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.