If you are a fan of Vincent van Gogh, Edward Hopper, Salvador Dalí or Sandro Botticelli, you certainly will take to Pineville artist Matt Dawson’s faintly familiar interpretations of these masters with his own visual twists and humor. Dawson, a…
A gilded sunrise, a field of poppies, a mean inner-city street or perhaps an artist’s painting — visual artists and poets respond to images that free our imaginations to see the world and “human spirit”…
West Monroe artist Donna McGee looks to the works of earlier artists such as Vincent Van Gogh for their use of bright colors and their “unique vision” and to environmentalists, conservationists and poets for their love of nature. But most…
Bossier City artist Joshua Chambers is a painter, storyteller, philosopher, teacher, theater set designer and former museum curator who was once described as “elusive and happily odd.” That description,…
The Louisiana landscape, nature, dreams, the female body, the moon and the “archetypal stories and mythologies” that passed through time are spiritual and metaphysical forces that give expression to Lafayette artist and filmmaker Cayla Zeek’s art. At first glance, her…
Art, to Ponchatoula artist, teacher and writer Kim Howes Zabbia, is about freedom, control, creativity, fear. Her paintings and sculptures express the intuitive exploration of her own subconscious as it responds to her surroundings and…
Slidell artist Solange Ledwith gave her gallery an unusual name. It’s called Swamp Girl Glass. She didn’t grow up in a Louisiana swamp, though her house in Slidell does back up to nearby Bayou Bonfouca. After a long nomadic life…
“Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” This snarky line from a 1905 play by George Bernard Shaw certainly doesn’t apply to artist Nicole Duet, an award-winning painter and long-time art professor at Louisiana…
Odd how things happen. The 51-year-old Schmidt, a lifetime resident of Chalmette, is a relative newcomer to the full-time “art for art’s sake” world. For almost 30 years, she enjoyed a successful career…
The law, scraps of metal, bits of used lumber, fragments of blown-out truck tires found alongside highways and a free-flowing imagination all in a way describe the life and work of Shreveport artist Julie Glass. Taking inspiration from her everyday…
People often travel the world looking for meaning and inspiration. St. Charles Parish artist Nonney Oddlokken found that inspiration at home in the marshes and culture of South Louisiana. It was an awakening for her. The 60-year-old New Orleans native…
“I paint and draw stuff.” It’s quite an understatement, but that’s how Central Louisiana artist Elizabeth P. Morgan describes her growing and successful art career. She has come a long way since her grandfather gave her a set of watercolors…
Novelist Thomas Wolfe once wrote, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Well, that didn’t discourage Monroe artist Jay Davis who returned to his North Louisiana hometown after a long and successful career as an artist and animator that has taken him…
In these days of political and social unrest, foreign wars, and a general sense of angst, Elayne Kuehler’s art transports viewers above the malaise into a more peaceful world. Whether she is painting tranquil scenes from the Louisiana landscape or…
Except perhaps for Rio de Janeiro, there’s nothing like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It’s a visual orgy of brightly-colored floats drawn through city streets in the fiery glow of…
A visit to Shannon Landis Hansen’s studio, a block from Lake Pontchartrain in Mandeville, is a journey through an artist’s imagination, an imagination driven by the lives of inanimate objects as they pass…
As long as Louisiana keeps producing world-class athletes, Chris Brown has a job, and what a job it is. He is the portrait artist to stars — Louisiana sports stars, that is. Since…
The 19th-century American artist James McNeill Whistler once wrote, “Nature sings her exquisite song to the artist alone.” Today, however, a growing number of passionate young Louisiana artists are hearing not nature’s “exquisite” song but one of ecological distress in…
A statement by the internationally acclaimed documentary photographer Carol Highsmith sets the tone for Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s recent four-hour TV documentary and Highsmith’s companion book exploring the people, towns, cities, customs and landscape across Louisiana today: "There are a…
Commemorative statues are everywhere in Louisiana. We have them for soldiers, explorers, musicians, sports figures, politicians and saintly people. Now, New Orleans has a new monument that celebrates the work of the nationally acclaimed New Orleans artist John Scott…
Each year, we comb the state in search of Louisianians who stand out in their professions, give back and represent what’s best about the Pelican State. From teachers and artists to culinary pros and conservationists, these are the individuals enhancing…
Art & Culture Occupation: Artist - Hometown: Terrebonne Parish Janie Verret Luster Art can convey an emotion, perhaps tell a story or simply respond to the beauty of nature. To Janie Verret Luster, teacher, healer, practitioner of tribal ways and…
Select photos by John Dupre Have you seen those two gigantic bees painted on the side of a small building on the corner of Karlstein and River Road near Vacherie? RISE St. James, a faith-based advocacy group based in…
For over six decades, Monroe artist Don Cincone has been on a remarkable journey that has taken him from a sharecropper’s cabin in Richland Parish to San Francisco, New York’s fashion district, movie sets in Hollywood, down to Mexico…
With assimilation and time many of Louisiana’s Native American folkways faded into history. Handmade tribal crafts gave way to mass-produced items purchased at local box stores. But somewhere deep in the DNA of tribal members, the old ways remain…
The ancients believed birds were messengers of the gods linking humans to the supernatural world. Baton Rouge artist Mary Lee Eggart’s colorful drawings of various birds represent her deep spirituality, faith and love of nature. More recently, however, her…
Are science and art really that much different? Not to New Orleans artist and environmentalist Pippin Frisbie-Calder. Like many artists — including Leonardo da Vinci — who draw no distinction between art and science, Frisbie-Calder sees science as an…
With dark memories of Hurricane Katrina still fresh in his mind, New Orleans artist Phil Sandusky packed up his brushes, paints and easel and headed out late last August into his Uptown New Orleans neighborhood to capture the…
Louisianians are a diverse bunch, but we have a few common traits. For example, many Louisianians, no matter how close we are to our family, have an independent streak. Strength and persistence also come to mind when you consider people…
Monroe artist Vitus Shell is a remarkable artist who explores the African-American experience through strong, compelling and often unsettling images of Black contemporary life in America. It is art driven by irony, activism and his notion of Black “coolness.” Monroe…
Photos by Ryan Hodgeson-Rigsbee The Rex Organization’s motto, “Pro Bono Publico,” has special meaning to New Orleans Mardi Gras float designer and painter Caroline Thomas.…
A visit to Paulo Dufour’s studio on Narrow Road in a wooded countryside north of Covington in St. Tammany Parish is like a walk through Tennessee Williams’ “Glass Menagerie,” a dreamlike place filled…
Kaori Maeyama creates paintings based on blurred images snapped on her cell phone while driving through the streets of New Orleans. Is there music without sound? One only has to look at the paintings…
Shutdowns, quarantines, masks, vaccines, hope. While Louisianians and the world deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, artist Kathryn Keller is in the right place — the peace and solitude of her…
→ For more information, visit jsdart.com New Orleans photographer, writer and freelance journalist Julie Dermansky is on a worldwide journey and mission to capture images of social…
Artist Christiane Drieling is on an artistic and life-searching journey that has taken her from the dark childhood fairytales of her native Northwest Germany to North Louisiana and the social and spiritual issues facing Americans and the world…
Artist Christiane Drieling is on an artistic and life-searching journey that has taken her from the dark childhood fairytales of her native Northwest Germany to North Louisiana and the social and spiritual issues facing Americans and the world…
New Orleans is a gumbo of people of all different nationalities and races and all those people show a lot of love to each other,” says artist and Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief Demond Melancon. “I’m part of that gumbo.”…
Are you tired of staying home watching the news? Do you need something uplifting? Try art. While COVID-19 has disrupted the schedules of art galleries and museums, Louisiana has…
The celebrated 19th-century American artist James McNeill Whistler once wrote that nature “sings her exquisite song to the artist alone.” Many Louisiana landscape painters believe Whistler’s “exquisite song” is heard best by artists who paint outdoors in the natural landscape.…
Randell Henry of Baton Rouge is a remarkable artist who creates vibrant and often cryptic paintings and collages that reflect an imagination and intellect drawn to the rhythms and cultures of Africa and the African-American experience. …
Louisiana photographer Cate Colvin Sampson, inspired by the writings of Southern novelist Flannery O’Connor, joins a growing chorus of artists and photographers raising warnings about South Louisiana’s endangered wetlands and a way of life for the people who have lived…
The long-neglected and nearly-forgotten “Fountain of the Four Winds” — one of Louisiana’s most spectacular, yet controversial Great Depression-era New Deal works of art located at the New Orleans Lakefront Airport — is at last being restored to its former…
Shreveport photographer Ann George is an artist, a storyteller and a playwright — not in the conventional sense of writing narratives and dialogue, but in composing staged photographic images that appear as still but quiet moments in a story or…
“Lovely the moonlight was as it glanced and gleamed on the water, Gleamed on the columns of cypress and cedar sustaining the arches, Down through whose broken vaults it fell as through chinks in a ruin. Dreamlike, and indistinct, and…
Mention the name Garland Robinette and most Southeast Louisiana residents over a certain age will recall the once wildly popular New Orleans TV news anchor during the 1970s and ‘80s or the no nonsense “Think Tank” radio talk show host…
On an unlikely spot in an older section of Hammond, Louisiana, sits one man’s tribute to the African-American experience. Dr. Charles Smith’s African-American Heritage Museum and Black Veterans Archive is unlike any other museum. It is a personal and spiritual…
Louisianians have heard the alarming reports. Rising sea-levels, saltwater intrusion, land subsidence, canal dredging, hurricanes, invasive animal species and man-made levees are destroying Louisiana’s coastal wetlands at a rate of up to 35 square miles a year, an average of…
The South Louisiana landscape is filled with mythical symbols of the people and cultures that have struggled to survive in an increasingly industrial world that has swept across the state over the last century. Baton Rouge artist Jonathan Mayers, alias…
The Louisiana landscape is an irresistible story. Its shadowy bayous and sugarcane fields are mood-setting backdrops for novelists, photographers and artists who sit for hours with palettes, paints and canvases to capture those moments when warm sunlight haloes over and…
