Newcomb Art Department
Upcoming Newcomb Art Department Events
Newcomb Art News
Uncommon Exchanges: Pippin Frisbie-Calder and Jordan KarubianNewcomb Art MuseumOctober 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.
The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design is pleased to announce the fall 2019 exhibition Looters: Itinerant Images of West African Architecture. This exhibition used light projection and sculpture to reveal hidden images of West African architecture in the background of European prints, drawings, and photographs from the 18th through early 20th centuries. Alongside projected images, sculptures and prints by contemporary artists respond to the hidden archive. Looters is particularly relevant for audiences in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, with its latent legacies of West African architecture. Looters is organized by art historian Adrian Anagnost and artists Manol Gueorguiev and Abdi Farah.
Looters focuses on architectural images from three West African sites with historical ties to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast: the city-state of Ouidah, the city of Abomey in the Dahomey kingdom (in present-day Benin), and Benin City (in present-day Nigeria). Much of these sites’ historical architecture is destroyed, and in many cases, only images recorded by European visitors remain. Looters seeks to recover a hidden and perhaps unreliable archive of this architecture, found in the backgrounds of prints and photographs in which Europeans staged their versions of colonial encounters. This 2019 presentation of Looters in New Orleans also commemorates the 300th anniversary of what is thought to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans directly from West Africa to New Orleans in 1719, likely including one or more ships from Ouidah (present-day Benin).
Looters will hold an exhibition reception from 4:00 to 6:00 PM on Friday, November 15th, and visitors are encouraged to visit the Ashé Cultural Arts Center’s Exploring the Diaspora: The Benin Republic, later that same evening.
Looters will also feature a children’s art activity inspired by Dahomey carved wood designs on Saturday, November 16th, from 10:30 AM to 1:00 PM.
Looters is funded in part by the Platforms Fund, a collaborative re-granting effort of Antenna and Ashé Cultural Arts Center with support by the Andy Warhol Foundation, and hosted by The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design. Special thanks to Francine Stock of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University.
Prospect New Orleans in collaboration with the Newcomb Art Department and the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund present:
Artist’s Talk by Andrea Fraser
Monday, September 16
6:00 pm
Freeman Auditorium (Rm. 205, Woldenberg Art Center)
Tulane University
Andrea Fraser performed Not just the few of us for the opening of Prospect.3: Notes for Now. Not just the few of us is an interpretation of one public confrontation with racist systems in contemporary New Orleans: a 1991 City Council hearing regarding the official desegregation of the unofficially self-segregated Mardi Gras krewes. For Prospect.3 Fraser also installed Um Monumento as Fantasias Descartadas in the Newcomb Art Gallery.
Andrea Fraser is an artist whose work investigates the social, financial, and affective economies of cultural institutions, fields, and groups. She is Professor, Interdisciplinary Studio Area Head, and Chair of the UCLA Department of Art. Retrospectives of her work have been presented by the Museum Ludwig Cologne (2013), the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2015), the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona and MUAC UNAM Mexico City (both 2016). Her most recent book, 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics (2018)—co-published by the CCA Wattis Institute, Westreich/Wagner Publications, and MIT Press—documents the political contributions of the board members of over 125 major US art organizations in the 2016 election cycle and its aftermath, examining the intersection of cultural philanthropy and political finance in the age of plutocracy. She serves on the boards W.A.G.E, Grex (the West Coast Affiliate of the A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and on the Artist Council of the Hammer Museum.
Prof. Zhang specializes in the art and material culture of early medieval China (3rd–6th century CE) and the cultural interactions among East Asia, Central Asia, and Northeastern Asia through and beyond the Silk Road network. Adopting an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach, her research probes into issues around identity, migration, and hybridity in the ancient world. Her current book project, Cultural Encounters: Ethnic Complexity and Material Expressions in the Fifth-century Pingcheng, draws attention to the funerary art of Pingcheng, the capital city of the Northern Wei Dynasty, and explores how artworks function as effective vehicles for individuals to articulate one’s identities in a multi-ethnic society. Fan Zhang has conducted archaeological fieldwork in both China and Central Asia. She also participated in research and curatorial programs in several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Korea, and the Sichuan Museum.
The exhibition is on view August 21-September 25 at the Carroll Gallery, hours M-F 9-4.
Cora Lautze, Work Promotes ConfidenceThe 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.
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.
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.
Teresa Cole, Infiltrate 2.0, relief printed Japanese paper with dye and bamboo, 72h x 60w in
In Imperfect, her fifth solo exhibition at Callan Contemporary, Teresa Cole brings together patterns from disparate traditions in images of startling complexity and beauty. This body of work—a suite of intaglio etchings, woodcuts, and two installations, Black & White Patchwork and Infiltrate 2.0—stems from research the artist conducted last spring in Seville, Cordova, and Granada, Spain. There, in architectural masterpieces such as the Alhambra palace, she studied and documented intricate patterns adorning tilework, carved wood and plaster, wainscoting, stone flooring, and cut glass. Alternately geometric and arabesque (plant- based/organic), these motifs exemplify Moorish aesthetics, in which only the divine is considered perfect and artisans build small flaws into their designs to signify earthly fallibility. Cole has integrated many of these patterns into her existing lexicon of shapes, combining Old World printmaking techniques with digital photography, laser cutters, and CNC routers. “There’s a tension between these perfect, computer-formed lines and the imperfection of the hand,” she observes. “Those imperfections are evidence of our humanity.”
Cole earned a B.F.A. degree from Maryland Institute College of Art and an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art, then continued her studies as a member of Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen, Scotland. Currently she is full professor at Tulane University, where she teaches all aspects of printmaking. She has conducted research and participated in residencies in India, South Africa, Nepal, Belgium, Spain, and throughout the U.S. and has been commissioned to create large-scale public artworks, most recently a sculptural installation at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane. Her works are included in prestigious private, corporate, and institutional collections around the world.
Cole’s prints are densely layered, rich with a translucence and texturality that reward close viewing. Their thematic content is also highly layered, sometimes juxtaposing or overlaying Roman and Arabic scripts—as well as symbols from Asia, Africa, and the Americas—into images of poignant cross-cultural mélange. Technically innovative and pictorially opulent, the artworks posit a fluidity between ornamentation and language, visual seduction and conceptual grounding, and pattern as both decorative and narrative devices. One need not speak foreign tongues or be versed in art history to appreciate these pieces, however, for they communicate directly and subliminally with the viewer’s perception and subconscious. “Maybe it’s possible,” Cole suggests, “to learn about something simply by looking at it.”
by Richard Speer
IMPERFECT exhibition dates: June 1st - July 20th, 2019
CALLAN CONTEMPORARY 518 JULIA STREET, NEW ORLEANS, LA 70130