NEW ORLEANS, LA.- The Ogden Museum of Southern Art will celebrates the opening of its three newest exhibitions on Thursday, June 16, 2016. Opening reception festivities for Top Mob: A History of New Orleans Graffiti, /’pāpər/ and In Time We Shall Know Ourselves: Photographs by Raymond Smith will commence at 5:00 p.m. and last until 8:00 p.m.
Highlights of the evening include remarks by photographer Raymond Smith and remarks by members of the Top Mob graffiti collective. Music will be provided in the Patrick F. Taylor Library by DJ Alfa Leone and DJ Quickie Mart, both affiliated with Top Mob.
Top Mob: A History of New Orleans Graffiti sponsored by Mo’s Art Supply
June 4 – November 6, 2016
From the Caves of Lascaux to the Subway tunnels of New York City, graffiti remains the oldest form of art known to man. In New Orleans during the early 1980s, graffiti writers emerged onto the scene and created a style and influence that would continue over three decades. Often the subject of controversy, graffiti draws attention to urban blight and gentrification, the line between creation and destruction, and the social conditions that allow and encourage this subversive life-style. Over the years graffiti has evolved from a purely street level rebellion to a multi-million dollar business, attracting a new generation of “street artists” and thus changing the perception of where graffiti culture comes from. This exhibition is a visual and historical retelling of the evolution of New Orleans graffiti by the ones who were there when it started and those who have kept it alive.
The first of its kind in the south, this innovative exhibition is a retrospective of the New Orleans-centric Top Mob Graffiti Collective, capturing over 30 years of visual impact in the Crescent City and beyond.
/’pāpər/
June 11 – November 6, 2016
Since the invention of paper in China during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), artists have used it as a medium to express their ideas. It quickly replaced vellum, papyrus, palm leaves and parchment as an economical and readily available medium for recording images and text. It revolutionized the transfer of information, and has been used to create sacred ritual objects in cultures throughout the world. Even in today’s digital environment, paper maintains its presence as a beautiful physical medium, and to some artists, occupies an almost spiritual role as a vehicle for inspiration.
Works on paper are by nature light-sensitive and susceptible to the environment. For that reason, these works in museum collections are often kept in the dark, and only displayed for short periods of time. This exhibition brings many of the masterful works on paper from the Ogden Museum’s permanent collection out of the dark, climate-controlled drawers of the vault, and into the light of exhibition, often for the first time.
Ranging from historic drawings to contemporary papier-mâché, /’pāpər/ will showcase the diversity and depth of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s collection of paper works. This exhibition also celebrates the diverse ways in which Southern artists have approached their medium. Works on paper are not necessarily preliminary studies for paintings or sculptures (although some definitely play that role), but are finished works of art, each with a unique character expressed through the hand of the artist, translated through the medium itself. These artists have manipulated the material through cutting, painting, drawing, collage, printmaking, book arts and sculpting. Through this broad survey of processes and artists, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art will offer the public a chance to explore the vast possibilities for expression contained within the seemingly simple medium of paper.
This exhibition will include work by Robert Rauschenberg, Benny Andrews, Ellsworth Woodward, John McCrady, John T. Scott, Dusti Bongé, George Dureau, Caroline Durieux, Michael Meads, Jules Pascin, Gregory Saunders, Seymour Fogel, John Alexander, Minnie Evans, James Rosenquist, Walter Anderson, William Dunlap, Andrew Bucci, Enrique Alferez, Fritz Bultman, William Hollingsworth, Noel Rockmore, James Surls, Hudson Marquez, George Biddle and others.
In Time We Shall Know Ourselves: Photographs by Raymond Smith
June 12 – September 18, 2016
In the summer of 1974, Raymond Smith drove a Volkswagen Beetle from New England through the South and into the Midwest, camping and photographing people and places along the way to California. The car broke down in Kansas City and Ray Smith took the train home to New Haven, Connecticut, where he printed some of the 750 exposures he had made with his Rolleiflex and Minolta twin-lens cameras. Few of these rare prints have been exhibited or published until now, the fortieth anniversary of Smith’s trip. Hence, the title of this portfolio of 52 black and white prints—In Time We Shall Know Ourselves: American Photographs, 1974.
Smith has acknowledged “the work of Walker Evans, with whom I studied while in the Graduate Program in American Studies at Yale University in 1971-1972, and Robert Frank, whose The Americans (1959) suggested a model for my sequence.” The majority of his photographs are portraits of people encountered in his travels, with additional images of the American vernacular landscape (i.e., highways, street scenes, storefronts, movie theatres) serving as punctuation.
This exhibition was organized by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, and curated by Michael Panhorst.
