The wild, ramshackle streets of New Orleans tell a rich story of life, loss, celebration, and change. Winding through her veins-where rambling oak trees drenched in Spanish moss tower over uneven sidewalks-you discover colorful shotgun houses, doorknobs fashioned as skulls, the sweet smell of Southern Satsumas, and an unrestrained year-round celebration of music, culture, and art peppered with plenty of human characters. It's a celebration that has drawn visitors from all over the world and has made New Orleans a hotspot for creative types to live, work, and play. It is also home to two of the most controversial and accessible genres of art: street art and graffiti. The walls-even the ones that are blank or bombed by tags-are drenched in history and stand as witnesses to the city's resilience. They are pages torn from a book about the Crescent City, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot.
This ambitious monograph celebrates the work of James Michalopoulos-New Orleans' most celebrated living artist. The book features a selection of over 500 paintings from the first two decades of the 21st century. His varied subjects include explorations of the human figure, architecture, landscapes, animals, musicians, New Orleans cemeteries, and classic cars. The works are accompanied by the artist's commentary as well as essays by curator Bradley Sumrall and writer Wayne Curtis.
This richly illustrated volume documents in detail the exhibition "New Orleans Music Observed: The Art of Noel Rockmore and Emilie Rhys" at the New Orleans Jazz Museum from January 30, 2020 to September 1, 2021, curated by the museum's own David Kunian and expanded upon in this book by Emilie Rhys (wearing several hats as contributing artist, contributing writer, co-editor, photo editor, layout designer, and publisher). Noel Rockmore, well-known in New Orleans for his mid-1960s oil portraits of Preservation Hall musicians, and his daughter Emilie Rhys, whose artwork of contemporary musicians all around town has gained her recent public notice, are brought together for their first joint exhibition in which a selection of their drawings and paintings is paired with a wide variety of artifacts and historic instruments, culled mostly from the Jazz Museum's incomparable archives. As the curator of this profusely illustrated book, Emilie Rhys not only provides a visual record of the exhibition, she expands upon it through the presentation of significant new material by several Louisiana natives who are close observers of the vibrant cultural life that makes New Orleans a veritable global magnet. They are novelist, journalist, and art collector John Ed Bradley; print and public radio journalist Gwen Thompkins; and scientist and art collector Myles Robichaux. For the lead chapter in this book, Bradley has written the first ever literary exploration of the intertwined lives of Rockmore and Rhys, "Picture in a Picture: Noel Rockmore and Emilie Rhys in New Orleans." In Chapter 3, Robichaux's original essay speaks to the profound impact on him of discovering Rockmore's art in 2002 and meeting Rhys in 2011. For Chapter 4, "Depiction/Being Depicted," Thompkins conducted interviews in 2020 with 14 musicians exploring their interest in visual art, their thoughts about the development of their own image, and how they feel about their image appearing in drawings, paintings, and photographs by visual artists. The book has 368 illustrations including 302 in full color, a large number of which have never been seen in public previously and have been selected by Rhys, many from her extensive personal archives.
"Created to accompany a 2021 exhibition commemorating the centennial of John Clemmer's birth, this catalog includes three essays that offer insight into Clemmer's life and art, as well as full-color plates of numerous works and an exhibition checklist"--
"Enrique Alférez, born in Zacatecas, Mexico, lived nearly the entire twentieth century. After service in the Mexican Revolution as a youth, he emigrated to Texas; studied in Chicago; and, in 1929, first made his way to Louisiana. For almost seventy years, he worked in New Orleans. His lasting imprint is seen among figurative sculptures, monuments, fountains, and architectural details in prominent locations from the Central Business District to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain and beyond. Author Katie Bowler Young has gained unprecedented access to Alférez's personal and family holdings and has crafted a poetic evocation of the life and work of this preeminent artist. Enrique Alférez: Sculptor is the latest entry in the well-received Louisiana Artists Biography series. The book, featuring more than 100 images of Alférez's work in New Orleans and beyond, will be the first in the series to center on sculpture and public art"--
FROM THE INTRODUCTION: Snippets are fragments of things. They are people observed, foods consumed, ornaments spotted: a man on a streetcar, crawfish shells on the sidewalk, an ornate cornstalk-shaped fence. I believe that to immerse oneself in a place means to try and hold all its elements, past and present, grandiose and mundane, in a single plane of vision. This is, of course, impossible. The result is fragments, vignettes. In Jackson Square, for example: a vision of the first French settlers coming up the Mississippi alongside the sight of a garishly painted street performer harassing passers-by. If we cannot hold all facets of a place in our mind at once, I think the next best thing is to honor our fragmented understanding, to see in "Snippets." I learned and re-learned a lot of things making this book. I learned that even in my "home" in Louisiana I feel I am an outsider peering into a window. I re-learned how beautiful and bizarre New Orleans is, how every street has a distinct personality. . . . I re-learned that I know very little about anything, and that the more I learn the more I realize how little I know. I learned that asking for entry into people's personal lives is complicated and requires a lot of mental and ethical somersaults. This book is my most earnest and honest reflection of New Orleans: triumphant and tragic, gaudy and gritty, elegant and ugly, rich and poor, a city that embodies all these and other polar opposites with a perverse kind of grace. My account is flawed and incomplete in the way all our experiences are flawed and incomplete: there are always vistas left to see, flavors left to try, stories left to hear; there are assumptions made, words misunderstood, histories distorted. May this book communicate the New Orleans I know, and may you weave your own New Orleans truth between the pages. - Emma Fick
After losing someone she loved, artist Candy Chang painted the side of an abandoned house in her New Orleans neighborhood with chalkboard paint and stenciled the sentence, "Before I die I want to _____." Within a day of the wall's completion, it was covered in colorful chalk dreams as neighbors stopped and reflected on their lives. Since then, more than four hundred Before I Die walls have been created by people all over the world. This beautiful hardcover book is an inspiring celebration of these walls and the stories behind them. Filled with hope, fear, humor, and heartbreak, Before I Die presents an intimate portrait of the dreams within our communities and a chance to ponder life's ultimate question.
