Above: Les Origines by Odilon Redon & Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds, by Martin Johnson Heade, from Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts at Yale University. Read All About It:
Lisa Yuskavage: A Lecture
It can be argued that there are really two kinds of history. The first, written by journalists and historians, appears in books recounting the events that shaped our view of the world. The second, by artists, reveals how the world looked and felt at those times. Perhaps because this nation dominated the latter-century art world, the American art from the first half of the 20th century has been overshadowed. A time profoundly shaped by world wars and the Great Depression, that America could seem remote—until recently. Now that bank failures and vanished fortunes are making the era of Hoover and FDR seem familiar once again, much of this Recording of America expo of 60 works on paper from the Herbert D. Halpern collection, can seem eerily resonant.
Of course, Manhattan always had its bright lights. In 2 A.M Saturday Night by Martin Lewis, it is 1932 and three post-flapper women are crossing Broadway as a street cleaner hoses it down, and while nothing much is happening, the buoyancy of the women amid the gloom of the street conveys a sense of the times. Less sanguine is Claire Leighton’s contemporaneous Bread Line, New York, a stark view of an endless queue of men huddled against the cold under jagged skyscrapers.
Derelict Banana Men, New Orleans, pictured, a view of ragged workers hauling produce in a scene that recalls some of Goya’s darker ruminations. Howard Cook’s stark Southern Pioneers etching of an Arkansas couple hints at Grant Wood and the great WPA photographers, but Raphael Soyer takes us back to Manhattan in his evocative, circa 1936, Dancers Resting litho, top, where the subjects are urbane, but the feel is no less austere, harking to Edward Hopper’s silences amid the cacophony. Here legendary artists such as Reginald Marsh, John Steuart Curry, George Bellows, John Sloan and Mable Dwight, among others, captured the spirit of their time no less than Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg decades later. –D. Eric BookhardtThrough March 26
Diboll Art Gallery, Loyola University, 861-5456; www.loyno.edu/dibollgallery
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Like Charles Saatchi in London, the Mugrabi's in New York buy and sell art like commodity traders trying to control the market in Warhols, Basquiats and Hirsts--a morbidly fascinating account of how the big time art market really works. Read it Here:
More photos: http://insidenola.blogspot.com/2009/02/societe-de-ste-anne-mardi-gras-2009.html
Near the intersection of St. Mary Street and Sophie Wright Place are two of Uptown's main photographic venues, the Darkroom and the New Orleans Photo Alliance Gallery. Both feature similarly obsessive and shadowy subject matter: pool halls and desire.
JackieBrenner's Friday Night at the Palace pool-hall series hints at her better-known stripper studies. Featuring stark, black-and-white views executed in a style somewhere between film noir and social work, it suggests how gracefully dancer-like pool players can be. 
But where her strippers' inner lives were revealed in close-ups of personal detail, here the pool-player psyche appears in the facial expressions and body language of competitors armed with pool cues. So we are left with a sense of the game as chess for contortionists, as we see in an image of a player attempting a tricky behind the back shot.
Some of the most interesting images feature a sort of blatant ambiguity: Andrea Caldwell's cute girl sipping wine as the Iraq war unwinds on TV, or Catherine Gommersall's photo of a young woman having a meaningful relationship with a stuffed fox in a room that might make Waters green with envy.
In Skeletor and Venus, a nude Creole Venus appears in a colorfully shabby kitchen where a Skeletor-like robot is about to raid her refrigerator. Both seem oblivious to ankle-deep flooding and a Leda-like swan paddling beneath the depression-era kitchen table in a scene that is provincial yet sweeping in its psychic and mythic overtones.
His painted collages and woodcuts extend those themes more abstractly, yet it is his lovingly painted school yearbook portraits that somehow meld the parochial and the universal in Bourgeois’ unique blend of down-home alchemy.
conceptual artwork, is based upon his book The Space Bunny which he wrote in 1978 while in the second grade. Boyd rewrote the book in 1988 when he was in high school, at which time he had dreams of being an animator. It is intended to represent the third piece of 'chamber music' and consists of a wall of water-colors, a wall of photographs, a free standing sculpture and a timeline documenting the artist’s history of incorporating a rabbit throughout his work." Cartoon content by Bunny Matthews was featured in the original version of the installation.
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Nicole Charbonnet's paintings don't always look like paintings as we know them. Densely textured and layered with chalky washes and translucent paper, her deceptively simple images evoke faded wallpaper or painted, sun-bleached signs on the sides of old buildings. Iconic renderings of zebras, wolves, flowers, dots, stripes or even Wonder Woman come across as ghostly afterimages that suggest partial recollections from the dim recesses of memory. Details are lost in much the way memories fade over time. Alternating between clearly rendered lines and partial obscurity allows the images to breathe and creates spaces that invite the viewer into the work in an exploration of subconscious, often poetic, associations. Charbonnet says: "Remembering furnishes a vantage point. ... Scavenging and interpreting the past opens a gateway into the future." — D. Eric Bookhardt
Through February
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Michelle Levine's Signs of the Times series of 40 realistic oil paintings of storm-ravaged McDonald's Golden Arches in various stages of disrepair resonates on several different levels. Initially painted in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as a way of creatively coping with the chaos, Levine's works, such as Severn at West Esplanade (pictured), have assumed additional layers of meaning. These days, blighted and abandoned properties reflect not just post-K New Orleans but also the state of the nation in the wake of the housing and financial collapse — proof killer storms can be economic as well as meteorological. — D. Eric Bookhardt
SIGNS OF THE TIMES: Forty Paintings by Michelle Levine
Through Feb. 18
AMMO, 938 Royal St., 220-9077; www.ammoarts.com
