New Course Spring 2020: Art and Science of Delta Clay

This 3 credit studio art course examines the nature of the clay New Orleans is built on, from the perspective of geologic sedimentation, an urban living environment and as a material for ceramic art. We will dig clay from four sites in the city, process it in the studio and use it as the material for original ceramic artworks. Working individually and in small groups students will develop new pieces that explore issues of identity, change and risk in the New Orleans region.

Guest speakers from the Earth Science dept. will present current research on the processes of sedimentation and land building, as well as the challenges of sea level rise, subsidence and climate change on this unique delta. As a studio arts course it will cover the chemical makeup and application of clays and emphasize creative thinking and the development of skills and original works. No prerequisite is required.

Professor Jeremy Jernegan: jjernaga@tulane.edu

Workhouse Arts Center Presents Jeremy Jernegan 'Dwell'

Dwell is a solo exhibition opening on May 1, through June 2, 2019 at Gallery W-8, Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, VA of work by ceramic sculptor and Tulane University Professor of Art Jeremy Jernegan. The exhibition features a new body of ceramic and stainless steel wall sculptures that address climate change and its effects on oceans and waterways, that Jernegan produced during his residency at the Workhouse over the past 9 months.

Dwell explores our experiences inhabiting a world undergoing cataclysmic climate change and our difficulty grasping the enormous scale and consequences of our plight.  In these new works, Jernegan’s longstanding interest in water imagery and in the amorphousness of marine environments as metaphors for uncertainty and disorientation becomes a meditation on the profound upheaval that will be brought by a radically altered climate environment.

These are technically complex, multi-media works, consisting of large, geometric ceramic tiles made as ceramic mono-prints and enclosed in stainless steel frames.  Incorporating a range of detailed imagery drawn from maritime contexts, these works suggest a sense of physical precarity and transformation through their large scale, unconventional combinations of materials, and protrusion from the wall. This remarkable body of work intertwines the pictorial and the sculptural in an investigation into our relationship to and perceptions of our rapidly changing environment.

[via East City Art]

Staple Goods show in New York features Tulane/Newcomb artists

Members of Staple Goods artist collective, based in New Orleans, are showing new work at The Clemente Center, 107 Suffolk Street in the Lower East Side, New York City.  

Two Blocks From Elysian Fields: Recent Work From New Orleans features Aaron Collier, Abdi Farah, Abe Geasland, Anne C. Nelson, Bill DePauw, Jack Niven, Katrina Andry, Norah Lovell and Thomasine Bartlett. The show is on view from June 1-30, 2017. 

The top photo shows current MFA student Abdi Farah's work on the left (Twice Conquered, 2017, tackle twill, fringe, fabric, and Latex paint, 87 x 104") and Assistant Professor Aaron Collier's two pieces on the right (Deep Calls to Deep, 2015, Flashe on canvas, 72 x 72" and Walkin' After Midnight, 2015, Flashe on canvas, 72 x 72").  Pictured in the orange shirt is Norah Lovell, a member at Staple Goods and Program Manager of the Honors Program at Tulane University.

The bottom photos shows Senior Professor of Practice William DePauw's piece in the foreground (Tip of the Tongue, 2016, fired clay and painted panel) and Professor of Practice Anne C. Nelson's piece to the far left (Anxiety of ancestry, 2017, Latex on wall, oil on canvas, oil on panel, 120 x 80").

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. 

Jenna Turner to exhibit in the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale in South Korea

Jenna Turner, Subversion (detail)

Jenna Turner (MFA 2014) has been accepted into the 8th Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale in South Korea. A total of 2,629 entries by 1,470 artists from seventy-four countries were received, among which 108 pieces by 101 artists from twenty-eight countries were selected after the preliminary screening.​

Turner's entry, Subversion, was completed in 2014 as part of her thesis show and is currently on view at Good Children Gallery. 


In order to attend the biennial, Jenna will be traveling to South Korea at the end of April with an Alberta Foundation for the Arts Cultural Relations Grant.

Catalytic Intelligence and Kiln Transformation in the Making of China