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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
Please join us for
FACADES
Organized by Amy Crum and Marjorie Rawle
featuring works by:
Allison Beondé
Jenna DeBoisblanc
Ana Hernandez
Carlie Trosclair
Opening reception: Thursday, June 13, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Exhibition on view June 13 – July 12, 2019
With the assistance of a grant from the Skau Music and Art Fund, I will spend eight weeks this summer crisscrossing the country, driving to all of the locations where queer people were murdered in 1999 and 2000. I will be photographing the locations with a Sony Digital Mavica, the first digital camera that was available at the time, to create a photographic archive of all the recorded queer murders. There is an immediacy to this project: It was exactly 20 years ago that the Matthew Shepard and the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was presented to Congress, expanding the definition of federal hate crime laws to include queer people. It was eventually signed by President Barack Obama 10 years ago. Additionally, it is exactly 50 years since the Stonewall riots. However, the current administration is changing laws that have protected queer people. The trans ban in the military, the bathroom ban, and the religious rights movement all play a part in institutionalizing queer hate. According to LAMBDA’s Website, “the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs’ ‘Crisis of Hate’ report [states that] 2017 was the deadliest year in recent history for LGBTQ+ people in the United States.” Queer people are still being murdered at horrific rates.
This spring, Anagnost was awarded a prestigious fellowship from the American Council on Learned Societies (ACLS) to continue this investigation, focusing on networks of architects and critics spanning Brazil and Italy. During her fellowship, Anagnost will begin research for a second book, expanding upon earlier research centered on ways that Brazilian artists and architects of the 1930s to the 1960s created works that critiqued, upheld, or intervened in urban Brazil’s socio-spatial inequalities. While conducting research for her first book project, Anagnost was drawn to the international circulation of architecture magazines and architecture exhibitions, and particularly noted parallells between Brazil and Italy.
[continue reading: Wilkerson, Emily, "Art History Professor Adrian Anagnost Awarded ACLS Fellowship," Tulane University School of Liberal Arts Newsletter, May 2019]
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]