01 March 2006: The Villager & 03 March 2006: Gambit Weekly |
Level
of artist and activist’s work rose with floods Andrea Garland was in Crawford, Tex., demonstrating against the war in Iraq when the Storm came. As news of the catastrophe engulfing her hometown reached her, she drafted some Vietnam vets who were willing to come to New Orleans to help. The vets were protesting the new war along Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq. Vietnam had been a lesson that America was quickly forgetting, and now here was an American city being abandoned by the U.S. government in its darkest hour. The war had come home. |
| 30 Dec 2005: Times-Picayune Lagniappe |
ART
THAT WAS 9. TOXIC ART. Artist Jeffrey Holmes receives special accolades for decorating a pile of demolition debris on the St. Claude Avenue neutral ground in September, thereby producing the first post-Katrina art exhibit. The politically charged display so irritated passing National Guardsmen that the argumentative -- and inebriated -- artist was hauled off to the hoosegow. Right on! (note from Jeffrey and Andrea - Jeffrey WAS NOT intoxicated, he had been asleep for the 8 hours prior to his arrest. Also, the Toxic Art exhibit was created by Jeffrey Holmes AND Andrea Garland). |
| 5 Dec 2005: New York Times |
| Art
Captures a City's Tumult and Renewal The robot in the median on Elysian Fields Avenue has a barbecue grill for a head, a microwave oven for a face and an adding machine keyboard for a chest. ''I can see the wit of a city reborn,'' said Murray Brown, a teacher, as he viewed the so-called trashbot, made from items found amid Hurricane Katrina's debris. ''Or it might be a corpse.'' The hurricane has inspired visual art everywhere here, be it on canvas, T-shirts, refrigerators or tattooed arms and legs. By turns whimsical, angry, despairing and hopeful, the art explores such themes as loss, impermanence and rebirth as it seeks to sculpture a kind of coherence from emotional and physical wreckage. ''New Orleans is rotting and tragically fresh,'' said Herbie Kearney, a painter and sculptor whose studio was destroyed. ''We have to come back and make art. If you don't have culture, the city will become Disneyland for condo people.'' On St. Claude Avenue in the Bywater section of the city, Jeffrey Holmes and Andrea Garland have created a memorial to the ravaged Lower Ninth Ward. They have driven wooden crosses into the median and spray-painted a metal cadaver transport case with the lament ''RIP Lower 9,'' which is also etched into the artists' arms with tattoos. |
| 15 Nov 2005: Gambit Weekly |
| The
Art of the Storm By D. Eric Bookhardt The site where the St. Daniel Spiritual Church once stood is now a surreal melange of rubble mingled with the headless statues of saints. I knew that if I didn't do it myself, Katrina would do it for me," says artist and urban planner Robert Tannen of the minimal, house-shaped outdoor sculptures that had adorned his yard, but which he smashed into a heap of mangled scrap metal just before Katrina hit. He might have been concerned about them becoming dangerous projectiles in the rampaging wind, but his response typified many artists' concerns about unauthorized changes to their work, and Katrina was the mother of unauthorized changes. In any event, they won't go to waste -- he plans to recycle their crushed remains into a conceptual piece later this year. |
| 6 Oct 2005: Artvoice |
| Submerged:
An Evacuee's Journal I love New Orleans. But after anchoring myself there for half my life, I still don’t understand it all that well. If this city has a soul, I think I’ve only caught fleeting glimpses of it. One of these glimpses occurred in 1993, when I had the chance to interview musician Danny Barker. He was 84. I was 30 and on assignment for a local magazine. I knew that Barker had played with Cab Calloway and wrote songs like “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” for his wife, Blue Lu Barker, to sing. I arrived at Barker’s doorstep one Saturday, and he let me in. I sat across from him while he pinned a microphone to his collar. He spoke quietly to himself. “I’ll be using my intelligent voice now,” he said. He continued, now looking up: “I have 10 different voices: my intelligent voice, my jazz voice, my night-life voice, my day-life voice, black Northern voice, black Southern voice. That’s interesting, eh? All the various voices you have to have when you have a brown or black paint job, you see?” As he talked, he would constantly check in to make sure I was still with him: “You see?” “You understand?” He talked about smiles. He listed them all: half-watermelon, two-cent, nickel. He demonstrated each one, twisting his face, raising his eyebrows. He learned that lesson in Hollywood in the 1930s, when he’d been in a short with Stepin Fetchit. A smile, he said, was “a weapon—you use that to get in, and you use it to get out.” There are times in New Orleans when everything you think you know suddenly shifts, or fades into the background, or gets turned upside down. Danny could play those moments like no one else. |
| 04 Oct 2005: The Mercury News |
Spontaneous art exhibit underscores defiant spirit in Ninth
Ward NEW ORLEANS - In the devastation wrought first by Hurricane Katrina and then Hurricane Rita, no neighborhood suffered more than this city's Ninth Ward. Levee breaches suddenly transformed it from community to underwater catastrophe. But as the water drains, revealing thousands of houses reduced to pickup sticks, a few defiant signs of life emerge. Although everyone is officially barred from the Ninth Ward, residents have begun to return and are rebuilding their lives. On a trash-strewn median, artist Jeffrey Holmes impaled a dozen mannequin heads on pieces of wood. Holmes and his wife, Andrea Garland, call their spontaneous exhibit "Toxic Art." The pair were lucky. The combination art gallery and home they bought last year on St. Claude Avenue withstood the storm. |
| 04 Oct 2005: NPR Talk of the Nation |
| Katrina & Recovery Talk of the Nation, October 4, 2005 · After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the higher parts of New Orleans escaped with minor damage, but the city's Lower Ninth Ward was hit hard. Sandwiched between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, the Lower Ninth was severely flooded when the levees that protect New Orleans were breached. |
| 30 Sept 2005: Times Picayune |
| One man's show Artist creates curbside exhibit from the ruins of his home By Doug MacCash Art critic A dozen black mannequin heads atop wooden stakes stood on the grassy median in the 4100 block of St. Claude Avenue on Monday, like a scene from "Apocalypse Now" rendered in Styrofoam. Nearby rested a sheet metal coffin filled with floodwater amid wooden crosses, a mirror marked with the words "9th Ward RIP" and piles of moldering rugs, furniture, paintings and other works of once-submerged art. Everything was webbed with orange caution tape, draped with carnival beads and touched with spray-painted graffiti. Although in many ways the detritus blended in with the endless roadside debris in the 9th Ward, this debris was different: It was an art display, perhaps the first of post-Katrina era New Orleans. Hand-made flyers distributed in the French Quarter announced the "Toxic Art" display in the 4100 block of St. Claude Avenue, with a reception scheduled for Monday afternoon. |
| 29 Sep 2005: Guerilla News |
Dispatch
from New Orleans Over the past few weeks, artist Jeffrey Holmes (40) has become something of a fixture in the Bywater area of New Orleans’ 9th Ward. Holmes has the distinction of being the first artist to mount an exhibition in post-Katrina New Orleans. When he and his wife Andrea Garland (34) returned to their house on St. Claude Avenue, the first floor had been flooded by the probably toxic water form the nearby Industrial Canal. They decided to park all its contents, some of their artwork and debris as well, on the median of St. Claude Avenue, and calling the whole thing ” Toxic Art – this exhibition can kill you!” |
| First
of all, I offer all my praises to you both on the transformation
of your space into a new gallery for the community and
the thriving bohemian underground we inhabit. Your creative
efforts give us all a new space to gather the intelligentsia
and be introduced to other artistic souls. Your dual
energies in transforming an abandoned space into such
a well-crafted aesthetic where Bywater shack decay meets
alternative semi-punk funk is impressive. Having seen
the space before your visions moved it to a level of
a genuine show room for new art is something to behold
and marvel. The mini installations of salmon roses and
candles that shape every corner of the two display rooms
illustrates such calculated concerns to please the eye. "L'art Noir New Orleans" is testament to an eclectic cultivated taste where high and low art intersect for a visual gestalt that defies the often septic spaces of "Fine Art Galleries." It adds another jewel to the new millennium renaissance of this "Big Easy" art
community. Kudos! Mil gracias. ---Jose Torres Tama |
INSDE ART - Gambit Weekly, March 2, 2004 ...No less gothic or mythic in tone are the works of Caro Caron, Josh Simmons and Richard Suicide at l'art Noir, a new Bywater gallery that, as its name suggests, offers art with an edge. What we see on the walls is an assortment of alternative illustration, some of it explicit, all reminiscent of the classic "underground" comics of yore. Caron's mixed-media pieces are Hispanic fantasias of garish colors, and luridly exaggerated figures arrayed in various debasing situations that reflect a humorously misanthropic world view. Suicide's stuff is more minimal, ducks with breasts and the like, while Simmons' is often explicitly pornographic.But his series of comic paste-up panels on the New orleans photographer E.J. Bellocq is actually a thoughtful meditation on the nature of art, photography and pornography, as well as a rebuttal to the urban legends that describe Bellocq as a demented hydrocephalic dwarf. Simmons cites evidence that he was, in fact, a reasonably normal, successful photographer who just happened to have inherited a family home adjacent to Storyville, where one thing apparently led to another. Whatever, l'art Noir, located in an outbuilding of the Mazant Guest House, is a colorful new addition to this city's burgeoning gallery roster. Macabre gallery opens in time for Halloween "There's a lot of darkness out there in things you wouldn't think," says Jeffery Holmes, with a knowing raise of his eyebrow.The little man with many tattoos and a pointy beard is Master Jeffrey Holmes; he is your host, and he knows a bit about the macabre side of visual art.It was the dark side of New Orleans that drew gallery owner Holmes from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to relocate his brainchild, l'art Noir, to the city synonymous with macabre themes and history. read remainder of review Bywater Art Reviews - Macabre art intentionally shocking The best things about l'art Noir's debut exhibit was the opening reception. The alternative art space unveiled its macabre art to the public for a Halloween happening on Saturday, October 25 in the heart of Bywater.The lithe curator Jeffrey Holmes, garbed in a black dress, launched the affair - two hours late - with a marriage proposal to co-curator, and now, faincée Andrea Garland, before a sizable crowd of neighborhood revelers. Milling amongst locals was Bohemian celebrity Andrei Codrescu, whose Presence marked the event as one at which to be see, and be seen. read remainder of review |
Visit the St. Claude Arts' District Website for other art events on St. Claude!