Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers

PUBLICATION ALERT: Art History alum Zoe Ariyama (BA, 2022) recently published an article in the Brooklyn Rail on the New Orleans Museum of Art's current exhibition “Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers.”

Art History alum Rebecca Villalpando (MA, 2022) contributed to this exhibition during her time as a graduate curatorial intern at NOMA.

Read the article here: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/artseen/Called-to-the-Camera-Black-American-Studio-Photographers

[James Presley Ball, Alexander S. Thomas, ca. late 1850s. Quarter plate daguerreotype. Courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum]

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

Magaret Rose Vendryes

We are deeply saddened to shares news of the death of Margaret Rose Vendryes on March 25. An accomplished and admired art historian, visual artist, and curator, she received her MA in Art History from the Newcomb Art Department in 1992, after having received her BA from Amherst and before going on to receive her PhD at Princeton. In her many creative and scholarly projects we see an astonishing array of approaches to thinking about and producing art. Among these, she published a book on Richmond Barthé (Barthé: A Life in Sculpture, 2008), curated Beyond the Blues at the New Orleans Museum of Art in partnership with the Amistad Research Center in 2010, and produced paintings for her African Diva Project series. She was Professor in the Department of Performing and Fine Arts and Director of the Fine Arts Gallery at York College at the City University of New York (CUNY). She was to become Dean of the School of  the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in June. Our thoughts are with the many who knew and loved her.

New Publications by Art History Alumni and Graduate Students

Victoria I. Lyall (MA Tulane, PhD UCLA), the Mayer Curator of Pre-Columbian Art at the Denver Art Museum, co-edited a recently published book titled ReVisión: A New Look at Art in the Americas.

“ReVisión” collects essays from scholars of Latin American art history to help others understand the region’s nuanced history of creation, destruction, and renewal. In addition to essays, ReVisión showcases work from artists such as Alexander Apóstol, Juan Enrique Bedoya, Johanna Calle, and Ronny Quevedo in order to help visualize the questions of identity, exploitation of natural resources, and displacement from both before and after the conquest.” - University of Chicago Press

The book is also accompanied by an upcoming exhibition at the Denver Art Museum (dates TBA).

Lily Filson (BA Tulane, MA Syracuse, PhD, Ca'Foscari) published an article titled "Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder: Automata Technology and the Transfer of Power from Church to State" in Society and Politics vol. 13, no. 2.

Lucia Momoh (MA Tulane) published an article titled “The Art of Erasure” in The Iron Lattice, an art and culture print magazine based in New Orleans.

Two of our Art History and Latin American Studies PhD candidates have just recently published Smarthistory essays, "The History of Mexico: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the National Palace" by Megan Flattley and "Painting Aztec History" by Hayley Woodward. This was part of a special COVID-era program to support emerging art history scholars, sponsored by the Kress Foundation. 

Art for Activism at the Carroll Gallery

The Newcomb Art Department's Carroll Gallery is pleased to announce its premier exhibition for Fall 2020. Art for Activism is an exhibition of over 40 works organized by Art for Activism, a group of Tulane artists made up of current students as well as alumni, in support of Black Lives Matter.
Artists included in the exhibition predominantly practice in New Orleans and responded to a Call for Artists, recognizing "the power that art has to inspire discussion, revision, and a shifting of opinions and culture in a way that words often can’t."

The work in the exhibition will be sold via silent auction with proceeds going to Mobilizing Millennials, a local organization dedicated to “recovering the fabric of true American democracy and promoting social equity and economic mobility.”  Artists have been asked to submit recent work that addresses themes of systemic and individual racism and the Black Lives Matter movement, with a goal of encouraging hope and a shifting of opinions and culture towards something better.

People can come see the work in the Carroll Gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition, August 10 - September 30, but the designated auction window will be Thursday, August 20th from 7:00 - 8:00 pm and will take place online. Art for Activism will be posting all work on their Instagram feed @art.foractivism in the weeks leading up to the auction.

Exhibition organizers:  Emery Gluck, Brandon Surtain, and Carlyn Morris
Opening date:  Monday, August 10, 2020
Gallery hours:  M – F, 9 am – 4 pm 
Silent Auction (online):  August 20th, 7:00 - 8:00 pm
Closing date: Thursday, September 3, 2020
Instagram: @art.foractivism @mobilizingmillennials

There will be no receptions in the gallery until further notice.  Viewers will be expected to wear face coverings and maintain social distance in the gallery. The Carroll Gallery is located in the Woldenberg Art Center on Tulane's uptown campus. (map )
 

Remembering Kendall Shaw (1924-2019)

In honor of Veterans Day, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art highlighted the work of World War II veteran and Tulane alumnus, Kendall Shaw.

Shaw was born in New Orleans in 1924. He served in the U. S. Navy as a radioman on an SPB Dauntless dive-bomber searching for German submarines off the mid-Atlantic coast during the second world war. The experience he gained during his service to country at a time of war informed his work for the rest of his life.

Shaw studied painting in New Orleans with George Rickey, Ida Kohlmeyer and Mark Rothko. In New York he studied with Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis and O. Louis Guglielmi. He held faculty teaching positions at Columbia University Architecture School, Hunter College, Lehman College, The Brooklyn Museum School and Parsons School of Design. Shaw was one of the founding members of a group of artists that came to be called the Pattern and Decoration Movement in the 1970s for their use of repeating geometric patterns inspired by craft traditions from both Western and non-Western cultures.

Born in the final years of the Greatest Generation, Shaw devoted his life to art after his formative experience of military service during WWII. Kendall Shaw died peacefully in his home in Brooklyn, New York on October 18, 2019. He leaves a legacy of innovation and excellence in American Art, and remains one of the most important artists to the mission, history and trajectory of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

WWII Veteran Kendall Shaw, Sunship, for John Coltrane, 1982, Acrylic and mirrors on canvas, Gift of the artist, Ogden Musuem of Southern Art

Pace Gallery celebrates Lynda Benglis (BFA '64) with a mini-retrospective

Lynda Benglis' Eat Meat, on view at Pace Gallery in Palo Alto. Photo by Brian Buckley/courtesy Pace Gallery.

Blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, Newcomb Art alumna Lynda Benglis' pioneering work sets her apart as one of the first women with the "moxie" to work with industrial materials in a bold way. Read more at Palo Alto Online.

Uncommon Exchanges: Pippin Frisbie-Calder and Jordan Karubian

Uncommon Exchanges: Pippin Frisbie-Calder and Jordan Karubian

Newcomb Art Museum

October 15 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

 

In partnership with A Studio in the Woods, The ByWater Institute at Tulane University, and The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South (Nola Gulf South), Newcomb Art Museum’s interdisciplinary conversation series “Uncommon Exchanges” invites the New Orleans community to interact with diverse experts from Tulane and the Gulf South region. Using the current exhibitions “Flint is Family” and “The American Dream Denied” as a catalyst, Pippin Frisbie-Calder, FATHOM Resident Artist at A Studio in the Woods and Jordan Karubian, Phd, Associate Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Tulane will engage in a unique conversation bridging their different disciplines and expertise to workshop new kinds of questions and establish commonalities.

alumniFree and open to the public, this event takes place inside the museum’s galleries.

Alumni News: Abdi Farah, Kristi Knipe, and Cora Lautze at the CAC

Cora Lautze, Work Promotes Confidence

The Contemporary Art Center's 2019 Open Call Exhibition Identity Measures opens on Saturday August 3rd, Hancock Whitney White Linen Night, and features the work of three recent alumni of Tulane's Studio Art graduate program:  Abdi Farah (MFA, Painting, 2018), Kristina Knipe (MFA Photography, 2016), and Cora Lautze (MFA, Printmaking, 2019).

Identity Measures is predicated on the understanding that identity is shaped by a variety of historical, racial, gendered, socioeconomic, geographical, physical, and ideological experiences through time. By opening up a dialogue about difference through the language of contemporary visual art, this exhibition claims that one’s structural location in the world matters to the articulation of personal and collective identity—a process that poses itself as a dynamic site of agency, creativity, resistance, visibility, ambiguity, and belonging.

The exhibtion is organized by guest curator, Dr. Jordan Amirkhani, an art historian, critic, curator, and educator based in Washington, DC, where she serves as a Professorial Lecturer in Global Modern and Contemporary Art History at American University. 

Opening reception: Saturday, August 3, 5:30pm - 9:30 pm, at the CAC.
Admission will be FREE and open to the public.

Alumni News: Marjorie Rawle

Marjorie Rawle, a 2019 M.A. graduate, has joined the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, MA, as a Terrana Curatorial Fellow through summer 2020. The Terrana Curatorial Fellowship, a 13-month, full-time appointment for a recent M.A./Ph.D. graduate in museum studies/art history, is designed to launch emerging curators into substantial museum careers by providing an immersive educational experience. 

Marjorie completed her M.A. thesis on the creative relationship between AbEx painter Grace Hartigan and New York school poet Frank O'Hara, and she completed a graduate internship at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Alumni News: Adriana Obiols-Roca

2019 Art History M.A. graduate Adriana Obiols-Roca was recently awarded the Stone Center for Latin American Studies' Donald Robertson Prize for best paper in the Humanities by a Latin American Studies Graduate Student. This award honors Donald Robertson, a professor of Art History at Tulane for more than 25 years and a pioneer in the field of Latin American art history. He authored the groundbreaking Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools, and motivated a generation of budding Art Historians and Ethnohistorians.

Adriana's award-winning paper, "The Battle of the Whale: Bataillean Aesthetics in El Techo de la Ballena," analyzed the 1960s Venezuelan artistic and literary group El Techo de la Ballena, in relation to the dissident surrealism of French writer Georges Bataille. While El Techo has been the focus of sustained analysis on the part of literary critics, the group’s artistic production has received comparatively less attention. Their artistic production has previously been understood as part of a continuation of postwar gestural abstraction, and as a rejection of the geometric abstract art and modernist architecture that characterized the developmentalist state in 1950s-70s Venezuela. However, Adriana’s paper convincingly argues that El Techo’s practice should not be understood as a belated modernist project, but as quintessentially of its time, as a particularly Venezuelan take on the 1960s neo-avant-garde strategies of entropy, base materiality, and assemblage.

AnnieLaurie Erickson: Data & Art of the City

AnnieLaurie Erickson, Assistant Professor of Photography, is currently participating in two group exhibitions.  Data: BIG/-driven/Visualized, at Northern Illinois University Museum in Chicago is on  view through May 17, 2019. User Agreement (at left), a pigment print on habotai silk, incorporates the text from all of the Google user agreements since this practice began in 1999.  Art of the City: Postmodern to Post-Katrina, presented by The Helis Foundation, is on view at the Historic New Orleans Collection Seignouret-Brulatour Building, 520 Royal Street, from April 6, 2019 to October 6, 2019. The exhibition was curated by alumna Jan Gilbert (MFA, 1982).

Alumni News: Elliot Doughtie recieves Joan Mitchell Foundation grant

Elliot Doughtie (BA, Studio Art, Art History, '07) was named a 2018 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants. The Foundation currently awards $25,000 to twenty-five artists through a nomination process. Nominators from across the country are invited to recommend artists, at any stage in their career, who are currently under-recognized for their creative achievements, and whose practice would significantly benefit from the grant.

Elliot Doughtie is a Baltimore-based artist originally from Dallas, TX. Doughtie’s current practice utilizes drawing, collage, sculpture, and installation in the service of generating new experiences that transcend existing boundaries or assumed functions. Cosmic landscapes and bathroom plumbing are used as metaphors for the body in transition in his own explorations of the fluidity of gender and sexuality.  Doughtie describes his practice, “My sculptures and installations are metaphors for how I envision my own body and the bodies of those who are, like myself, transgender. Often the sculptures, or their attached component parts, are tools that would be used specifically by a trans person to push the body to something other than its current limits.”


Elliot Doughite, Alchemy Set For A Future Body (Part 2), 2016, mixed media installation: plaster, paper clay, plastic tubing, ink, ink jet transfer, copper couplings, and found table, 48" x 60" x 30"

Mignon Faget (BFA 1955): recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award 2018

Congratulations to Mignon Faget, this year's recipient of Tulane's Distinguished Alumni Award. A fifth generation New Orleanian, Mignon Faget has flourished in the culture and traditions of her birthplace. Faget’s formal training in the arts began at Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University from which she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, with a concentration in sculpture. She furthered her studies at l’Atelier de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris and the Parsons School of Design in New York. Faget returned to Tulane University to take post graduate classes in botany and other areas of personal interest.

Faget began her design career in 1969 with the launch of her first ready-to- wear clothing collection. The success of the collection prompted her to explore creating accessories such as belts, pins and jewelry to compliment the ready-to- wear pieces. This early exercise and her studies in sculpture from Sophie Newcomb College led to her first jewelry forms. Since then, jewelry has become her all-consuming interest in the field of design. From the beginning, she has worked closely with natural and architectural forms—extracting the essence of a particular shape and refining into her own unique sculptural interpretation.

Faget has also long been an active philanthropist, preservationist, and art advocate. In 1969, when Faget launched her first collection, women entrepreneurs were a bit of rarity in New Orleans. Today, she is committed to celebrating and advocating for women across a number of fields as well contributing to diverse communities and groups in need. In addition, she is passionate about giving back to the culture and community that inspires her life’s work. Since 2005, Faget has donated over half a million dollars of proceeds from her designs to the Audubon Society, Louisiana Beekeeper’s Association, Tulane-Xavier University Center for Bio-Environmental Research, the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation, and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, to name a few. She has been an active leader and supporter of the arts and has served on boards for several of the local museums. The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana State Museum Capitol Park honored Faget with a retrospective exhibit titled Mignon Faget: A Life in Art and Design.

https://alumniawards.tulane.edu/awardee/mignon-faget/

Alumna Establishes Visiting Studio Artist Endowed Fund

Katherine (Kathy) Steinmayer McLean (NC ’53

As a student in Newcomb College Katherine (Kathy) Steinmayer McLean (NC ’53) pursued her dream of majoring in art in the Newcomb Art Department. The daughter of a Tulane geology professor, Reinhard Steinmayer, she studied ceramics under world renowned Newcomb pottery artist, Sadie Irvine. In 2005, in honor of her father, she established the Reinhard A. Steinmayer Endowed Scholarship, which aids students studying earth and environmental sciences. That same year, she created the J. Michael McLean Endowed Scholarship—an award for student-athletes—to recognize her late husband who had been a graduate of Tulane (A&S ‘52) and captain of the football team.

Although now living in Houston, McLean never forgot the lessons she learned in the Newcomb Art Department or the impact it had on her life. Recently, to allow others to have the outstanding education she experienced, she has added to her generosity by establishing the Katherine Steinmayer McLean Visiting Studio Artist Endowed Fund. The gift will support visiting artists who come to Tulane and provide funds for such activities as special topics classes, workshops, lectures, artistic residencies and exhibitions. “There are so many smart and talented young people at Tulane,” says McLean. “I wanted to give them an opportunity to experience artistic experimentation and to meet visiting artists from other areas who will teach them new techniques.”

In addition to making a current-use gift establishing the visiting artist fund, she has also provided a generous bequest in her will for the same purpose. “I just feel that Tulane is a wonderful place, and I know that this gift will really make a difference to students who are following their dreams to study art,” she says. “It makes me so happy to do it.”

[Why We Give, School of Liberal Arts newsletter, February 2018]

Alumni News: Michel Varisco (MFA 1994)

“Turning: prayer wheels for the Mississippi River” Artist Rendering

The unveiling dedication of artist Michel Varisco's public art installation, “Turning (prayer wheels for the Mississippi River)” will take place on site, the Lafitte Greenway entrance at Bayou St. John and Jefferson Davis Parkway, on Saturday November 18th, 2:30 - 4:30pm.

Commissioned by the Arts Council of New Orleans, the City of New Orleans, and featured in the Prospect.4 Biennial, “Turning” elegantly blends social and environmental activism with interactive sculpture, where the history of the land itself is an integral component of the piece.

“Turning” consists of three, 9 foot, stainless steel, interactive “prayer wheels”, individually cut with iconography of the Mississippi River from three distinct periods of the riverʼs history, (the wild era, colonial plantation era, and petrochemical era), based on the mapping in Kate Orffʼs seminal book, “Petrochemical America”. Each cylinder is rooted in a hand-made mosaic base that depicts the land building patterns created from deposits of the riverʼs sediment over 7000 years, informed by the Fisk maps of 1944. At night, the prayer wheels will emit pulses of dim blue light via solar power, and visitors may spin each wheel to intensify the emanations. The path that weaves through the installation echoes the riverʼs serpentine curvature, while the indigenous gardens surrounding the site were planted by Varisco and a team of devoted community volunteers.

Alumni News: Marisa Hershon

Marissa Hershon (BA, Art History, 2003) is happy to announce that the catalog she co-authored, Glass: Masterworks from the Chrysler Museum of Art, is now available on Amazon, with her essays highlighting American and European glass in the museum’s collection. 

Hershon, a Curatorial Assistant in Decorative Arts, Craft, and Design at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston also is pleased to share that the exhibition, The Glamour and Romance of Oscar de la Renta, is on view at The MFAH from October 8, 2017 – January 28, 2018.

Tulane/Newcomb artists featured in New American Paintings

The most recent edition of New American Paintings features the work of Ronna S. Harris, Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing. Harris works in oils and soft pastels, playing with light and its affect on color. Her paintings communicate a state of controlled chaos as she combines two divergent forces and approaches: realism and abstract expression. By a proficient handling of light, a mastery of images, and a skillful mark making method, the paintings confer an illusion of reality to something that's not real. The end result is a spatial between magic and illusion rooted in the American Realist tradition.

Issue 130 of New American Paintings also features the work of two Tulane/Newcomb alumnae, Maysey Craddock (BA 1993) and Anastasia Pelias (BFA 1981).

Alumni News: Jan Gilbert at NOMA

 JAN GILBERT TO DISCUSS HER CAREER AND INFLUENCE OF MENTOR JIM STEG AT ARTIST PERSPECTIVE LECTURE

Friday Nights at NOMA, August 11, 6 p.m.

Artist Jan Gilbert (MFA 1982), among many former students of longtime Tulane professor and innovative printmaker Jim Steg, will be featured in an Artist Perspective lecture. Deeply influenced by her native New Orleans, Gilbert employs tools and processes of collaboration to create a host of widely varied projects with wildly diverse partnerships, including her documentary filmmaker husband, Kevin McCaffrey; poet/writers Andrei Codrescu and Yusef Komunyakaa; experimental theater directors Richard Schechner, Julie Hebert, and Kathy Randels; and Swiss cultural psychiatrist/anthropologist Jacques Arpin. 

[via NOMA News]

Kristina Knipe & Kevin Brisco Jr. show at Good Children

Kevin Brisco Jr. (left) and Kristina E. Knipe (right)

Alumna Kristina E. Knipe (MFA 2016) and Kevin Brisco Jr. have a joint show at Good Children Gallery opening on Saturday, July 8th from 6-10 p.m. with a walkthrough by both artists at 6 p.m.

Kristina E. Knipe's exhibit of photographs titled, Talisman, explores the relationship between sensuality and spirituality through visual opulence and invites the viewer to peer into intimate scenes. Kevin Brisco Jr.'s exhibit of paintings titled, (For) What Is(s) Worth, addresses worth in a society that places high value on specific objects and routinely undervalues specific people. Good Children Gallery, located at 4037 St. Claude Avenue, is open 12-5pm on Saturdays and Sundays. The show will run from July 8th through August 6th.