Jan Gilbert Art

30 Years / 30 Blocks

May 24, 2012

Please mark your calendars: Saturday, June 9th 6 p.m. – 10 p.m. is the opening reception of my solo exhibition 30 Years / 30 Blocks: a retrospective installation of place and public artworks at The Front gallery in the St. Claude Arts District. This exhibition, and the book accompanying it, is a scrapbook-like album that simultaneously chronicles three decades of public art, amalgamates these works with the current physical presence of The Front, and introduces an upcoming plan for a new series of public pieces to appear on the streets of New Orleans in 2014.

The book of this retrospective installation/exhibition will be available for sale at the gallery and online at e/PRIME Media.

Along with this installation, Babette Beaullieu and I will introduce our Cajun Prayer Flags public art installation in the back/side yard of The Front. Ushering in the 2012 hurricane season, our new hybrid of Cajun Prayer Flags will flutter with deeply textured imagery of Cajun Mardi Gras costumes in Acadiana. Paper and pen will be provided as an interactive component for passers by, encouraging them to join in by offering their personal wishes or prayers and tying them to the fence amidst its dead, clinging vines. This ritual and these devotional offerings are borrowed and blended traditions from Tibetan, Japanese, and Cajun cultures.

I plan to be gallery sitting Saturdays and Sundays 12-5 during the run of the exhibition.

Imprint: Call to Disarm. This installation was installed at our 511 Royal Street studio building in the Quarter as a Prospect.2 Satellite and will remain on view through July 8th, the end of the exhibition at The Front.

February 22, 2012

Our large scale VESTIGES/trinitas installation traveled home from its inaugural showing  in  South Carolina and is included in NOLA NOW Part II: Landscape, Seascape, Cityscape (1986 & 2012) at the Contemporary Arts Center curated by Don Marshall, Executive Director, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation (Founding Executive Director of the CAC).  The exhibition will be on view February 25 – March 25, 2012 with the opening reception from 6-8 pm on February 25, 2012.  Bring this work by 50 artists/writers to a venue near you!

It feels like fall!

October 19, 2011

How exciting. Along with Saints’ games and pumpkin spice, art is in the air.

Trinitas installation at Bryan Gallery, Coastal Carolina University

The summer heat didn’t keep art away though. We simply headed to the cooler climes of Coastal Carolina University’s Rebecca Bryan Gallery to present VESTIGES/trinitas marking the sixth anniversary of the levee breaches in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Detail Trinitas Installation

Image/Text was on view at The Carroll Gallery of Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Department gathering those of us long fascinated by ways that we may wed image and text.

And now, Prospect.2 Biennial will be on view October 20, 2011 – January 29. 2012. I’ve joined with my studio partner, Jana Napoli, again to present a satellite offering, but this time the art is on the facade of our studio building, Borenstein Galleries at 511 Royal Street in the French Quarter, just down the block from the official P.2 Historic New Orleans Collection venue. That means, 24 hour visitation though evening viewing is recommended. My work Imprint: A Call to Disarm, a site-specific installation for the building’s vestibule, springs from the act of daily collecting, in this case a multitude of obituaries of New Orleans gunshot victims, from the days when they put it as a cause of death in the newspaper. It is a public call to acknowledge this senseless loss of lives and to end the violence. Jana’s installation deals with Floodwall, comprised of hundreds of drawers put out for trash that she collected immediately after the Post-Katrina floods from neighborhoods all over New Orleans and assembled into a Maya Lin-like memorial, which has been exhibited internationally and will be burned at the bonfire on the Algiers Levee at 8 p.m. on the evening of December 3.

Mark your calendars to open the new year with RAW curated by Sharon Jacques and Luis Cruz Azaceta at Homespace Gallery in the St. Claude Arts District. SCAD openings are always the second Saturdays of each month.

2011 Five months in

May 28, 2011

My Mom Says My Artwork Has Really Improved at Antenna Gallery is a group exhibition, curated by Natalie McLaurin, that explores the connection between artworks made at different times in an artist’s life. By using childhood work shown next to recent works of art, this exhibition shows how some themes, forms, and content stay with the artist over the course of a lifetime. It includes my bookwork Lots of Love, Helen which is a portrait of my mother, Helen Basilo Gilbert  (February 29, 1920-April 27-2011), along with several scrapbooks I made as a kid.   My mother was a strong creative influence always urging me to make things and allowing me to cut up our encyclopedia and magazines as long as it was to go into a constructive project. At my graduate thesis exhibition, she told John Clemmer, Chairman of the Art Department at Newcomb,  that I “used to be able to draw really well.” May she rest in peace.

Detail of Lots of Love, Helen bookwork

JUST BACK FROM SPRING TRAVELS and presenting (along with long time collaborators Jacques and Monica Arpin and hubby, Kevin McCaffrey):  THE CAJUNS OF LOUISIANA:  The strategies, traditions and techniques of a cultural community in a post-disaster situation in Paris at the 1ST International Conference on Cultural Psychiatry in the French Speaking World, Transcultural Psychiatric Section of the World Psychiatry Association. For a short, collaboratively-produced video we used to introduce the Cajuns and our field work in Acadiana, click here.

Patchworks 2011

SPEAKING OF CAJUN, in his latest documentary  Cajun Food Traditions Now premiering this month on WYES, Kevin surveys the complex traditions and ingredients that make up Cajun cuisine.  We will continue roaming, photographing, talking and tasting Acadiana to document CAJUN SMOKED MEAT STORIES for Kevin’s upcoming book with University of Mississippi Press.

Lundi Gras Boucherie, Mamou

We were able to do some Cajun food history research on our flower-filled drive around the Loire Valley while in residence at Maison Gai Saber in Leigne-sur-Usseau.  To view an album of meditations on place merging French Quarter and Leigne views, click here.

Looking onto village square at Maison Gai Saber

We then moved into a more general  ‘roots research’ when we visited Madrid at our artists’ residency with NoDoor .

NEXT UP, will be participating in the Global Fairness Initiative Weekend Events in late June:  Art of the Americas Auction to be held at the historic Organization of American States building on the national mall and GFI’s launch of BeFair, a new green campaign for farmers in Guatemala.  Click here for auction book and previewing opportunities.

The Rebecca Bryan Gallery at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina has invited The VESTIGES Project to mark the 6th Anniversary of the Katrina floods with an exhibition September 1- October 7, 2011 entitled VESTIGES/TRINITAS. Along with other works that we’ll be showing, will be an installation  (9’ x 18’) VESTIGES/trinitas, conceived and currently being constructed by Debra Howell and me with contributions by 50 artists and writers from far and wide. STAY TUNED!

Website Launch

January 22, 2011

WELCOME  to the launch of my newly revamped website!

A snippet of the past year’s artventures:

THE FIRST QUARTER began in residence at Point B in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My first solo NYC show Sur la ligne/On the Line opened at Sophie Brechu-West’s 571 Projects in Chelsea which included interactions with the adjacent new High Line and gallery visit with the Lower Eastside Girls Club.

Labor's Love, Brooklin, Maine

SUMMERTIME SCENARIOS

After its extended stay at Atlanta’s Buckhead Library, VESTIGES of New Orleans  returned home.  Our HOME, New Orleans? four neighborhood  arts recovery project proudly concluded its year long evaluation and published a report. (download PDF) Please feel free to download it, share our lessons and pass it on.  GO YE THEREFORE,  this year’s HNO? LakeviewS project premiered in Gentilly and later travelled to Atlanta audiences.

Then it was time to beat the NOLA summer heat by stoking fires in Brooklin, Maine. Worked hard with inspiration:  a view of Allen Cove just down from where E.B. White wrote. Then over to Massachusetts: Nantucket, Harvard, Boston and surrounding areas including a visit to The Healing Garden (unique breast cancer facility).

Headed to DC to participate in NEA Access to Excellence Museum panel and saw seeds of great Art to come to all areas of the country.

Artspot's Go Ye Therefore

MOVING INTO FALL

The fifth anniversary of the Katrina flood was marked by VESTIGES’ participation in tributes held in NOLA’s sister cities, at Houston’s DiverseWorks  and Atlanta’s Spruill Gallery.

These travails were topped off with the continued support of Creative Capital and the Louisiana Division of the Arts and that of Stephen King’s Haven Foundation support for the first time!

Brought in the new year Cajun-style heading to Acadiana for the third new year’s holiday in a row:  roaming the Atchafalaya swamp, supporting the seafood industry, and listening to the music all along the way.  Kevin and I and the Arpins were continuing our research missions for projects you’ll be hearing about in the near future.

Atchafalaya New Year's

HUGE THANKS to web designer Taylor Lasseigne, known for his Slicesofamerica.com as well as  the design of websites for artists Angela Driscoll, Mark Grote, Jim Richard, and many others!

Thanks for stopping by!