Theo Tobiasse: Textural Emergence

Angela Fraleigh earned her MFA from Yale University School of Art and her BFA from Boston University. Her solo exhibitions include Hirschl & Adler Modern and PPOW Gallery in New York, Inman Gallery in Houston, TX, Peters Projects in Santa Fe, NM and James Harris Gallery in Seattle, WA.

Fraleigh has created site-specific solo projects for the Edward Hopper House Museum, the Vanderbilt Mansion Museum, the Everson Museum of Art, the Delaware Art Museum and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Her work is included in Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value & Worth at the Weatherspoon Art museum; traveling to The Hood Art Museum and Hunter Art Museum. Her work can be found in museum collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and she has been the recipient of several awards and residencies including the Yale University Alice Kimball English grant, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Brooklyn, NY, The CORE program in Houston, TX and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE among others. She currently lives and works in New York, NY and Allentown, PA where she is a Professor at Moravian University.

“What if the female characters we’ve come to know from art history-the lounging odalisques, the chorus that whispers in the background-present more than a voyeuristic visual feast? What if these characters embody a flickering of female power at work? Can we see these passive characters as subversive and powerful? And if we do, how might it affect women today and of the future?” – Angela Fraleigh

Born and raised in New Iberia, Louisiana, George Rodrigue (1944-2013) received his formal training at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now UL Lafayette) followed by the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, California. Unlike his classmates, he risked returning home, bravely choosing Louisiana over California and New York to pursue a career in painting. The year was 1969, and Rodrigue felt compelled, he said, “to graphically interpret the Cajun culture,” something the young artist recognized as disappearing in a modern world. His keen observation regarding his heritage, as well as the landscape of Southwest Louisiana, led Rodrigue on an extraordinary artistic and personal journey over the next 45 years. Furthermore, his simple, heartfelt decision to return home to Louisiana ultimately catapulted him to world-renowned status.

Rodrigue noted in his book, The Cajuns of George Rodrigue (1976, Oxmoor House), that when the Cajuns arrived from Canada following Le Grand Dérangement in 1755, “The waterways of Louisiana were the highways. We had no roads; we just had the water. They were the natural fairways for commerce, development, and everything necessary for settlers to expand.”

In Rodrigue’s paintings, the roads and rivers blend as one, and are one and the same. Rejecting the spacious sky of traditional European-style paintings, he pushes a large oak to the front of his canvas, cropping the top of the tree so that the light shines in the distance and is small beneath the branches. In hundreds of his paintings, it is a river or road that invites the viewer into Rodrigue’s imaginary world, one that feels like Louisiana, and onto a painted path that leads to a symbolic, hopeful light.

When the Blue Dog enters Rodrigue’s world, his paintings become increasingly more colorful, reflecting changes in his life and outlook. Unlike the black bayous of his Cajun paintings, Rodrigue’s Blue Dog interpretations are surreal in both design and color. Oftentimes the rivers are blue, red, yellow, and abstracted, blending and swirling almost indiscernibly with the land and sky. Ultimately, paintings from the last year of Rodrigue’s life, as featured in this exhibition, ponder his life’s journey as never before, borrowing from the symbolism of his early paintings and the optimism of his later ones. In these intensely personal expressions, Rodrigue once again invites us into his world with a river, this time contemplating not only his life’s journey and artistic legacy, but also, with hope and curiosity, the next part of his adventure.

Julie Crews is an oil painter. She grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, but has called many other places home. A few include northern California, which taught her how to ease into her 20’s; Louisiana, which enriched her southern vision for ten years; and Huntsville, Alabama, where she now lives with her husband and five children. She operates an open studio and gallery in a 122-year-old cotton mill, repurposed as Lowe Mill Arts and Entertainment.

Julie paints what takes her out of the studio: the life it takes to nurture a family. When she is in the studio she escapes certain domestic tethers, but on the canvas before her remain the scenes of her life. Fires burn in the backyard. Cars wait at a red light. Children swim and leaves settle on the forest floor. Weather, traffic, landscapes encountered while running errands around town, and her interactions with the people closest to her influence her work, naturally. But recreating these scenes gives permanence to the emotional undercurrents of her life.

I’ll Be Right With You is an ongoing narrative of the pursuit of living a well-curated life, and even though curating her emotions is one of her most challenging charges, Julie Crews does not hold back. With works entitled I Can Do Hard Things and Wake Me Please When This is Over, she is hopeful that every soul viewing the exhibition I’ll Be Right With You will find work that resonates with them in a deep and meaningful way.