Star Player
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…
Author: John R. Kemp
Repurposing with a Purpose
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…
Louisiana Love
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…
Abstract Narrative
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…
Louisianians of the Year
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…
Weaving a Connection
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…
For the Good of the Hive
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…
Electric Art
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…
Passing it On
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 Beasts Will Teach You the Beauty of This Earth
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…
Natural Science
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…
Forces of Nature
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 of the Year
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…
Vitus Shell
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…
Art for the People
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.…
Magical Mystery
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…
Art: Visual Music
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…
Art: Art Out of Chaos
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…
Art: Tragic Beauty
→ 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…
Art: The Big Picture
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…
Art: The Big Picture
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…
Beading Rhythms
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.”…
Art Al Fresco
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…
Nature’s Exquisite Song
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.…
Art: Chaos and Order
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. …
Art: Holding On
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…
Art: Preserving (Art) History
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…
Art: Spiritually Connected
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…
Art: Evangeline Revisited
“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…
Art: Good Juju
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…
Art: Garden of Memories
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…
The View from Above
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…
Artist: Louisiana Monsters
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…
Wild at Heart
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…
State of Louisiana: Pelican Briefs
NEW ORLEANS NOWFE News The New Orleans Wine and Food Experience honors Mark Romig in a gala celebration Jan. 17 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel to bestow the coveted 2019 Ella Brennan Lifetime Achievement Award in Hospitality. Romig is president and…
The Art of Crime
The French artist Georges Braque once described art “as a wound turned into light.” In New Orleans, Detective Charles Hoffacker, a 14-year-veteran of the New Orleans Police Department, is shinning light on the city’s wounds through his art. Watching the…
Pelican Briefs
NEW ORLEANS Culinary Institute Opens Inaugural classes begin Jan. 7 at the hotly anticipated New Orleans Culinary & Hospitality Institute (NOCHI), the brainchild of co-founder and board chairman Ti Martin of Commander’s Palace. State-of-the-art instructional spaces in the five-story, 93,000-square-foot…
Pelican Briefs
Lafourche, Jefferson, IberiaGumbo Galore Gumbo festival fans are facing a delectable dilemma in October. The Louisiana Gumbo Festival of Chackbay is held in Lafourche Parish Oct. 12-14 (lagumbofest.com) on the very same weekend as Bridge City’s World-Famous Gumbo Festival (bridgecitygumbofestival.org)…
Iconic Imagery
“Memento Mori” According to the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, “nature always wears the colors of the spirit.” Over the years, Breaux Bridge’s transcendental photographer Lynda Frese has traveled the world, studying religions, mythologies, early goddess cults and the classical…
Pelican Briefs
Noteworthy news and happenings around the state
Bayou Dreaming
Carol Hallock paints her impressions of Bayou Lacombe
pelican briefs
Noteworthy news and happenings around the state
Vitus Shell
Picturing the Black Experience
Celebrating the New Orleans Tricentennial with art
Celebrating the New Orleans Tricentennial with art
Cultural Inspiration
Mardi Gras on the Cajun prairie and in the New Orleans streets of Tremé
Pelican Briefs
Noteworthy news and happenings around the state
Russell Whiting
Hot Steel and Angels in St. Martin Parish
pelican briefs
Celebrations, cinema and ‘snow’
Pelican Briefs
Films, funny money, flights and free lunch
Dawn DeDeaux
New Orleans artist uses installations to save ‘MotherShip’ Earth and Louisiana’s wetlands
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