Andy Antippas, owner of Barristers Gallery in New Orleans, had to offer a guy from the power company a six-pack of warm beer to get the juice turned back on in his gallery, but he didn't hesitate. He was determined to have an art opening on schedule and kick off the art season in a town that has always been known for its creative spirit and lively arts community. Sure enough, on Saturday, October 1st, he put up two big art shows and held an opening attended by over 100 people.

"I knew I'd have to shut down by curfew, but I stayed open until 8 pm and a lot of people in the local arts community showed up," Antippas said. "It was absolutely worth it. It's one thing for people in other parts of the country to hear about the Wal-Marts and the Home Depots reopening, but this is an arts city, so I felt it was important that people know the arts are alive too."

"I was going to do this in the dark if I had to. I thought it might be a purely quixotic and platonic gesture, but I'm glad that so many people showed up and appreciated it," Antippas said in a phone interview a few days after the opening. His 140-year-old home, located on the edge of the badly swamped Ninth Ward, has no power or potable water and two ancient trees are leaning against the roof, but he still opens his gallery daily to the public. As we spoke, two artists who he represents were coming and going. Friends and artists have been sleeping in the mezzanine loft at the back of the gallery at times lately. "Seeing Rene in his p.j.s in the morning is not something you want to see when you open the gallery," he said only half-seriously, and laughed.

Barristers Gallery, owned by Antippas, represents an eclectic group of artists. The two shows that opened at his gallery on October 1st feature the art of a local voodoo scholar and practitioner and a group show of art by people who have mental disabilities. Antippas, a former professor of English literature, is known in New Orleans as somewhat of a renegade and one of the most creative, cutting-edge gallerists around. "I've subjected myself to some unusual life experiences, which makes me more studious and knowledgeable than most," Antippas said. His huge gallery is full of some of the best African art, folk art, lowbrow art, outsider art, and contemporary art in New Orleans.

Even the location of the gallery is contrary to the conventional wisdom of the New Orleans art landscape: it's not in the popular museum/restaurant/gallery area called the Warehouse District just west of downtown, nor on the busy gallery row of Royal Street in the French Quarter, nor on trendy Magazine Street. Instead it's in a semi-abandoned industrial/commercial area west of the Superdome that can seem desolate and scary. Outside of the large, floor-to-ceiling windows is the wide Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, a thoroughfare that wasn't heavily used even before Hurricane Katrina emptied the town. Sometimes the only person you'd see in an hour would be someone riding by on a dilapidated biycle.

Yet the gallery has a roster of some of the most successful folk and underground artists in New Orleans, including Mike Fedor, John Greco, Sean Star Wars, Sallie Ann Glassman, Herbert Singleton, John Arceneaux, Elizabeth Fox, Ryan Burns, Rene Stout, Chris Fisher, Ray Ferdinand and Mrytle Damitz.

Usually October 1st is the beginning of a busy art season. "The first weekend in October is when all galleries in New Orleans have the Art For Art's Sake weekend to launch the season," Antippas said "But this year I'm hearing from other gallery owners that the season is dead. They're talking about how they're going to try to sell the art in other cities. One has already rented the gallery out to a construction company."

"I want them to stop this whining and get back here. If they don't come back now, they won't have a clue about what's going on. A massive clean-up has already happened. The city is coming back. I had over 100 people at the opening. People told me that they were so glad I was doing this."

Antippas and his fiance Tricia Moss returned from Texas, where they went to avoid Katrina, to live in their house full-time a week and a half before the art opening and just after Hurricane Rita temporarily closed the city for a second time this year. "The mosquitos are a nightmare. Each night we've had to cover ourselves completely with Off," Antippas said.

"The gallery had a large oval puddle on the floor because of a leak in the roof, but no flooding. I was going to have a big group show called The Spirit of Place for October, with a New Orleans theme and all local artists. But a lot of studios have flooded and work was damaged or destroyed."

Fortunately, Antippas already had art on hand for two shows. "The last thing I did before we left town as Katrina was approaching was to come to the gallery and move all the art for the new shows upstairs to the mezzanine in case there was four or five feet of water in the gallery."

Altered Perceptions II: Artists with Mental Illness is a juried group show featuring work by artists with mental disabilities, now in its second year. "All of the artists have a diagnosed mental illness," Antippas said. "All proceeds go to the artists. It's becoming known around the country. After Katrina hit, I was contacted by an organization in New York City called Hospital Audiences Incorporated that shows art by artists with mental disabilities. They offered to put on a benefit show in New York for me. I thanked them but said I was determined to do it here, as planned. Unasked, a Latino artist who works with an organization that helps artists with mental disabilities sent me some amazing paintings." Some of the artists in this show are Natalie Gaidry, Kenny Champagne, Gus Fink, and William A. Kelly.

The other show, new work by Sallie Ann Glassman, an aritst and spiritualist who has studied and practiced Voudon, is called Glimpses of the Invisible. Her work is moody and full of archetypal symbols. Antippas also included two brand-new storm-themed paintings that she did while she was in Houma, Louisiana, having evactuated during the storm. "One depicts the city with a dark, glowering sky," Antippas said.

Antippas and Moss delivered the previously printed show invitations by hand throughout the French Quarter during the days before the show. He spoke with Times Picayune arts writer Doug McCash. whose article about the state of the arts now in New Orleans appeared in the Living section of that paper on Friday, September 30th (the article can be found at NoLA.com), saying that, "Maybe we can get a Black Hawk to drop some from the sky."

As it turned out, the fears Antippas had that no one would show up were unfounded. Over 100 people attended the opening on Saturday including Don Marshall, head of the famous Jazz Fest and former head of Contemporary Arts Center; Press Kabakoff, a major developer in the city; Kathy Randall, one of the leading actress/performers in town; David and Courtney Sullivan, who do great video and computer art; and many more. "Usually we get mainly visual artists, but there were lots of people from the theater community here. All of the arts were represented."

"I had plenty of wine left from past openings. For a while I thought only ten people would show up and I could give each person their own bottle of wine," Antippas said.

Antiapps feels that the arts community in New Orleans will be back despite the storm. "Artists gravitate to a physical place, a city that captures their imagination. Musicians drift around on a spiritual basis; they're nomadic. But artists work from a sense of place, so they will tend to be back. The big challenge will be to rebuild."

"Many artists simply lost their work. Many studios were completely flooded. The issue is how much work they can salvage. We had planned to open last weekend with a Spirit of Place, a group show of local artists. I'm still planning to put that on, along with my Mao show called Mao Now, a collection of Chinese posters and communist kitsch social-realist art, in the coming months." 

Barristers Gallery
http://www.barristersgallery.com

1724 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd.
New Orleans, La. 70113
504-710-4506 
Tues-Sat 10-5

"Art for Art's Sake will go on, despite a lack of electricity, despite a drastically reduced population, despite everything."

 

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The New York Times

By JERE LONGMAN
Published: December 5, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 30 - 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.

Mr. Holmes also created a street memorial featuring molded black Styrofoam heads placed on stakes and called "Field of Silent Screams." It was meant as a tribute to black residents in the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward who cried out futilely for help. But, he said, National Guard troops dismantled the exhibit one night, a consequence risked by many artists who created their works in the street.

"One guy said, 'Some of my troops find it offensive, and it might be construed as racist,' " Mr. Holmes said. "I said, 'Excuse me, you don't know me, the dynamics of my neighborhood, the friends that I lost.' "

Not all of their posthurricane work has been so brooding. After the storm, Ms. Garland draped an abandoned city bus with moldy fabric and spray-painted the message "This is not a Christo."

"Sometimes," she said, "you just have to make people laugh."

Jonathan Traviesa, a photographer, rode out the hurricane in Mid-City and then traveled around in an inner tube, documenting the rescue of people on a strip of land near Bayou St. John. Mr. Traviesa had the photographs printed on corrugated plastic and stuck into the ground on metal tines, a comment on the pastures of signs that have sprung up offering tree trimming, house gutting and other cleanup services.

In mid-November, the photographs were placed in the spots where they had been taken, providing a time-travel perspective that was poignant but also transitory. By late November, the photographs appeared to have been removed, as if they were just another bit of storm debris.

"I thought having the work in the environment communicated something peaceful and reverent in tribute to the people of the neighborhood," Mr. Traviesa said from New York. "But I knew the photographs could get confiscated, stolen or blown over. It was meant to be a temporary gift."

For relief workers and residents who want something more than a T-shirt proclaiming Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as "Girls Gone Wild" and "Twisted Sisters," tattoos have become a popular, indelible reminder.

"I don't want to forget that storm," Bubba Welborn, a local construction worker, said as he had the swirling winds of Katrina and "I survived" tattooed onto his left calf. "That's the thing that chased me out of my city."

Andy Antippas, owner of Barrister's Gallery in Central City, said he was initially reluctant to show a hurricane exhibit, believing that art might be incapable of capturing the breadth of the storm's devastation.

Then Mr. Antippas reconsidered. A project called "Dirt Drive," initiated by an artist named Adam Farrington, invites artists from around the country to send packets of dirt to be piled in a mound in a symbolic effort to repair the city's failed levees.

The project underscores a growing belief here that New Orleans is being forgotten by the federal government and will have to rebuild itself. Even residents of largely untouched Uptown neighborhoods seem to have grown insulated from more despoiled areas like Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Ward, Mr. Antippas said.

"They've got their cable and gas and electricity, and most of the trash is picked up," he said, "and they're in a state of denial about the needs of the rest of the city."

Art Captures a City's Tumult and Renewal

Published: December 5, 2005
(Page 2 of 2)

Defiantly, Mr. Antippas reopened his gallery on Oct. 1, even without electricity, and exhibited works by Sallie Ann Glassman, a painter and voodoo priestess. Ms. Glassman sold hurricane-inspired paintings of roiling skies. At her Bywater home, she is now working on a piece featuring bruised clouds and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Ms. Glassman said she felt a "sacred duty" to capture the tumult of the moment. "I tend to paint the way I feel," she said, "and I guess there are a lot of turbulent emotions and thoughts right now."

At the Waiting Room Gallery in Bywater, Pati D'Amico has been drawn to the hands of Hurricane Katrina victims. Ms. D'Amico has painted a series of panels in which hands provide a sign language of desperation, reaching for help, falling limp in defeat.

Her husband, William Warren, has begun to sculpture with cement as he explores elements of permanence and rebuilding.

"In all this destruction," Mr. Warren said, "cement remained."

Hurricane Katrina has forced reassessment on several levels for New Orleans's artists, who have been left to re-evaluate their work and their viability in a city of escalating rents and scattered clients.

"People can't afford to buy art," said Miranda Lake, 36, a painter who lives Uptown. "They have to put roofs on their houses."

A general sense of doubt is the subject of Jose Torres Tama's performance-art piece "The Cone of Uncertainty," in which he explores, among other subjects, the future of New Orleans. He worries that it may become an "insidious Las Vegas" or a sideshow tourist destination "where we become the three-legged woman."

Mr. Torres Tama's roommate, William Sabourin O'Reilly, 33, is seeking to expand his short film "Old Orleans," in which he juxtaposes scenes of the city's cultural heritage with documentary footage of Hurricane Katrina and prestorm newspaper headlines on the city's rising crime rate and sinking hope for its public schools.

"It was not only Katrina that destroyed New Orleans," Mr. Sabourin O'Reilly said. "There was a perpetual state of passivity and tolerance of a lot of bad things."

In the weeks after the storm, discarded refrigerators became billboards of protest, regarding the possible move of the New Orleans Saints to San Antonio or Los Angeles, and the widely criticized response of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Now the tone seems to have changed. A refrigerator standing along Esplanade Avenue this week offered a mournful request: "Please Come Home."

For those who cannot yet return, the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in Central City will soon begin transporting a photography exhibit of African-American life to displaced residents in cities including Atlanta; Baton Rouge, La.; Houston; and Jackson, Miss.

The exhibit is called "The Ties That Bind: Making Family New Orleans Style." Those who attend will be asked to write stories of memory and hope on cloth that will be transformed into another traveling exhibit.

"It's our way of letting them know we are not complete without them, that their faces and hellos and sassy phrases are missed," said Carol Bebelle, project director for Ashé.

Even New Orleans art indirectly related to Hurricane Katrina has developed a certain cachet.

Humidity turned Ms. Lake's Uptown studio into a "dank sweatbox" after the hurricane, buckling and fading her collage paintings done with pigmented beeswax. Improvising with a razor blade and a pancake griddle, and drying some works atop her car, she said she restored four paintings and sold three at the Affordable Art Fair in Manhattan in October.

"People were hooting and hollering; they were so amazed we put it together," Ms. Lake said. "If we get the underdog vote, that's fine. I have to buy a lot of Sheetrock and do a lot of mold remediation."

 

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Blank Canvas

By D. Eric Bookhardt
 

Designer Jac Currie's "Defend New Orleans" T-shirts, originally created to protest gentrification, assumed a profound new significance after Katrina.

In September 2005, a flood-ravaged New Orleans lay silent, dark and empty. The last remaining residents had been made to leave, some at gunpoint, and those who somehow escaped expulsion wandered the streets like zombies, often armed and under cover of darkness, avoiding both the law and the lawless. By the end of the month, drinking water and electricity were still scarce and access was still restricted by the National Guard. The Art for Arts' Sake-coordinated gallery openings slated to kick off the art season on Oct. 1 were all but forgotten. An empty city under martial law was clearly no place for art shows or festive openings, but on that very day, on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in Central City, that is exactly what happened.

"We didn't think we'd have lights, and there was a curfew anyway, so we held it in the afternoon," said Barrister's Gallery director, Andy Antippas, of the opening reception for Sallie Ann Glassman's paintings. "We weren't expecting anything -- if anyone thought I was crazy, here was the proof -- but lo and behold, over 100 people showed up and none of them were National Guards. I have no idea where they came from."

Serendipitously, Entergy had hooked up the electricity the day before. Barrister's was soon followed by the Arthur Roger, LeMieux and Cole Pratt galleries, which all opened their doors in early October and even made some occasional sales. Soon others followed suit, as did the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and now all but two of the Arts District galleries, as well as the Contemporary Arts Center, are scheduled to be open by January. The New Orleans Museum of Art Sculpture Garden has also reopened, as will the museum itself come April. And that in a nutshell is how a major art scene, written off for dead in September, came roaring back to life over the following months.

As gallery dealer Cole Pratt put it, "The way to bring New Orleans back is for people to come home and do their job."

But that may be easier said than done. Some artists, like so many Orleanians, no longer have homes or jobs to come back to. Some haven't returned because they were traumatized, while others are nomadic by nature. An artist of elemental discord in her own right, Katrina was a catalyst for mixed emotions. But she sometimes brought out something else: a dogged determination to keep on keeping on. Even during the dark days after the storm when it looked like we were down for the count, artists kept working with whatever they had at hand. Shows of local art were organized in other cities, while here at home artworks appeared spontaneously in the streets like mushrooms after a rain. They included a "robot" on the Elysian Fields Avenue median with a barbecue grill for a head, a microwave oven for a face and an adding machine keyboard for a chest.

Then there was Jeffrey Holmes and Andrea Garland's controversial RIP Lower 9 trash-art installation on St. Claude Avenue with its "Field of Silent Screams," rows of dark Styrofoam heads on stakes meant as reminders of the Lower Ninth Ward residents left stranded on their roofs. (Some National Guardsmen found it offensive and took it upon themselves to dismantle it.) Another holdout, Jonathan Traviesa, plied the floodwaters photographing helicopter rescues from his Mid-City neighborhood near Bayou St. John. He later had the images transformed into plastic signs like those ads that now blanket the neutral grounds, and in November each sign was placed at the site it documented as part of his Deliverance on Bayou St. John conceptual project. While some dithered from a distance, artists and others pursued their own vision in a kind of urban guerrilla activism, a sensibility reflected in Jac Currie's gothic "Defend New Orleans" T-shirts about town.

Considering the erratic nature of Mayor Nagin's leadership, and President Bush's unspoken, yet obvious, policy of demolition by neglect where New Orleans is concerned, citizen activism is more important than ever. More than a city, New Orleans is regarded by many as an artwork in itself and, as with any art form, people are either passionate about it or not. Those who are not now mostly live elsewhere. Those who are here have a chance to create a new landscape much bigger than any canvas.

By D. Eric Bookhardt

 

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2005-12-27/art_review.php

 

 

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"Barrister's Gallery...the heaven of hell on earth" ...Marilyn Manson

         'Yes, as you may have already guessed, Barrister's ain't your ordinary art gallery. Once inside, you begin to suspect that you'll never, ever see all of it, no matter how much time you spend wandering through the 8,790 square foot space. Andy arranges his gallery in a random-looking but secretly kinky-structured assemblage that makes sense only if you know the subject matter or have a good sense of humor. "