(May 18, print edition, T-P) Apologies if this column seems like a written version of a collage, but please give it a chance to cohere.
When earlier this spring I wrote that musicians and restaurateurs are two groups that, more than any other, define Louisiana for the world, a friend suggested I also look into our “[visual] art scene and its international impact.” The friend was right about the thriving art scene — but as I looked into that, it led to another potential story, and then others, ranging from art to Katrina recovery to neighborhood revitalization to an industrial controversy and back to food and music.
So, just about everything I will mention deserves a story of its own, but the resulting weave of all the elements creates a paean to the astonishing vibrancy of Louisiana’s socio-cultural landscape. This place is a miracle.
I’ll start with the Ferrara Showman Gallery on Julia Street. The international scope of its programs in the past 27 years was a revelation to me. The background of founder Jonathan Ferrara — the fascinating struggles and risks he embraced to create today’s thriving gallery — is itself worth a major feature story, as is the peripatetic journey of gallery co-owner Matthew Showman.
The gallery’s immediate interest, though, is in kicking off what surely will be a statewide spate of 20th anniversary remembrances of Hurricane Katrina. The gallery’s Katrina remembrance comes in two parts.
One of its current featured exhibitions, through May 31, is of works by mixed-media artist Gina Phillips, who came to New Orleans in the 1990s by way of Kentucky….
… In the very week her new exhibit opened at Ferrara Showman, she featured prominently in a very large story in the London-based Guardian by New Orleans essayist Jason Berry. Berry’s thesis begins with an assertion that the Lower Ninth has become an arts-centered “renaissance district” post-Katrina, with Phillips as one of its guiding lights. That renaissance, Berry posits, is now at risk because of a major grain terminal being built nearby.
Well, the grain terminal is a subject for another day; but when I asked Phillips about Berry’s depiction of a vibrantly artistic community, she agreed but noted that both sides of the Industrial Canal, including the Bywater district opposite her Holy Cross neighborhood, are flourishing…. [The full column is at this link.]
