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Archive: "Queens and Archetypes," New Orleans Art Review, Spring 2018

 https://www.noareview.org/uploads/4/3/5/8/43585085/noar-spring-2018-lay.pdf “A Queen Within – Adorned Archetypes” New Orleans Museum of Art Kathy Rodriguez               “ A Queen Within began with the idea that the queen, as an archetype and historical feminine construct, symbolizes tradition yet possesses the creative freedom to redefine the rules established by a patriarchal system,” states Kelly Peck in the foreword to the catalog for this show. Just upstairs from the first-floor gallery that houses dazzling fashion within complex set designs, one can peer at such a queen from across the mezzanine. New Orleans Museum of Art’s jewel of the permanent collection, Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun’s portrait of Marie Antoinette, gazes back at the viewer in splendor.               The portrait is notable for its Neoclassical elements, such as its rectilinear composition punctuated by the triangular form of the subject matter.   By description, this portrait fulfilled
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Archive: Redheaded Stepchild, NOLA Defender 2011

  Redheaded Stepchild Kathy Rodriguez   In 1648, Charles LeBrun, artist and advisor to the French monarchy, helped found The Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. In the 1660s, Le Brun had become official painter to the King, Louis XIV, and director of the Academy.   In his morceau de reception , or reception piece, submitted to the Academy in 1686, Le Brun’s student Nicolas de Largilli è rre depicts him like a monarch. Rather than setting the painter in all the lavish accoutr é ments indicative of the excessive riches of the aristocracy, Largilli è rre depicts him surrounded by the trappings of academic training: classical busts, prints, and drawings. In the background, Largilli è rre copies Le Brun’s work from the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, The Conquest of Franche-Comt é . History painting like this, which meant to represent the political and military power of the king, was considered the highest academic art. Le Brun gestures towards it in hi
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Archive: Cortés and Turner

 "Identity and Connection," New Orleans Art Review 2020-21 https://www.noareview.org/uploads/4/3/5/8/43585085/noar-2020-21-looking_back-zz.pdf   “I am.” It’s an ancient, glorious, and difficult mantra. I was struck with it in mind as I walked from Jonathan Ferrara Gallery with two painting students after viewing works by Esperanza Cortés in her solo exhibition “Arrested Symphony,” and “Here and Now” by Meg Turner at the Contemporary Arts Center – a solo show reiterated in a new form in New Orleans from her Master of Fine Arts thesis at Columbia– about conceptions of identity.   The students accompanying me engaged in a variety of friendly banter, getting to know each other in the first two weeks of class, as I drove them back to school. I thought of the awkwardness of learning about someone new (as the practice of being a carpooler always does for me).   That process of creating familiarity and a recognition of another’s identity has a lot to do with establishing sense of
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Archive: Rolón and the Global South, NOAR Spring/Summer 2018

 https://www.noareview.org/uploads/4/3/5/8/43585085/noar-spring-2018-lay.pdf   The third iteration of Prospect.3 – and its last as a biennial – took on curatorial themes of identity and “search” in the work within the exhibit.   The Propeller Group’s The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music – a multi-media installation including video, photography, and sculpture – was especially effective at communicating this theme, as it related to global affinities between New Orleans and South Vietnam. Using the tradition of the jazz funeral as a subject, the artists revealed the stunning similarities between the two cultures.   Within the video and half of the UNO-St. Claude Gallery, morphed instruments served as symbols for a shared space conversed through the language of music, and a transgender performer acted as a guide through the amorphous and liminal area.   Carlos Rolón’s solo exhibition at New Orleans Museum of Art, “Outside/In,” shares similar content.   He explor
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Archive: Brooke Pickett at the CAC, NOLA Defender July 2011

  Brooke Pickett’s 2005 painting, Everybody Wants You to Be Special , lurks around a corner in her exhibition The Center Cannot Hold at the Contemporary Arts Center. The focal point of the piece is a large, brain-shaped field of pink oil paint slicked into thickly textured strokes. That pink is total Philip Guston – the renegade painter who left abstract expressionism to seek truth in then-degenerate figuration. It is bright, fleshy, jarring, delightful and verges on painful.   Earthy browns and yellows offset the bruised violets and deadened grays that further emphasize this area, recalled the muted palette of the Ab-Ex Guston that hangs in New Orleans Museum of Art.   Pickett’s painting is like a memorial to him.   Guston is special. He is somewhat recently regarded with the art-world adulation that he left with his official exit from abstract expressionism in a controversial 1970 show at the Marlborough Galleries in New York.   That show featured abstract figu
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Archive: Grant vs. Lee at Good Children Gallery, NOLA Defender June 2011

    A recently posted Starbucks sign at the corner of St. Claude and Bartholomew streets that promised, “Coming Soon,” was painted over with the word TROUBLE. NOLA Defender recently revealed the sign is a hoax, but it still implies a visceral apocalyptic panic - it heralded the coming of the coffee shop, the harbinger of gentrification, the end of the era.   It also opened a kind of semiotic approach to interpretation.   Even though that sign is false, its presence instigated a dialogue, however anonymous, of how it has meaning. The combination of painted text and sign becomes a single symbol of the fear of potential cultural meaninglessness. But it is also a sign of a battle between a northern power and a South struggling to maintain its identity.     We commemorate the anniversary of the Civil War this year. This interpretation is not meant to slick over the issues that surrounded the war, but to suggest that perhaps at least some of those issues might be perpetu
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Archive: Post-Minimalist Vogel Donation to NOMA, NOLA Defender March 2012

  The documentary Herb and Dorothy , directed by Megumi Sasaki and released in 2008, opens with busy New York streets and quick shots of PaceWildenstein Gallery in Manhattan, a well-known bastion of contemporary art founded in the 1960s. In the next shot, two hunched figures, a man and a woman both in their 70s, emerge toward the street from the back seat of a taxi.   Their backs are then turned toward the camera as they approach the gallery doors, and the man mutters, “Oh, it’s crowded already.” That tinge of aggravation sensed in his tone is really the tremble of excitement.   In the next shot from the interior of the gallery, this man exclaims from his seat amidst crowding figures, “It’s extraordinary!”   The couple is Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, perhaps the greatest collectors of art from the 1960s in the United States.   In the documentary, the Vogels and the artists whose art formed their collection – currently approximated at more than 4,000 works - explain ho
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