There is no better way to discover a city than to walk through its streets, looking at the architecture while learning about its history. To assimilate a city's culture requires a deeper involvement which includes getting acquainted with its artistic heritage, especially in New Orleans where Jeffrey Cook (1961-2009) was born and raised. His short career left a deep imprint on the city's art scene, and the exhibition at Boyd Satellite Gallery is the latest proof of this. A Nkisi for Jeffrey Cook is a "memorial and tribute" to the artist and gathers an extensive body of work, spanning from his debuts as a sculptor to his last pieces.
In the photograph under the title of the show, the artist appears serious and thoughtful. According to his peers, he was charismatic, humble and loyal to his family, friends and community. Starting in a clockwise fashion from the entrance, the exhibition is more or less organized in chronological order. The overall display offers all shades of browns to blacks with occasional touches of color brought up by works like the first three wall pieces inspired by compositions from John T. Scott, Cook's teacher at Xavier University. Joseph Cornell's influence is also noticeable in the four "boxes" hung along the wall. Each tells a story. In search of his own language, the artist designed two geometric sculptures in painted wood, one of them with ladders, symbol of escape from reality to an imaginary world, according to Joan Miró. Jeffrey Cook's previous endeavor as a lead dancer for a Los Angeles dance company brought him to visit numerous countries from Europe to Asia. However, he never reached the shores of Africa. It is upon his return to New Orleans in the eighties, while visiting the French Quarter galleries, that he soaked in African art and embraced its soul. Most of the following pieces are made with what became his media of choice: cloth, wood, found objects, to create spiritual landscapes. Filled with artifacts gathered in the streets of New Orleans, most of the wall sculptures are of smaller sizes except three of them which could be called panels due to their dimensions while another pair is accompanied by preliminary drawings, proof of the artist's quest for aesthetic and content. All include recurrent symbols like brooms, children's blocks, chalk, ..., described in Andy Antipas's essay Jeffrey Cook: African Art and New Orleans as: "created objects that elude rational analysis, because they form a magical, ideographic vocabulary that is indecipherable without the artist's grimoire". A collection of statuettes made of black cloth secured with twine, like funerary objects, is displayed on individual shelves. Black birds are represented in many pieces. Born from ancestral African beliefs about the soul's future after death, the symbol is also found in Song of Silence. The poignant sculpture made to commemorate two of Cook's friends killed in a shooting features the barrel of two shotguns transformed into birds. Another moving piece is about the holocaust. With pieces of rags and strings, the artist built two expressive figurines full of sorrow. Two collages and an abstract painting are reminders of a less well known side of the artist who was also a painter. The eclectic material of the center piece appears to have been collected after hurricane Katrina. The sculpture, an unstable fragile assemblage of pulleys, pieces of wood and varied objects, evokes destruction and a world in turmoil. 
Most of the pieces belong to friends and/or collectors and the busy display misses information about their titles or dates. However, pamphlets and essays written by peers are available at the gallery, providing a window on the artist's work and persona. The exhibition is appropriately called a memorial and includes personal possessions like a weathered bicycle and large pieces of wood from a childhood's tree house built by Cook and his friends in their Central City neighborhood. The artist started to collect everyday objects almost two decades before the disaster struck the city, catching its soul through the debris found in the streets and transforming them into relics through his sculptures. We are made of our past, and Cook went far back in time and also places to find his, digging into his roots from Africa to the Caribbean and fill his works with "spiritual and ritualistic qualities". Four African sculptures embedded in the show emphasize this, so does a quote from Antipas: "... African art was created as spirit guides, to venerate the ancestors, to encourage clan and tribal social order, to protect the community and individuals,... and most importantly, to protect against the supernatural... Jeffrey's pieces are themselves a kind of talisman to help negotiate the fearsome supernatural powers which surround us".
I previously saw a few works from Cook at various venues like the New Orleans Museum of Art or the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Going through the show allows not only to get a grasp of his body of work but also of his connections to the city's art scene.
The exhibition which takes place during the Triennial Prospect.4 and also at the start of the city's Tricentennial commemoration is the occasion to measure the breadth of Jeffrey Cook's legacy.
photographs by the author
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