the saratoga collection essays

PERMANENT MARKER: Introducing the SARATOGA COLLECTION

BY ADAM FALIK

The danger in addressing an entire collection is of diminishing the diversity of the collection into a single discourse. In examining the work itself, as if each piece grew from the walls of the Saratoga Building and not from the earnest studios of earnest artists, there is no single theme, or even consistent thread, to unite these pieces. The collection is dense with paintings, but there are also sculptures, photographs, a video display, and an installation. A census of the work shows a trend unabashedly figurative, but likewise graphic and high concept. These artists continue to explore – as contemporary artists should – the Self, their environment, ongoing interests in race, politics, community, celebrity, childhood, religious and scientific knowledge. forays into place, memory, and time are not ignored. Living spaces, landscapes, outer-space and inner- consciousnesses are investigated. There are not just ideas here, but statements. Outrages. Pleas. all in the works of forty-one artists.

These works were created by individuals living and working in New Orleans since hurricane Katrina, which, along with 9/11/01, now serves as one of our national historical signifiers. To utter the phrase “post-Katrina” is an attempt to describe a sensibility, an assessment; not only an era in time, but an era of culture; a flux marked by alteration, change, cultural evolution. Since Katrina there has been an inflooding of visual artists into the city. They have joined the legions of native (and transplanted, pre-Katrina) New Orleans artists to create an artistic renaissance, a realignment of the city’s artistic nerve-center. This renaissance’s nexus is often cited as the “St. Claude Arts District,” where relatively affordable gallery space and art collectives have created a scene, a hipster destination for every second Saturday of the month when the galleries open their doors, serve libations, display the efforts of this new wealth of working artists who deserve – if nothing less than for their passionate commitment – appreciation and critical examination. The Saratoga Collection is the single most expansive collection attempting to encapsulate this post-Katrina artistic environment. The artists represented are not, strictly speaking, St. Claude artists. The photographer Bruce Keyes, for instance, has been shooting iconic New Orleans imagery -Mardi Gras Parades, second line funerals, Jazzfests and street musicians- for more than three decades. Dan Tague and Srdjan Loncar, while also members of Good Children Gallery (one of St. Claude’s signature artist collectives), are represented by Jonathan Ferrara Gallery and Arthur Rogers Gallery respectively. Ferrara and Rogers are long-held royals of Julia Street, the once lone-stop for New Orleans’ serious art collectors. This power shift away from Julia Street, away from the regional and tourist-bent art of the French Quarter, has given rise to a new artistic map of New Orleans so that to say “St. Claude Arts District” is much the same as saying “post-Katrina”; it is less a place than a movement.

The artists of the Saratoga Collection live and work in the Bywater, the Marigny, Mid-City, Broadmoor, and every neighborhood mapping Orleans parish. They proudly show their work where they can. Jim Sohr and Alex Podesta have some of the most arresting public pieces in uptown and Mid-City. Generic Arts Solutions recently exhibited in the New Orleans Museum of Art. Terrence Sanders has curated shows in the French Quarter and the ninth ward; his Jupiter Arts Projects, which has featured several Saratoga Collection artists, is located in the Marigny Triangle. The contributors to the Saratoga Collection are what is most easily referred to as emerging and mid-career artists. amongst them are pre- and post- MFA graduates, while others are self-taught. They are art market warriors, filling vans and carrying their wares to Miami, Pensacola, Houston, and Dallas. While Srdjan Loncar was a featured Prospect.1 artist, several others from this collection are without formal gallery representation.

Though the group is diverse and multi-disciplinary, a few themes can be applied, sorting the artists into smaller congregations. There are those whose works deal with self- identity (Miriam Waterman, Alex Podesta, Blaine Capone), the urban experience (Colin Meneghini, Rex Dingler, Brad Dupuy), race and social identity (Katrina Andry, Terrence Sanders), political outrage (Rajko Radovanovic), and the whimsically imaginative (Olivia Hill, Rebecca Rebouché, Barbi L’Hoste). artists such as Anthony Carriere, Generic Arts Solutions, Dan Tague, and Stephen Collier make conceptual games of contemporary art while drawing from the cornucopia of art’s historical context. This list is far from definitive. Terrence Sanders and Rex Digler can both easily be considered politically outraged. The photographic surveys of Jonathan Traviesa, Jameson Stokes, Libbie Allen, and Aubrey Edwards are also dealing with identity. This jumble of names can be reshuflled into those working representatively (Hayley Gaberlavage, Aaron Reichert, James Taylor Bonds) versus those graphically inclined (Paige Valente, Chris Jahncke, Stephen Kwok). Robert Tannen is both concerned with the natural order (as are Layla Messkoub, Miranda Lake and Kevin H. Jones), as well as the social order (along with Dave Greber).

Or perhaps I am personally unable to encapsulate these artists after having immersed myself so thoroughly in their works in order to write their individual essays. To my very good fortune, their works still speak to me one-by-one. The privilege of becoming steeped in any artist’s process is that the creation becomes unshakably individual, a voice unlost in the wilderness of art’s cacophonous terrain.

Inclusion in a collection creates an even playing field. The quality of work demonstrates an awareness of the ever- current dialogue of contemporary art, and an intent to engage it. Most of these artists desire recognition beyond the boarders of their city, are intent in joining the ranks of those operating on the global circuit, showing in biennials, selling in galleries that promote in the pages of glossy magazines.

While more often than not a curator, like an essayist, should be invisible, tucked behind the curtain so as not to come between the audience and the work they’ve arrived to view, something should be said of this collection’s curator, Terrence Sanders. His figurehead in New Orleans derives from methods that dance somewhere between that of a prize fighter and a conniving old Jew from my grandfathers’ days: a salesman hustler, kvetching, in-your-face, making things happen with bombast and a threat to burn down the building. he is New Orleans’ Don King. a self-proclaimed provocateur, Sanders earns this title by endlessly unsettling the New Orleans art establishment. his primary directive is that a renaissance is indeed taking place, that he is part of it, and that this renaissance should be nailed to the map of now. Sanders is new meat on the flesh, bone and muscle of New Orleans. his ability to launch magazines and galleries and organize this collection, to have the Saratoga Collection exhibited in The Ogden Museum of Southern art, speaks of his tenacity, as well as New Orleans’ ability to continue to adapt and evolve while maintaining its tradition of raucous creativity, even while under the perilous floodgates of hurricanes and oil spills.

What definitively defines this group is the moment, and the moment has been captured. The collection declares Right Here, Right Now! These works of art will serve as a permanent collection for the Saratoga Building, as well as a permanent marker for our new New Orleans.

Post-Katrina New Orleans

By BILL SASSER

Over the past two years I’ve been privileged to write about a number of the artists represented in the Saratoga Collection for Terrence Sanders’ ArtVoices Magazine, a publication that, like this collection, documents the vibrant new art scene that sprang from the flood-soaked soil of post-Katrina New Orleans.

As an all-purpose journalist, albeit one with an artistic bent, over the past five years I’ve written more about house gutting, crime, homelessness, public housing, and an oil spill than about art. Yet perhaps the most interesting and inspiring story I have witnessed was the unfolding of a new artistic energy that took root soon after the debris was cleared. Involving native talents, transplanted prodigies, and young artists who came from across the country, this energy was inspired by the creative possibilities of new beginnings and being a part of the life of a storied, romantic, yet always troubled city.

As the poets say, in destruction lies rebirth, and artists— many represented in the Saratoga Collection—were among the hardiest pioneers after Katrina. Just a month after the hurricane, the city saw its first post-disaster art opening. By the time Prospect.1 opened in the fall of 2008, nearly a dozen new galleries had opened along the newly designated St. Claude avenue Arts corridor. While artists of all ages and from across the city are represented in the Saratoga Collection, a preponderance of its energy comes from young artists plying their craft along St. Claude avenue, located in the city’s Ninth Ward, a section of the city perhaps hardest hit by Katrina. Anyone who was here in the weeks just after the flood couldn’t imagine the transformation this corridor had undergone, with artists and galleries undeniably leading its rebirth.

While journalism may be history’s first draft, art is a document that carries the personal visions and realities of a time and a place. future historians will undoubtedly turn to the artists of this collection to understand the New Orleans of our era.

In the Saratoga Collection, we find tributes to the city that existed before the flood, in works such as Bruce Davenport’s Marching Bands, Colin Meneghini’s Carrollton Junction (Story of Tyrone), and Jonathan Traviesa’s photography portrait series. Paintings by James Taylor Bonds and Brad Dupuy offer indelible images of the disaster’s immediate aftermath. Yet the bulk of the collection reaches beyond the boundaries of Katrina with art that addresses the broader human condition, with artists working figuratively, abstractly, and across mediums. While not explicitly addressing New Orleans or Katrina, these works of imagination nevertheless illustrate the city’s astonishingly fertile creative soil, which has nurtured its own creative souls and continues to draw others from around the world.

Every new wave needs its impresarios, its big jolts of irrepressible life which create and sometimes fight on their own terms. With the Saratoga Collection and efforts such as ArtVoices, artist-publisher-gallerist-collector Terrence Sanders has undoubtedly played a central role in laying the groundwork for the new generation of New Orleans art that sprang beautifully from the mud of disaster.

BEST FOOT FORWARD

BY DAN CAMERON

EMERGE, The selection of 41 artists who live and work in New Orleans presented at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in late 2010, handily qualifies as a landmark exhibition. As the first curatorial effort to lay the groundwork for collecting current work by New Orleans artists, Emerge is essentially an overview of the still-nascent Saratoga Collection, assembled by New Orleans artist/publisher Terrence Sanders in collaboration with the architect/ developer Marcel Wisznia. While corporate art collections are nothing new, and even corporate collections of New Orleans art far from rare, the notion of developing a cohesive public collection consisting exclusively of work produced in New Orleans after Katrina is Sanders’ own, and its significance as a public acknowledgment of the local art scene’s survival is a civically inspired piece of wisdom on his and Wisznia’s part. at its very least, Emerge’s usefulness as a template for other corporate entities to adapt in years ahead is inestimable.

Let’s face facts: until fairly recently, there was simply not much general interest in what New Orleans artists created in their studios. for most of us, even the phrase “New Orleans artist” suggested the kind of choice that was tied more to one’s lifestyle than one’s vocation. artists, one supposed, lived in New Orleans in order to be close to the music, the food, and the culture, and also that one can live pretty well in New Orleans on relatively no money. But as far as having an art career here was concerned, there were at least three very good reasons not to: (1) nobody in New Orleans should ever have to work as hard as it would take to further one’s career elsewhere; (2) careerism in New Orleans only gets you so far locally; and--most daunting of all--(3) nobody outside New Orleans was paying attention to the city’s art scene. At first the truth hurts, but being systematically excluded from every Whitney Biennial for decades on end provides a city as proud as New Orleans with its own twisted sense of purpose: if they don’t appreciate us, then we must be doing something right.

Just as they helped demolish an untold number of collective myths about New Orleans and washed away at least as many self-imposed delusions, the 2005 floods after Katrina radically upended the social and cultural identities of New Orleans’ visual artists, both within their city and relative to the outside world. after the population began to return and the shock of coming back had subsided, with jerry- rigged living and working conditions soon re-established inside newly revamped communities, New Orleans artists soon found themselves in an unexpectedly empowered situation vis-à-vis the rest of the country. The near-total lack of information about contemporary New Orleans art, which had been established dogma before Katrina, was suddenly, in the media centers of the country, a liability. With national foundations pouring money into the cultural rebuilding of the city, a New Orleans artist was suddenly a prized commodity. Whether they would be prized for their work, or simply for their survival skills, is still a subject of some debate.

Although by now it is mostly taken for granted that St. Claude avenue has become the epicenter of the New Orleans art scene, the implications of that piece of news are sometimes lost on casual observers. Just as commercial galleries followed the example of the Contemporary arts Center (CAC) by pioneering Julia Street during the 1980s--in the process becoming standard bearers for gentrification--so today the mostly cooperative galleries that dot St. Claude avenue between franklin Street and the bridge to the Lower Ninth Ward represent the zeitgeist of what it means to be a New Orleans artist at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. One of the first comments most visitors tend to have about the St. Claude neighborhood is that it seems too run-down and shabby to serve as an art center. Well-informed collectors, on the other hand, are usually more than happy to pay a few hundred dollars for artworks that two dozen blocks away would be priced at five or ten times that amount, which is no doubt one of the reasons Sanders was able to convince Wisznia that the moment to take the leap of faith and start his collection is (with only a slight margin for leeway) now.

From a demographic standpoint, the Saratoga Collection is as eclectic a mix as the neighborhood it aspires to represent. for one thing, the overwhelming majority of artists in Emerge were neither born nor raised in South Louisiana but instead moved to New Orleans at various times from other parts of the country and the world. While in other small cities that statistic might appear problematic, in New Orleans it is generally understood that most ambitious young artists who are native to the region leave for greener pastures in other parts of the country, and only a small fraction of them return later in life to put down roots. The Saratoga selection is eclectic in other ways, too, especially with regards to style. Like New York’s East Village during the 1980s--the place and time in recent art history which the current St. Claude scene most resembles--an unspoken battle of styles is being subtly played out between the post-modernist camp on one hand, who use photography, media, and printing, and a more street-savvy group of (mostly) painters who are more direct in their approach. Because Sanders lives and works in the precise epicenter of the scene, it is understandable that he would come away with an overview that errs, when it does, on the side of inclusiveness and generosity.

That being said, one dearly hopes that Wisznia’s commitment to the St. Claude scene is as long-lasting as Sanders’s own investment in the community has been -- not to mention that of the artists. for as impressive as the Saratoga Collection may be in terms of sheer volume and scope, the collection’s future depends to a great extent on whether or not its owner can see himself objectively as all important patrons of avant-garde art, from Peggy Guggenheim to Davis Joannou have seem themselves-- that is, as seekers unafraid to do their learning in public. Judging on the basis of New Orleans’ newfound visibility, the stakes are already quite high, and based solely on the evidence provided by the Ogden exhibition, the Saratoga Collection is already way out ahead of the pack.

Trauma Is A Powerful Frame

By NOAH BECKER

Terrence Sanders curated collection for New Orleans’ “Saratoga Building” is defined by Hurricane Katrina, much as New Orleans itself, even in its regeneration, is in many ways currently defined by the disaster. In what will perhaps become one of the key pieces of the collection, at least with respect to how it will be experienced by the public at large, Nick Hasslock has been commissioned to create a granite mural documenting names of the 1,830 recorded hurricane victims. This will be mounted onto a wall outside the Saratoga Building. Such a strong anchor cannot help but impact our interpretation of every piece encapsulated within; it sustains our focus on the disaster. Trauma cannot and should not be forgotten - nor must it be perpetually relived. It is important to recognize that the Saratoga Collection is not a lifeless monument that looks only backwards to a historical event. While acting as a marker for the reality of what was endured during that time, it is more deeply concerned with how that reality impacts the present and future.

Some works, such as those from Robert Tannen, Tony Nozero, Rajko Radovanovic, and Sanders himself do deal explicitly with trauma. Tannen’s Boulder #5 stretches the immediate context of the collection back almost 40 years with its reference to the devastation of hurricane Camile. These are more the exception than the rule, though - the collection is notable for expansive thematic territory explored through a variety of media. Pieces by Alex Podesta, David Gerber, and Libbie Allen delve into the psychology of identity; those by Rebecca Rebouche and Hannah Downey explore soft, poignant, and whimsical methods of addressing humanity; artists like Bruce Keyes, Aubrey Edwards, Jameson Stokes, and Jonathan Travesia employ their own unique aesthetics of photographic portraiture to investigate representation and perception of individuals. This is only a small segment of the ideas present. When framed by the explicit context driving this collection, each piece contributes to the creation of a complex perspective on the history and recovery of New Orleans. The Saratoga Collection continues a dialogue that exploded into America’s consciousness when we had no choice but to publicly acknowledge deep-running inequalities in access to support. In his essay “Best Foot Forward,” Dan Cameron situates New Orleans’ currently burgeoning contemporary art scene in relation to a historic “systematic exclusion” from the Whitney Biennial as perhaps a more general statement on disenfranchisement. When resources and support are not available from without, they must come from within. as evidenced by the breadth of this collection, it is empowering to learn how fertile the land in one’s own back yard is. The collection is not a plea to be accepted by a New York-centric art world, nor a closed reiteration of a traumatic experience, but a statement of confidence in a local community, artistically and in the broadest socio-cultural terms.