Art & Justice
Featured
A photoessay featuring the paintings and ceramics of Horton Humble.
Living as we do in trying times, Dean has been pondering poetry’s purposes, as Far Flung, his new poetry collection from Portal’s Press can attest. Throughout the volume he asks and answers the question, what can poetry do for a world that appears to be bleeding out anywhere you look? “This country is collapsing from within, it seems,” he says. “Poetry may be the lie that tells the truth, but what difference does it make?” When I ask him what difference it’s made for him, he dreamily returns to his lifetime of adventures. “A friend of mine in Brazil—he has something like a Brazilian Rick’s Cafe—set up a table where people would come up and I’d write them poetry on the spot,” he says.
As the right hand man of celebrity photographer Greg Gorman, Josh Smith has often traveled to far-flung destinations to coordinate and teach high-end photography workshops. Spending countless nights in the unfamiliar ambiances of hotel rooms, Josh had the idea to document the traces of his humanity in these transient spaces.
If you follow the sound of steady drumbeats and lilting accordion into the Ogden’s third floor gallery, prepare to be dazzled by the Neighborhood Story Project’s exhibit Called to Spirit: Women & Healing Arts in New Orleans. Presented as part of Prospect.5, and on display through January 23rd, curators Rachel Breunlin and Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes have retraced the legacies of our city’s most notable female spiritual leaders—past and present—through their sacred objects, audio recordings, visual art, and archival material. By presenting the unique material culture of New Orleans’ particular form of African-diasporic spiritualism, the exhibit broadens definitions of art into the metaphysical.
Queer poet and legendary Lusher English teacher Brad Richard is a Gulf Coast native, born in Port Arthur and full-fledged New Orleanian since the sixth grade. "I knew I was a writer from a young age," says Richard, "but I went through some other possibilities—like little children who don't that they're queer do. I was going to either be a priest or a jeweler." In junior high, Richard began writing poetry, making a small chapbook with the precocious title Living and Dying, Trying and Failing. "I knew I was a poet pretty exclusively by the end of high school," he says.
When Gwendolyn Midlo Hall published Africans in Colonial Louisiana, her meticulous archival work performed the miracle of retrieving the lost voices of the enslaved Africans who built Louisiana from the ground up, paving the way for slavery historians elsewhere to do the same.
The clash between the old guard and its challengers is especially intense in the magistrate judge’s race, which has seen Flip the Bench candidate Steve Singer go head to head over bail with the more traditional former ATC commissioner Juana Lombard.
“I’m here to look into the Portrait of Betsy,” I told the woman behind the frontdesk. She placed her hand on her heart and exhaled, “Oh, the story of that painting is such a tragedy.”
Michel’s work has a keen ability to imprint you with something beyond an understanding of what’s at stake or has already been lost on our coast; she’s tapped into a deeper current.
The McKenna Museum, by collecting the works of African-American artists throughout history under one roof, demonstrates that they form a distinct and ongoing lineage—a singular canon of black art driven by diverse experiences and visions.
I like for art to have a broad appeal-art for the people. I want it to be real. I want it on the down low.
That dream come directly from God. God knows what you need, and God helps those who try to help themselves. He sent me to New Orleans.
From his days organizing with the Black Panther Party in the Desire Projects, to co-founding the Common Ground Collective, Malik’s brilliance as a community organizer lies in the simplicity of his model: gather any and all available resources, do the necessary work no matter how unglamorous it may be, and honor and protect one another like your life depends on it.
For Douglas Bourgeois, art is something everyone can know; it belongs to anyone with an eye for the spectacular. “Art is an open secret,” as he puts it, though it must be said that no one tells the secret quite like he does.
He meticulously chronicled the New Orleans underworld for decades before Katrina hit and destroyed much of his studio and countless works of original art. Though he has relocated to higher ground in New Mexico for the time being, he remains a devoted reveler and supernumerary in the mad opera of New Orleans.
I’m here to be a part of this fresh new century. And every artist, everyone who is working a profession can claim this century as their own. We have a part in our history, for the type of work that we are going to be remembered for. That’s how I see it.
Making a living as an artist is hard work. While it remains a dream for many, the pressures of a rapidly increasing cost of living here in New Orleans is turning that dream into a difficult hustle.