From Gauguin to Calan, P.3 at the NOMA

The visit for Prospect.3 should start at the New Orleans Museum of Art, on the second floor, where the visitor can find the nexus of the biennial, Paul Gauguin's painting Under the Pandanus, 1891. The title of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897, another work from Gauguin, would better summarize "the search" which is going to propel the visitors around New Orleans in the next few months. Gauguin is found next to Degas in the gallery. The two artists mingled while in Paris and, upon his return from New Orleans, Degas encouraged the restless artist to move to the Crescent City. Gauguin ended up in Tahiti and even further, the Marquesas Islands, in his search for exoticism and himself. Degas reported to the dealer Ambroise Vollard: "I advised him to go to New Orleans, but he decided it was too civilized. He had to have people around him with flowers on their heads and rings in their noses before he could feel at home."
The next P.3 artist, Tarsila do Amaral is represented with a painting and three drawings. Upon her return from Europe, the artist traveled in Brazil with the poet Oswald de Andrade, looking for the primitive and indigenous in her country. Os Anjos, 1924, is a naive but provocative painting representing mestizos as angels. One can find the influence of Fernand Léger in the tubular bodies and of her childhood in the colors baby blue, pink, she "adored as a child". The Brazilian artist was a member of the Anthropophagic Movement, and the sketches are related to one of her most famous work, Anthropofagia, 1929.
Jeffrey Gibson's search translates into a dichotomy in his works. From Choctaw and Cherokee descent, he "modernizes" traditional material like raw hide, beads, mixing them with fluorescent light or metal, and in the process westernizes the American Indian culture. He is represented by half a dozen iconic works appropriately displayed next to the golden cabin from Will Ryman, titled  America, 2013, part of the permanent collection.
Two abstract expressionist landscapes from Ed Clark and one of his oval paintings are next to a work from Joan Mitchell belonging to the permanent collection. The american artists became friends in Paris. Mitchell, who lived in France most her adult life, meets the criteria for P.3. In one of his essays, John Ashbery states: "she voluntarily became an apatride, not an expatriate". Alma W. Thomas did not choose to leave her birthplace. She was uprooted during her childhood from her native Georgia to Washington, D.C. with her family, to flee the racial violence. In the three paintings selected for P.3, she depicts nature with her characteristic brushstrokes and vivid colors. She was a member of the Washington Color School.  
Huguette Calan, another female artist, was born in Lebanon, taught in France and is currently living in California. Her body-landscapes are filled with sensuality and poetry.
The paintings from Frederick Brown are first and last, decking the Great Hall. Musicians have been selected among his portraits which include folk heroes, religious figures and more. Music is a dear theme in New Orleans, however, I could not find the link with P.3.

At first, the Prospect.3 exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art seems spotty, but after some consideration, the works embedded in the permanent collection offer a platform to look at the landscape from Asher Durand or the boxes from Joseph Cornell with new eyes. This is what the biennial is also about.






photographs by the author:

"Os Anjos", 1924, Tarsila do Amaral
"Quiver", 2012, Jeffrey Gibson
"Sunrise", 1973, Huguette Calan

Manal AlDowayan, Huguette Calan at Prospect.3

Manal AlDowayan


Manal AlDowayan is a conceptual artist born in 1973 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. After completing a Masters degree in Systems Analysis and Design, she worked as the Creative Director of the Saudi Arabian oil company for ten years before becoming a full-time artist. Her work in a predominantly male environment fostered her interest for women's status in Saudi Arabia.
In her practice, she combines photography and mixed media to capture the often contradictory relationships between tradition, political regulation, contemporary Saudi society and raise awareness around gender issues in her country.
She has participated in several residencies including: Delfina Foundation in London, The Town House Gallery in Cairo, Cuadro Gallery in Dubai, and Mathaf Project Space in Doha. Manal has been inducted into various cultural leadership initiatives including the Clore Leadership program and the British Council International Cultural Leaders program. She has also been invited as the key note speaker in many international conferences and seminars; most recently at the Clinton Foundation in Little Rock, Arkansas as part of the Club de Madrid’s 2012 annual conference, entitled “Harnessing 21st Century Solutions: A Focus on Women” and at "Beyond Borders, The Platform for Small Nation Dialogue and Cultural Exchange" in Scotland 2012.

Manal has been included in international exhibitions including the collateral exhibitions in the  Venice Biennial in 2011 and 2009, the Berlin Biennial in 2010, and in Contemporary Istanbul in 2010. Her works are part of the permanent collections of the British Museum, LA County Museum, Mathaf Museum of Modern Arab Art, the Jordan National Museum of Fine Art, the Abdul Latif Jamil Foundation, the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), the Nadour Foundation, and the Barjeel Foundation. Manal AlDowayan is represented by Cuadro Gallery in Dubai. She currently lives and works between her native Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, UAE.

links to websites featuring AlDowayan's work,
artists-edge of Arabia
Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art
Delfina Foundation

Interview


Huguette El Khoury Caland

Huguette El Khoury Caland was born in Beirut in 1931. She is the daughter of the first Lebanese president after the independence (1943). She studied art at the American University of Beirut from 1964 to 1968 and started her career breaking barriers in Middle Eastern art with her erotic abstract paintings. She treated human anatomy, her main subject, in a playful way. She lived in Paris from 1970 till 1987 and she illustrated books, notably by the poet Andrée Chedid. In 1970, she had her first solo show at Dar El Fan and moved to live and work in Paris where she was  part of many group exhibitions.
Huguette Caland designed a line of clothing for Pierre Cardin in 1978, lived and worked in New York for one year (1981-2) and returned to Paris in 1983 where she worked with Romanian sculptor George Apostu on a series of stone, wood and terra cotta sculptures. Caland moved from Paris to Los Angeles in 1988, where she presently lives and works. She now works her canvas as if it was a world she creates, where distance are distorted and spaces widened. Her recent works often talks about her childhood memories in Lebanon.
"Huguette Caland is part of a generation of artists including Shafic Abboud, Yvette Achkar, and Helen Khal, the main players of the Lebanese art scene after the independence. They were the artists who shaped the artistic identity of their young country. All of them studied and worked in Europe or the USA and were greatly influenced by the artistic periods they experienced there. But they all remained attached to their country and heritage, and one could see that attachment in their art, where they always referred to their native culture."
Since 1993, she had an exhibition at the Galerie Janine Rubeiz in Beirut. Her artwork has also been shown at the Delta Gallery in Rome, at Tokyo’s Museum of Modern Art, the Faris Gallery in Paris, the Monaco Art Center in Monte Carlo, Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona and the International Biennale of Venice in Italy. She also participated in Europ’Art (Geneva), Start’Art (Strasbourg) and the "Brushes for Feathers" exhibition organized by Janine Rubeiz Gallery for the benefit of the Lebanese Foundation of the National Library in 2005.
In the United States her work was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Caland’s work hang in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain in Paris. Her work is present notably in the Monaco and Beirut collections of the prominent collector Pierre Naim as well as in numerous private collections in Lebanon, France, United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.
More recently she is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris. Huguette Caland will be featuring with a solo show at the first Art Dubai Modern 2014, presented by Galerie Janine Rubeiz.