Ogden Museum of Southern Art first launched Louisiana Contemporary, presented by The Helis Foundation in 2012, to establish a vehicle that would bring to the fore the work of artists living in Louisiana and highlight the dynamism of art practice throughout the state. Since the inaugural exhibition thirteen years ago, Ogden Museum has shown works by over 560 artists, making Louisiana Contemporary an important moment in the national arts calendar to recognize and experience the spectrum and vitality of artistic voices emanating from New Orleans and in art communities across Louisiana.

This statewide, juried exhibition promotes the contemporary art practices in the state of Louisiana, provides an exhibition space for the exposition of living artists’ work and engages a contemporary audience that recognizes the vibrant visual arts culture of Louisiana and the role of New Orleans as a rising, international art center.

This year’s juror, Lauren Haynes, Head Curator, Governors Island Arts and Vice President for Arts and Culture at the Trust for Governors Island, has selected 41 works by 37 artists from over one-thousand submissions.

Presenting Sponsor: The Helis Foundation

Host CommitteeKaye Courington
Alison Hartman
Eclectic Home
Jan W. Katz & Jim Derbes
Jackson & Donna Little
Dr. and Mrs. Don Norris
Roger H. Ogden & Ken Barnes
Erica J. Washington
Richard Wilkof

Contributor: Debra J. Fischman

Presented by The New Orleans (LA) Chapter of The Links, IncorporatedAlanni Martin (DU),

Featuring artwork by students attending Dillard University and Xavier University of Louisiana

Eleven years ago, Ogden Museum of Southern Art and The New Orleans Chapter of The Links, Incorporated formed a partnership with the goal of presenting an exhibition that would spotlight works of art created by students attending Louisiana’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and provide an opportunity to celebrate those artists. Since then, the HBCU Art Showcase has been presented annually in the Museum’s Education Gallery, a space designated to honor the teaching of art and works created by students in the Southern region of the United States. To date, over 125 HBCU artists from Louisiana’s five HBCUs have participated in the annual showcase.

A fundamental objective of Ogden Museum is to create programs that explore the diversity of backgrounds, experiences and ideas that artists and viewers bring to the museum experience. To this end, the Museum’s Learning and Engagement Department seeks to present a variety of perspectives and points of view to broaden and enrich our understanding of the world. Ogden Museum is proud to provide a platform for young students of color to share their voice and offer commentary on the impactful times in which we all live.

Ogden Museum applauds The New Orleans Chapter of The Links, Incorporated for their continued support of this exhibition. Many thanks are also extended to John Barnes of Dillard University, and Ron Bechet and MaPo Kinnord of Xavier University for their enthusiastic assistance with the organization and presentation of this exhibition.

Finally, gratitude is extended to the students for their hard work and artistic vision. The HBCU Art Showcase has become a highlight in Ogden Museum’s exhibition calendar and an important component in the advancement towards racial equity.

When one thinks of American landscape photography, the first region of the country that comes to mind is usually the West. The iconic photographs made in the late 19th century by Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins, captured the majestic views of the West’s endless wide-open expanses and formed the visualization of manifest destiny. In the 20th century, America’s most important and famous landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, visually defined the dramatic scenery of Western landscape in art and popular culture through the Half Dome in California’s Yosemite National Park and the moon rise over Hernandez, New Mexico.

Unlike the West, the American South is not well known as a subject of landscape photography. Perhaps, this is due to the Southern landscape not being as visually dramatic or as photogenic as the West. The Appalachian and Ozark mountains of the South are beautiful, but cannot compete visually with the much more rugged and higher peaks of the West’s Rockies, Tetons and Sierra-Nevada mountains. The sandy dunes of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico beaches that ring the South are much more sublime when compared to the roaring waves, rocky beaches and jagged cliffs of the Pacific Ocean.

The landscape in Southern art is much more about the romantic idealization of a place. Place along with time, are the central components of Southern art, music and literature. Within Southern art, place can be actual, imaged or metaphysical. When O’Sullivan and Watkins were documenting the virgin Western landscape, the lands of the American South (east of the Mississippi River) had been almost entirely tamed for hundreds of years through European settlement. The settlement came with European romantic ideas of art and literature. The 18th century European concept of Romanticism in art and literature (which had an emphasis on imagination, idealization and emotion) were first infused into Southern landscape painting and later into photography.

Southland examines the role photographs have played in the visualization of the natural landscape of the American South. The exhibition explores the many technical and aesthetic methods photographers have employed in approaching the subject of the Southern Landscape. Highlighting the marshlands in Louisiana, the beaches of Florida, the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta and the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, the exhibition shows the landscape of the American South is as diverse as the people and culture of the region. Southland not only investigates the topographical physical characteristics of the land of the American South, but the metaphysical and emotional role romanticism plays in the understanding of landscape photographs made of and about the American South.

Supporting Sponsor
Eugenie & Joseph Jones Family Foundation

Host Committee
Sesthasak Boonchai
Claire Elizabeth Gallery
William Dunlap & Linda Burgess
Steven Montgomery & Brian Weatherford
Betsy Nalty & Dick Simmons
Don and Lola Norris
Roger H. Ogden & Ken Barnes
Alan Rothschild
Warwick and Jessica Sabin
Micki Beth Stiller
Donna Vitter
Penny Weaver in honor of Euphus RuthYhrough September 29, 2024

The Contemporary South is an exhibition that brings together thirteen works of art created in the past twenty years by artists working in the American South, encouraging a dynamic conversation between the excitement of recent acquisitions and the familiarity of permanent collection highlights. Emerging artistic expressions across a variety of mediums and techniques are included alongside artworks by mid-career and established artists.

This selection of works from the permanent collection of Ogden Museum of Southern Art (some on view for the first time) considers the many ways artists throughout the region explore process, place and identity through their creative practices. Contemporary experiences of place and identity in the American South are myriad, situational and decidedly in flux. Whether examining the past, critiquing the present or looking to the future – these 21st century artists bring unique approaches and contemporary goals to the dialogue around Southern art and culture.
Presented by The New Orleans (LA) Chapter of The Links, IncorporatedAlanni Martin (DU),

The art of the American South has never existed in a vacuum. It has – since the earliest moments of the American experience – run concurrent with dominant academic art movements and popular trends, while maintaining a distinct regional identity. This exhibition traces the development of Southern Art through examples by leading figures working in the visual language of abstraction.

In the early 1940s, American Art took a new direction thanks to the innovation of loosely affiliated group of artists in New York City – the group of artist we now call the Abstract Expressionists, also known as the New York School. During and in the wake of World War II, as the US was forging a new direction for American life, these artists working in the language of abstraction were the vanguard of a new direction in art, a uniquely American style of art that would shift the avant-garde dialogue away from Europe. Through formal innovation and a focus on surface and process, this new style escaped adherence to realistic depictions of the outer world, seeking instead to convey the artist’s inner world. In the spirit of American individualism, these artists sought to create as a pure expression of self.

Abstract Expressionism was heavily influenced by another uniquely American musical form that had arisen from New Orleans a generation before – Jazz. These painters embraced Jazz as a guide to creation through improvisation, lyricism and spontaneity. Perhaps most importantly, these artists sought to reinvent the world with their paintings. Many had suffered through the Great Depression and witnessed the horrors of World War II. This new direction in art sought to explore the human psyche in pursuit of essential truth and to create a new direction in American culture, as well. Theirs was a mission of rebirth, innovation and hope.

The artists of the New York School came from diverse places. Some were Europeans seeking refuge from war. Some came from the Midwest, seeking work in the wake of the Great Depression. Some were native New Yorkers. Of course, there were Southerners involved from the beginning of the movement. New Orleans’ Fritz Bultman was a major figure in the first generation of AbEx artists. He studied under influential German-born American painter, Hans Hofmann, and was a member of the Irascibles, a group of artists who penned an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, condemning the institution for ignoring a new American art movement. Another New Orleans artist, Ida Kohlmeyer, also made her way to the circle of Hans Hofmann. In New York, Hofmann persuaded Kohlmeyer to abandon realism in favor of abstraction. Kohlmeyer also met Mark Rothko, a leading figure in the New York School who was teaching in New Orleans, and whose influence would help move her work toward something wholly original in the history of American abstraction. Rothko also befriended and influenced New Orleans painter, Kendall Shaw. Shaw studied under Rothko during Rothko’s tenure as visiting instructor at Tulane University. Returning to New York, Shaw established himself first as an AbEx painter, then a founding member of the Pattern & Decoration movement. Mississippi’s Dusti Bongé had the rare privilege of being a part of the New York School, while living and working on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Beginning in 1939, Bongé showed her work regularly in New York City, most importantly at Betty Parsons Gallery, whose pioneering roster included some of the leading figures of the movement. Other artists from the South who participated in the New York School include Beauford Delaney from Tennessee, Jack Stewart from Georgia and Merton Simpson from South Carolina, among others.

Initially, the American South was less than receptive to the new movement of American art toward abstraction. But as Southern artists gained more access to education, both at home and afield, through the G.I. Bill, they were exposed to and trained in the dominant contemporary style of painting. Returning home, they brought more acceptance for abstract art to the South. Expanded funding for education by the federal government in the 1950s and 60s also played a role, bringing artists from Northern industrial cities into Southern art programs. Melville Price was one of the youngest of the first generation Abstract Expressionist circle of painters before moving to Tuscaloosa to teach at the University of Alabama. Tulane University’s art department – led by New Yorker Pat Trivigno – established an active visiting professor program, bringing established artists including Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still to New Orleans. Seymour Fogel – a leading figure in the New York scene and apprentice to Diego Rivera — moved to Austin, Texas in 1946 for a teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin. Thereafter, that University took the lead in the development of a Texas Modernist movement. As abstraction took foothold in the academic setting, appreciation for the style grew in the popular mind across the South. As new voices arrived in the South, others left for the larger Northern cities. Some artists stayed in the South, though, forging their own path. Three such artists were Bess Dawson, Ruth Atkinson Holmes and Halcyone Barnes. These women embraced abstraction in their studio practice beginning in 1951 in rural Summit, Mississippi. Showing together for the next three decades as The Summit Group, these rural artists exhibited in major museums across the Gulf South.

The dialogue of American Art is never stagnant, and while abstraction dominated the conversation for decades, it began to evolve in new directions. Abstract Expressionism led the way for a myriad of new movements including Post-Painterly Abstraction, Minimalism, Pattern & Decoration and Lyrical Abstraction, among others. Artists from the American South were involved with each evolution. Beginning in the 1950s, a group of mostly Southern artists in Washington, D.C., including Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, established the Washington Color School of painters, a group that was central to the larger Color Field movement in American Art. Eugene Martin developed his practice in this scene before relocating to Lafayette, Louisiana. Perhaps no other artist of the Washington Color School was more influential than Mississippi-born Sam Gilliam. Arising as a great innovator, his large unstretched Drape paintings not only challenged the traditions of his medium, but also the very spaces in which they were seen.

In the past few decades, abstraction has ceded ground to more figurative art in the contemporary dialogue. Yet abstraction is still very much alive, and relevant, as is evident in this exhibition. Artists such as John T. Scott, Ed McGowin, Clyde Connell and George Dunbar engaged in significant material exploration and meditations on regional identity with their work from the second half of the 20th century. Contemporary artists such as Shawne Major, Kevin Cole, John Barnes, William Monaghan and Sherry Owens continue to push conversation around abstraction into new territory with their work.

From early innovators in oil to the contemporary vanguard of material exploration, this exhibition traces Southern abstract artists’ impact upon a critically important movement – widely considered to be America’s most significant contribution to art history. By including both 20th century and contemporary artists, academically trained and self-taught – this exhibition considers the legacy of Modernism in the American South.

Bradley Sumrall
Curator of the Collection
ARTISTS FEATURED: (32)