Objects in Focus: Clothes by Betsy Packard, MFA 1978

Join us for this month’s Objects in Focus gallery talk, which will focus on work of Betsy Packard (MFA, 1978).
 

Friday, November 4, 12 pm

Newcomb Art Museum

This talk will be led by Alex Landry, Curatorial Assistant at the Newcomb Art Museum and a 2nd-year Art History MA student.

This event is free and open to all.

Gene Koss: solo exhibition at Ohr-O'keefe Museum

Always an admirer of Frank Gehry's architecture, Gene Koss is excited to exhibit in a stainless steel Gehry designed pod on the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum campus. The huge steel panels and exposed beams in the raw, unfinished interior of the pod contrast and complement Koss’s sculpture.

The exhibit covers a span of Koss’s sculpture career from 1990 to 2019 and was curated by David Houston, the Ohr-O’Keefe executive director.  Included is Arc, a large-scale sculpture of steel, stone and glass; Totem, a large wooden timber sculpture; as well as several multi-media maquette sculptures. 

Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art  386 Beach Blvd, Biloxi, MS 39530
Open to the public:  10am-5pm Tuesday – Saturday; 1pm-5pm Sunday

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.

Barry Stone Bailey (1952-2021)

 

With heavy hearts we share the news that sculptor Barry Bailey died in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, around September 1, 2021.  

 

Barry Stone Bailey was born on October 21, 1952, in High Point, North Carolina.  Bailey received his M.F.A. in sculpture from East Carolina University in 1978. His thesis exhibition was titled, "A Sculptural Response to Coastal Landscape and Environmental Space." In 1980 he came to New Orleans for the College Art Association Conference and never left. From 1980-1982 Bailey served as visual arts coordinator at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. He was one of founding members of A.J.A.C. Studio (Artists at Joliet and Cohn) with Mark Grote, Steve Klein, Gene Koss, Sandra Russell Clark, and others. Bailey served as supervisor for "Artworks '84" at the Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans in 1984. 

 

In 1987 Bailey joined the studio art faculty at the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University, first as visiting professor (1987-89), then assistant professor (1989-1993), and finally associate professor (1993-2010). Bailey also taught in the summer at the University of Georgia sculpture program at Cortona, Italy from 1992-1996.

 

Bailey is remembered for the many community iron pours, annual "River Day" events, and foundry shows in the Tulane studio and courtyard. In the sculpture community Bailey was known for his unique head furnaces for casting iron, themselves sculptures made of paper, clay, and sand. In 2002-2003 he exhibited in Italy and England, the only American exhibiting in the Canterbury Sculpture Festival, among a select group within the ruins of St. Augustine's Abbey. In 2004 he served as one of the local chairs for the International Sculpture Conference in New Orleans with John Scott. 

 

His students were exceptional and of them he was most proud. Distinguished alumni of the Tulane Sculpture program during his tenure include Zarouhie Abdalian, Joseph Burwell, Thor Carlson, Allison Collins,  Maysey Craddock, Joseph Hillier, Jonathan Hils, Erik Johnson, Loren Schwerd, Cynthia Scott, and Phoebe Washburn. On his birthday in 2016, he wrote, "Thanks one and all, for all the kind greetings and well wishes on my birthday. Though I never had children, I had students much more interesting and brilliant than myself. It has brought me great joy to see them grow into well-adjusted men and ladies. Bon chance, to all my FB friends and colleagues alike, around the world wherever you may be remembered, we are one and never the same, or ashamed to be who we truly are. Carry on, brothers and sisters, and as John Scott used to say, "PASS IT ON !" 

 

Forging Strength: the Art of Labor

Gene Koss, Arc, installation view, Hibernian Memorial Park, New Orleans

The opening of Forging Strength: The Art of Labor, a new sculpture garden at Hibernian Memorial Park, will take place on Friday, January 17 at 10 am at the Celtic Cross Monument in New Orleans, located on the neutral ground between West End and Pontchartrain boulevards. (map) The guest of honor for the kick-off is Irish Consul General Claire McCarthy, making her first trip to New Orleans since her appointment to the Irish Consulate in Austin, Texas, last fall.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Earl Dismuke, Erica Larkin Gaudet, Hernan Caro, Gene H. Koss, Mia Kaplan and Tara Conley. The exhibit provides artistic representation of the immigration experience and supports the mission of the Irish heritage park to honor the contribution of the Irish in the Crescent City.

For more information contact Louisiana Hibernian Charity board president Jim Moriarty 504.616.3999.

Funding for the Hibernian Memorial Park sculpture project was provided by the Emigrant Support Programme of Ireland, with additional support from the Louisiana Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Hash House Harriers, the Irish Channel St. Patrick’s Day Club and Roubion Shoring and Construction.

Taking risks in sculpture

Emily Hermant, who joined the faculty this semester as an assistant professor of sculpture, seeks to inspire students in the Sculpture Foundry in the Woldenberg Art Center on the Tulane University uptown campus. New digital art tools were a gift from New Orleans resident Louis Jung, in honor of his mother, Harriett Tolar Jung, a 1940 Newcomb College graduate who majored in painting.

read more... Tulane New Wave 10.09.15
(Photo by Ryan Rivet)

Emily Hermant exhibition in Chicago

On Saturday October 3, the two-person exhibition Hermant/Butler opens at the Franklin in Chicago, featuring the work of Assistant Professor of Sculpture Emily Hermant and Ben Butler.

In Emily Hermant’s work, a recurring theme is the utilization of slow, hand-making processes to generate ways of representing the rapid movement and proliferation of digital information and communication in contemporary life. For this duo exhibition with Ben Butler at The Franklin, Hermant has created Walled Garden, an installation of hand-rendered wallpaper panels on the interior of the Franklin’s outdoor structure, in which orchestrated ensembles of individually drawn dashes fluctuate in vibrant, toxic color combinations—a distillation of our experience of the hum and blur of rapidly changing technological information.

New Faculty: Emily Hermant, Asisstant Professor, Sculpture

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Emily Hermant to the faculty as Assistant Professor of Sculpture. Hermant is an interdisciplinary artist whose large-scale drawings, sculptures, and installations explore themes of communication, gender, labor, and the spatial experiences of the body. She received her BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada in 2004 and her MFA as a Trustee Merit Scholar in Studio Art/Fiber & Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Ace Art in Winnipeg (2015), CIRCA Art Actuel in Montréal (2014), the Evanston Art Center (2012), The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (2012); and group exhibitions at Galerie Nicolas Robert in Montréal (2014), Virginia Commonwealth University (2011), Hyde Park Art Center (2010), Triennale di Milano Museum in Italy (2009), and the Museum of Arts & Design in New York (2008). Her work has been featured in LVL3 Media, ArtSlant, Espace Sculpture, The Washington Post, and TimeOut Chicago. Hermant has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec as well as residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Ox-Bow School of Art, The Ragdale Foundation, and the Nordic Artists’ Centre in Norway.