The Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans Displays Works by Tina Girourard & Robert Gordy

Written by James Macmillan Wednesday, 29 February 2012 21:17

New Orleans.- The Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans is proud to present "Patterns and Prototypes: Tina Girouard and Robert Gordy", on view at the center until September 25th. Of the many art movements that took place in the United States during the latter part of the 20th century, few have consistently lacked critical and historical reassessment to the extent experienced by the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement that took the New York art world by storm from the mid 1970s until the early 1980s. During its heyday, such stars of the P&D movement as Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnell, Joyce Kozloff, and Robert Zakanitch promoted a freeform, sensual use of patterned motifs in their work, fusing abstraction and representation in a distinctively pleasure-based aesthetic that was embraced as a significant departure from the more conceptualized approach of Post-Minimal art and Earthworks.

Unbeknownst to most casual observers, two Louisiana artists-Tina Girouard and Robert Gordy-played a formative role in the P&D movement, and as part of its 35th Birthday program, the CAC presents "Patterns and Prototypes", an exhibition focused on early works by these two pioneering figures.

Tina Girouard was originally from Louisiana, but moved to New York in the 1960's attracted by the creative fever of the city's contemporary art movements. In New York, she met and worked with musicians Richard Landry and the Philip Glass Ensemble and performance artists such as Gordon Matta Clark, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, Laurie Anderson, Sonnier, Deborah Hay and the Natural History of the American Dancer, among others. She was an early founding participant of many cutting edge artistic developments, including, 112 Greene St., FOOD, the Clocktower and PS1, Creative Time, Performance Art and the Fabric Workshop. After a fire destroyed her building in 1979, she her main studio back to Louisiana. From her base there, she helping to promote Louisiana's culture by creating visual arts venues and an international festival. Since 1990, she has maintained a studio in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Girouard has received numerous fellowships and grants, and her works are in museums and private collections around the world.


Louisiana artist Robert Gordy was known for his complex acrylic paintings which featured patterning and repetition, and linear shapes in a flat pictorial space in closely-keyed colors. In the early 1980s, the human head began to emerge as an important element in his paintings and in a series of monotypes created in Santa Fe. Invited to a residency at Graphicstudio in 1983, Gordy created his first etchings in aquatint. Many works make direct references to African sculpture, which Gordy collected. Gordy had solo exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York and the Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans. He was included in the 1973 Whitney Biennial, and the 21st National Print Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, among many other exhibitions. Born in Louisiana in 1933, Gordy died in 1989.

The Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans is a multi-disciplinary arts center, dedicated to the presentation, production and promotion of the art of our time. The CAC is a cultural leader. As such, it organizes, presents and tours curated exhibitions, performances and programs by local, regional, national and international artists. It demonstrates proactive local and regional leadership by educating children and adults; cultivating and growing audiences; and initiating and encouraging collaboration among diverse artists, institutions, communities and supporters. The Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) was formed in the fall of 1976 by a passionate group of visual artists when the movement to tear down the walls between visual and performing arts was active nationwide. The CAC began as an artist-run, artist-driven community organization in the nearly empty arts district of New Orleans. As the burgeoning arts district grew, so did the CAC, evolving to meet the increasing needs of a diverse audience and artist communities. Renovated in 1990, and donated to the CAC in 1999, the CAC's building mixes the timelessness of New Orleans' historic architecture with contemporary materials and usable open spaces. Throughout the CAC's 35 years, the center has remained active in the visual and performing arts and arts education communities, continuing to represent an era of creative freedom and multi-disciplinary expression.


Today, the CAC is one out of a handful of nationwide arts organizations who have remained solvent and successful while serving a truly multi-disciplinary mission. Currently dedicating two floors, about 10,000 square feet of gallery space, on the 4-story building to rotating exhibitions throughout the year, the CAC is home to artists' bold experiments in painting, theater, photography, performance art, dance, music, video, education, and sculpture. Since 2006, the CAC has awarded $350,000 in grants to individual New Orleans' artists who were affected by Hurricane Katrina through the CAC Theatre Arts Fund and the SweetArts Katrina Fund. Offering creative outlets and opportunities, the CAC's education department successfully engages over 10,000 children and adults annually, including those with special needs and those from economically deprived backgrounds. The CAC's education and outreach projects offer intimate arts education settings where students, most for the first time, work together with artists, generating a greater impact through more personal, interactive experiences. The CAC's significance and role in the cultural community of New Orleans has and always will be cemented in its broad community-based programs and initiatives. Visit the center's website at ... http://www.cacno.org

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