Also on display:
Young at Art Gallery, 40 Acres
Celebrating My Life: A Student Exhibit based upon Willie Birch artwork
July 17 – September 8, 2007
Underground Books Gallery
NOLA Though Our Eyes: Sac High Visits New Orleans
July 17 – September 8, 2007
For press release, click here.
Celebrating Freedom is the first major museum survey of Willie Birch’s amazing figurative drawings, in which he documents rituals and celebrations of African-American life in his native New Orleans. Although Birch’s funky, folk-inspired sculptures are widely known, these highly detailed charcoal drawings are new to the art public. Birch’s mature works, many as large as seven by eleven feet, are a tour-de-force of draftsmanship—enriched by the artist’s keen social observations and character studies. Here, he pays homage to everyday urban life and the tight communal bonds within the Black neighborhoods of New Orleans.
Celebrating Freedom: The Art of Willie Birch includes eighteen grand renditions of subjects such as Mardi Gras krewes and parades; Martin Luther King Day festivities; family celebrations; Sunday rituals; baptisms; and jazz funerals – all made prior to Hurricane Katrina. Birch is fascinated by the retention of African roots in the dress, music, dance and rituals that enliven and unite the African-American community in contemporary times. Celebrating Freedom documents such syncretic traditions, and honors the contribution of the African past to the American mainstream. It enables the mainstream public to see beyond the stereotypes of New Orleans culture and to understand the historic legacy of core customs.
Birch returned to his home town in the late 1990s, after spending two decades in New York, and now lives near the French Quarter. The communal street life and impromptu parades of his neighborhood figure prominently in this body of work. Birch also focuses on Mardi Gras [Fat Tuesday]—a distinctly regional pre-Lenten revelry, unlike anything else in the United States, that is a huge tourist draw and a compelling part of New Orleans lore.
Willie Birch was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1942. He received his BA from Southern University in New Orleans and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. He exhibits his work widely across the country and is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, among many others.
Funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, and accompanied by a book co-published with Hudson Hills Press. The exhibit also travelled to the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and will travel to New Orleans for its closing exhibition at the Centemporary Arts Center.
