At age 50, the Contemporary Arts Center may have a little gray hair at the temples, but it’s still got avant-garde passion in its heart.
The sprawling exhibit, titled "Festival/New/Works," is a celebration of the center’s long history as the home of the new in New Orleans' downtown arts district. It's also a throwback to the annual group shows presented by the CAC in its early days, but with a generation-spanning twist.
The CAC’s resident curator, DiQuan Forcell, selected 15 local artists who’d previously exhibited at the center, and asked them to propose a less-well-established artist whose work somehow reflected their own. Those local artist pairings produce some marvelous harmonies.
When is modern not modern?
For decades, Martin Payton has blended ageless African design and geometric abstraction into rugged, welded steel sculptures. Payton’s rigid, somber constructions, like those in Festival/New/Works remind us that one of the main inspirations for modernism wasn’t modern at all. Picasso, Modigliani, Brancusi and others based some of their aesthetics on age-old non-European pictography.
Payton’s art protégé, Jer’Lisa Devezin, follows the African-modernist impulse and makes it her own in works such as “Cowry,” an austere ceramic sculpture that transforms the natural seashell forms into simple, striking shapes.
Devezin’s free-standing sculpture Muva is made from nothing more than stiff concrete reinforcing rod, yet is seems to spin somewhat disconcertingly, like a Christmas tree in a tornado. Muva is the swirling centerpiece of Festival/New/Works.
Nearby, visitors will find deliberately chaotic, colorful, found-object assemblages by Kerry Punzo, for whom trash heaps are art supply stores. Punzo’s emotional work is a counterpoint to his collaborator Gina Laguna’s wonderfully well-wrought, welded-steel studies of trees, insects and such. Laguna views the world as if Mother Nature were Rosie the Riveter.
Latin flavor
Meanwhile in a back room, agitated angst has come to a boil. Eyeballs bulge with terror, apartment buildings are bombed, smiling skeletons shoot craps, and barbed wire spirals around magnolia blossoms in colorful canvases by Luis Cruz Azaceta and Angel Perdomo.
Since the 1990s, Cuban-born Luis Cruz Azaceta has been a star of the Crescent City art scene, known for his unique blend of buoyant geometric abstraction with existential expressionism. Imagine a combo of Mondrian and Munch with an anti-authoritarian political punch.
Perdomo, who was born in Honduras and grew up in Metairie, is almost a half-century younger than Azaceta, but he has a similar social consciousness. His soft-focus, Rosenquistish pop style is the yin to the Azaceta’s yang.
Perdomo’s fabulously funny painting of a bloody mary cocktail run amok — a witty commentary on New Orleans-style excess, perhaps — is one of the many Easter eggs scattered throughout the exhibition.
Punk nostalgia
At one juncture of the exhibition, visitors will be transported to what seems to be a 1980s-style punk rock boutique, a temple of loud music, erotica and general anti-establishmentarianism.
The grimy entrance is occluded with a collage of posters and graffiti. Inside, there’s a kiosk displaying a selection of subversive magazines, with lurid covers and titles like “Goon” and “Public Freakout.”
A makeshift clothes rack displays T-shirts and canvas tote bags emblazoned with nihilistic images like dead cockroaches and handguns.
The authentic punk shop facsimile has been meticulously constructed by New Orleans’ pop art maestro Skylar Fein and stocked with screen-printed T-shirts and other outré fashion accessories created by his art colleague, Jake R. Swanson. The installation is a sentimental masterpiece based on a decidedly unsentimental era.
Splintery history
Dillard University professor John Barnes’ wooden sculptures are another high point of Festival/New/Works. Two of the creations are rough-hewn renderings of the female anatomy.
One, titled “Ishtar,” is a characteristically buxom version of a mythological Mesopotamian goddess of love and war. The other, titled “Standing Baartman with BBL,” is a reference to an historical figure Sarah Baartman, an African woman, who was cruelly exhibited in 18th-century England as a sideshow-style human curiosity.
Baartman was apparently advertised as both a “Venus” and a “missing link,” because of her unfamiliar appearance. The abbreviation in the title of the artwork is a bitterly wry reference to the current Brazilian butt lift surgery craze.
In both cases, Professor Barnes seems to ask us to consider how female anatomy is used and, frequently, misused in popular culture across the ages.
Beside the two womanly figures hang wooden reproductions of rib-eye steaks, each 5 feet tall. The drippingly red pieces of meat are marked here and there with various, intriguing words and phrases, such as “desperate,” “collateral” and “permafrost.”
Perfectly understanding the meaning behind Barnes’ “Beef” and “Beef 2” isn’t required. Nor is it necessary to know if the wooden rib-eyes have any relation to the wooden female bodies. It’s enough to consider the possibilities.
Barnes’ contribution to Festival/New/Works could be a knockout solo exhibit in its own right. His protégé Myron Solomon Jr.’s wall sculptures are subtle gray shapes that bring to mind anything from ocean waves to tangled silk bed sheets. They deserve contemplation, though their visual quietude can be lost beside the professor’s much more aggressive work.
Artistic heredity
Visitors will discover several more inspired, generation-spanning pairings in the exhibition. Forcell said that he hopes the show demonstrates that, even in the somewhat isolating age of the cellphone, “artists aren't creating works in a silo or bubble.”
As in earlier times, “the younger generations are influenced by the older generations.” And the CAC has certainly been a locus of that artistic inheritance.
Festival/New/Works is the sort of Crescent City fine art feast that the Contemporary Arts Center has been serving up for a half-century now.
The CAC is located at 900 Camp St. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, closed Tuesday.