Newcomb Art Department

Abstract: The French fort of La Balise, built in the early eighteenth-century, was at the nexus of marshland and sea in the Mississippi River Delta. Originally, the fortified settlement aimed to protect French colonial interests and secure access to the Mississippi River at a crucial juncture. Today, due to land loss along the Gulf of Mexico, the fort lies underwater at most tides, but visual evidence remains: a series of ink and watercolor maps produced for administrative oversight and sent to the Dépôt des Fortifications des Colonies.
Recognizing both advantages and hazards of the landscape, these maps document the enmeshment of fort and the Mississippi Delta’s complex ecosystem. Passage from the Gulf of Mexico to the river was fraught with peril, evident in references to shipwrecks alongside pictorial and textual demarcations of currents and oceanic depths. Simultaneously, French mercantile and social orders were imposed on the landscape, with a brickyard and designated settlement for enslaved Africans on an adjoining island. Exploitation of natural resources and racialized spatial segregation were formative to the colonial project in the Americas. We argue that depictions of the fort’s construction, amidst the ever-shifting environs of the Gulf South, reveal how topographic variability posed difficulties to pictorial rendering. Troubling rigid conceptualizations of landscapes and seascapes, maps reveal interpenetrating salt and freshwaters, shoals, and islands. As the French sought to make militarily secure this mutable terrain, the land itself challenged visual discernment, with colonial expansion, imperial power, and enslavement set against a natural landscape that thwarted cartographic fixity.

Artists Respond: Post-Roe Louisiana is a juried exhibition that will feature artwork in a variety of media by artists from Louisiana, in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States in June of 2022.  The exhibition will be on view in the Carroll Gallery of the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University, and will include student work as well as artwork by established and emerging artists from throughout the state.  

The exhibition’s Panel of Jurors is comprised of:
Dr. Clare Daniel, Administrative Associate Professor, Newcomb Institute
Dr. Maurita Poole, Director, Newcomb Art Museum
Laura Richens, Curator, Carroll Gallery, Newcomb Art Department

The exhibition will be on view from Oct. 4 – 28, 2022, and will include a Panel Discussion and Exhibition Reception on Thursday, Oct. 13.  

Panel discussion: 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm, Stone Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center
Exhibition reception:  6:30 - 8:00 pm, Carroll Gallery, Woldenberg Art Center

Moderators:  
    Dr. Clare Daniel, Administrative Associate Professor, Newcomb Institute
    Kelsey Lain, Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health Intern, Newcomb Institute
Panelists:
    Dr. Karissa Haugeberg, Associate Professor of History, Tulane University
    Lakeesha Harris, Co-Executive Director, Lift Louisiana
    Amy Irvin, Executive Director, Creative Community League

Artists from Louisiana were encouraged to submit works for consideration via the Carroll Gallery website:  https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/carrollgallery between Sept. 1 – 19, 2022.  

Please contact Laura Richens at lrichens@tulane.edu for more information. 

The Artists Respond: Post-Roe Louisiana project is supported by the Newcomb Institute.

"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 September 13 through October 03, 2022. nolafront.org

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.