On Saturday, November 3, the Contemporary Arts Center will be opening their 2018 Fall Multi-Artist Visual Arts exhibition showcasing the exploration of labor in a post-industrial society. The exhibit will give a look into the history of labor, tools, and community portraits of New Orleans dating all the way back to the 1970s. The event is free to the public and will be held at the Contemporary Arts Center, 900 Camp Street, from 7 pm to 9 pm featuring live music, a food truck and cash bars.
The featured New Orleans native artists are pieced together to merge art as an instrument for social documentation and activism. The following list the artists, their exhibit title and their contribution to this call to activism through exploring labor in a post-industrial society:
Zarouhie Abdalian: Production
Zarouhie Abdalian exhibition is a display of sound, sculpture & site-specific installation. Her work focuses on the historical and subjective condition of human labor. Her exhibit will be a mix of existing work and new pieces as well as a feature-length film series by Zarouhie Abdalian. It will also include films by Allan Sekula, Flora M’mbugu-Schelling, Harun Farocki, Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, Kevin Jerome Everson, Loreley Unamuno, & Malena Bystrowicz. Her exhibition will also feature 2 additional parts both of which take place at the CAC during the monthly Second Thursday’s event. One is a panel discussion on Thursday, November 8th, 2018 from 6-9pm and the second is an evening performance directed by Zarouhie Abdalian and Joseph Rosensweig Thursday, January 10th, 2019.
Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick: Labor Studies
Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick exhibition is a display of documentary style photography that is forty years old from two individuals living and working in the ninth ward. Their photographs contain the last sugar cane and sweet potato harvesters, unionized dockworkers, musician day laborers, hospitality & restaurant workers and the inmates of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola which has one of the largest workforces in Louisiana. This will be the first exhibition that presents a comprehensive study of the history and present state of the city’s changing labor force.
William Monaghan: I - Object
William Monaghan exhibition will be his first display in forty years which will include art from the 1970s, 1980s and a large body of work from his last three years of production in New Orleans. His early work deals with steel and canvas mounted and exposed to rain and the elements exposing viewers to chemical reactions, oxidization and evaporation causing rust of red hues. His latest work centers around an industrial scrap yard. Composed of remaindered and unwanted detritus. He’s put together affixed and painted canvases estranging the perceptions of depth, space, and the relationship of the viewer to histories and function of commonplace objects. As a whole, his pieces act as portraits of a contemporary post-industrial economy and the aestheticized remains of a foregone day.
For Freedom’s 50 State Initiative
The CAC will also participate in For Freedom’s 50 State Initiative which will feature 2 site-specific art installation billboards with the help of Lamar Advertising by the artist William Monaghan and Keith Calhoun. William Monaghan, Stripes and Stars, 1973. Steel aluminum clothing paint on wood panel, 48" x 72" at Earhart Expressway and Airline Drive in Metairie, LA and Keith Calhoun’s Foundation, Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina(New Orleans), 2005 at Elysian Fields and Exit 237 in the St. Roch neighborhood of New Orleans.
For Freedom 50 state Initiative is a non-partisan, nationwide campaign to use art as a means of inspiring civic participation in advance of the 2018 midterm elections. It was founded by artists in 2016 as a platform for civic engagement, discourse, and direct action in the United States. Inspired by Norman Rockwell’s 1943 paintings of the four universal freedoms articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—For Freedoms uses art to deepen public discussions of civic issues and core values, and to clarify that citizenship in American society is dependent on participation, not ideology.
The CAC's 2018 Fall Exhibitions are supported by the Azby Fund, Sydney & Walda Besthoff, The Helis Foundation, Kaitlyn & Mike Krieger, the John T. Scott Guild, Lamar Advertisingand the Visual Arts Exhibition Fund. Performance support is provided by Kaitlyn & Mike Krieger the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works and a Community Arts Grant made possible by the City of New Orleans and administered by the Arts Council New Orleans, as well as by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council.
Zarouhie Abdalian, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, & William Monaghan exhibits will run from Saturday, November 3, 2018 to February 10, 2019 during regular CAC hours Wednesday-Monday 11am-5pm. More information of the exhibitions or about the CAC visit their website.