Marching on - New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, Louisiana

Art in America, April, 1997 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

At 3:15 sharp on the afternoon of Jan. 18, 1997, the members of the St. Augustine High School Marching 100 filed into the four-story atrium of the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center. For the next two hours their brass and drum music, more familiar to the crowds at Carnival parades than to gallery goers, marked the closing of the CAC's 20th-anniversary exhibition. The band's appearance was at once a smart exercise in community outreach and a sincere expression of nostalgia, for the Marching 100 had ushered in the CAC's inaugural event two decades earlier in the far less polished setting which was then home to the infant organization.

The history of the CAC is part of the larger story of the 1970s alternative space movement, which saw the birth of a wide spectrum of hybrid organizations dedicated to bringing artists and audiences together in the name of interdisciplinary and experimental art. The center had no charismatic founder, but came about through the joint efforts of artists and musicians, collectors, newspaper columnists, volunteer legal advisors and museum professionals. First director Donald K. Marshall was recruited some months later. The improvisational quality of the center's early programming and hand-to-mouth funding was suited to the two floors it occupied in a ramshackle warehouse at 900 Camp Street, given by local drugstore magnate and art collector Sydney J. Besthoff in a dollar-per-day lease agreement. The center reported a first-year income of less than $19,000; todays operating budget hovers around $1.2 million.

Like not-for-profit organizations in other cities, the CAC survived the public arts funding cutbacks of the 1980s by turning to corporate support. It also found itself the anchor and beneficiary of one of the bigger stories in New Orleans real estate development, the renovation of the city's Warehouse District and its promotion as an upscale art zone. In the aftermath of the otherwise financially disastrous 1984 World's Fair, dozens of derelict buildings were refurbished for residential and commercial use. New and transplanted galleries moved into ground floor spaces along Julia Street, to be followed in the neighborhood by the Louisiana Children's Museum, antique shops, restaurants and, most recently, a Saturday morning green market. From the start, promoters had compared the transformed Warehouse District to SoHo. Ironically, the influx of tourists lamented by so many in New York is precisely what New Orleans planners and dealers rely on to sustain the area, which also includes hotels and a convention center. Today there are close to 20 commercial galleries, with the newest, Heriard/Cimino, scheduled to open in the spring. A museum housing the collection of traditional and contemporary Southern art formed by local developer Roger Ogden is slated to open in late 1998 across from the CAC at Lee Circle.

The mature CAC has found itself struggling to reconcile its pioneering role as an incubator for emerging art with its determination to be a solvent player in a more cosmopolitan art world. A $5-million renovation project, completed in 1990 was a triumph of fund-raising, but left the organization with a more expensive facility to maintain. Strategies to feed the beast have included annual evening events starring celebrity artists like Andres Serrano and Kiki Smith, but no small resentment was aroused when admission tickets were priced beyond the means of most artists and students. The effort to balance local and national perspective may be read in the list of exhibitions, which is divided between titles like "Mostly Big: Abstract Painting in New Orleans" (1992) and "New York Abstract"(1995). The New Orleans abstraction show was itself an exercise in institutional evenhandedness, for it followed a 1990 exhibition of "Visionary Imagists," whose thesis was that the authentic regional idiom was meticulously representational, myth-driven, and strong on craft.

For its anniversary celebration, the CAC reunited artists from its first nor emition, a 1980 show of Louisiana art curated by Linda Cathcart, then the director of Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum. The artists, in turn, suggested younger collegues to fill out the shows roster. The exhibition diplomatically showcased two generations of area talent without imposing a distinct and potentially divisive curatorial take on the material In Md, more than two generations were represented, for the first group itself was diversified in age, and included Clyde Connell and the late Ida Kohlmeyer, then 79 and 68 respectively, along with Andrew Bascle, Peter Halley, Sally Heller, Giuliano Ieronimo, Sam Losavio, Robert Lyon, Steve Rucker, Steve Sweet and Clifton Webb, all in their 20s at the time.

With nearly 100 works and no apparent internal divisions, thematic or otherwise, the exhibition became a kind of open house -- rambling, good-natured and inconclusive. Sculpture, for example, ranged from the assertive monumental glass and/or steel works by Gene Koss, Martin Payton and Robert Tannen to the scrappy, smaller and more frankly inventive mixed-medium pieces by Bascle, Jeffrey Cook and Bernard Mattox. Vintage eccentric abstraction was reprised in Wayne Amedee's chevronas-boomerang shapes in resin, cheesecloth and acrylic, and in Lyon's long clay block gridded with nails and thread. More deliberately up-to-the-minute was Christopher Salcedo's scripture with its highly crafted, if cartoonish, pedestal-seats, embroidered cushions, and implied Three Bears narrative. The exhibition was short on insibitions, an important form for Louisiana artists for two decades, though it did re-present the wryly comical environment designed by Sweet, Jesse Poimboeuf and Steve Cunningham for "Music from Nancy," a mulddisciplinary performance staged at the CAC by aD artists, collaborative in 1979.