON exhibition reunites artists in the Carroll Gallery

The 2020 BFA graduates of the Newcomb Art Department are pleased to present RECON, an exhibition of new artwork, following the cancellation of their undergraduate thesis exhibitions nearly 28 months ago.

The root word "recon" evokes gathering, reunion, and the search for knowledge, splintering into a multitude of connotations. After time apart, we tap into the empowerment of community, with collaboration as a driving force. We rekindle the playful experimentation of our undergraduate years while still approaching our practices with the greater respect and seriousness afforded with time and experience. The artwork presented offers a portrayal of a young group reuniting to create - not in competition or exclusion - but in the interest of growth, resurrection, and collective success.

RECON was able to take place due to the generosity of Tulane University, the Newcomb Art Department, the Carroll Gallery, and Laura Richens. To everyone who contributed to RECON, thank you for showing up in every way that matters.

RECON is curated by Emma Conroy and includes new artwork by Parker Greenwood, Alex Lawton, Andrew Mahaffie, and Eli Pillaert.

On view: August 11 - September 19, 2022

[Photos of exhibition by Alex Lawton]

Team Lead, 2021, by Andrew Mahaffie

 

 

Untitled no 7 by Alex Lawton

Lady Fingers, 2022 by Eli Pillaert

Ink painting by Parker Greenwood

1000 Places by Andrew Mahaffie

Blas Isasi solo exhibition at The Front

"An idea is just the shape of a flower" is a solo exhibition of new work by Blas Isasi, visiting assistant professor of sculpture at Tulane. The exhibition will be on view at The Front from August 13 through September 4, 2022. nolafront.org

Artist Statement

The Peruvian coast consists of a long and narrow strip of desert squeezed between the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean, and crossed by a series of oasis-like river valleys. Given its long history of human occupation, ancient ruins have been one of this arid landscape´s most emblematic features. Abandoned temples and settlements that were gradually reclaimed by the desert sands were then turned into venerated shrines and cemeteries by subsequent kingdoms and their societies. After the Spanish conquest of Peru, this continued under new forms as those practices became more syncretic (e.g. witchcraft), together with the then nascent and still ongoing looting of tombs and temples. The latest development in this long history is the commodification of the past under a neoliberal regime that renders ancient artifacts and archeological sites as tourist attractions: inert, sterilized and “disenfranchised” relics of the past. Peru´s coastal desert is a scarred landscape, one whose scars work as mnemonic devices and indexical marks. Past and present populations have systematically engaged in a complex, dynamic and often conflictive process of negotiating memory through an editing process that sometimes involves the erasing of these marks, others their unearthing, resignifying and reinvention altogether resulting in a living palimpsest.

Following in the footsteps of numerous past Peruvian artists like Emilio Rodríguez Larraín, Juan Javier Salazar, and most notoriously Jorge Eduardo Eielson in making the desert a subject of their work, in "An idea is just the shape of a flower" I try to bring into play different key aspects, fragments, materials and symbols characteristic to this unique cultural landscape. By deploying various strategies, I intend to animate some of its most representative elements such as sand, clay, bones, etc. so as to put them in dialogue with each other in ways that seem counterintuitive, suggesting not only new connections and meanings but also other possible worlds. The accompanying presence of seamless metal structures in my installations hint to cartesian reason on the one hand, while evoking 20th century Modernist design on the other, the quintessential aesthetics that symbolizes the unfulfilled promise of progress in the context of the Global South. The resulting tension from the juxtaposition of these seemingly opposing sets of elements is meant to, in the words of Raymond Williams, convey a “structure of feeling”: the feeling of things before we are able think them; the feeling of a different world before we can imagine it. In short, mine is a humble attempt to reenchant the world and sow the seeds of hope in a bleak and perilous age.

Last but not least, this exhibition is meant as a heartfelt and critical homage to the arid and stunningly beautiful land I grew up on.

Kevin H. Jones solo exhibition in Tokyo, Japan

"Absurd Thinking" a solo exhibition of new work by digital arts professor Kevin H. Jones, was on view June and July at Art Lab Akiba in Tokyo, Japan.

Kevin H. Jones' new body of work presents the viewer with a constellation of images from popular culture, and digital processes, to iconic childhood memories. In his latest exhibition, Absurd Thinking, Jones creates visually and physically layered digital prints that conceptually oscillate between meaning and nonsense. Building upon his past inquiry into our attempts to understand the natural world, the construct of charts and diagrams also traverses this new work. What is different is that Jones reveals his process by using calibration graphics related to the process of printing and by showing computer operating system floating menus.

The result of these choreographed juxtapositions seen in his digital prints and videos feels like one is flipping through channels on a TV or moving past the static of a radio dial as images coalesce and momentarily make sense.

For example in the work, Mixed Metaphor, a portrait of Frankenstein sits in a computer's operating system’s popup window surrounded by color and grayscale gradients. The portrait has been pierced with holes revealing the star chart layered underneath. A pixelated bird is perched to the left of Frankenstein. Amongst the organization of seemingly abstract ideas, one may wonder about the relationship of the bird with the monster.