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Events
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The River is the Road: Paintings by George Rodrigue X
The River is the Road: Paintings by George Rodrigue
May 23 - October 19, 2024
About the artist: 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 the 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.
This exhibition was organized by the Life & Legacy Foundation and Art Tour with Wendy Rodrigue
The museum will also be auctioning a SIGNED and framed George Rodrigue Blue Dog screen-print. This work will be on display at the exhibition and will be sold via an online silent auction. For information on when this auction will open, please sign up for our newsletter at masurmuseum.org.
IMAGE:
He Stopped Loving Her Today (2013)
Acrylic on canvas
Collection Wendy Rodrigue
On view May 23 – October 19, 2024
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Julie Crews: I’ll Be Right With You X
Julie Crews: I’ll Be Right With You
August 22 - November 2, 2024
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.
Upcoming Exhibitions
Peter Jones
November 21, 2024 – February 8, 2025
On View: November 21, 2024 – February 8, 2025
About the Exhibition: TBA
About the Artist:
Peter Jones is a figurative painter with a deep respect for the abstract accomplishments of the 20th Century. He grew up in the artists’ community of Woodstock, New York, where his mother painted portraits and his father painted mural commissions for the Federal Government projects during the Depression. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1969, and focused on still life painting in the early 70s during his first teaching experience at Sullins College. Following seven years as art director of Vermont Life Magazine he came to Louisiana Tech in 1980, and taught there for 31 years. During that period he had two one-man shows at A.M Adler Fine Arts in New York City, and one-man shows at Amherst College and in Woodstock, New York, Charleston, West Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia. He had a 25 year retrospective in Ruston in 2005 and an exhibition of still lifes at the Alexandria Museum in 2006. Since his retirement he has continued to exhibit still lifes and landscapes in group shows in Louisiana and national juried shows. In 2023 he had a retrospective exhibition at ULM’s Bry Gallery.
62nd Annual Juried Competition
Feb 20 - May 3, 2025
Sponsored by
The Northeast Louisiana Arts Council
Juror: TBD
Exhibition on view Feb 20 – May 3, 2025
Public Reception: TBD
About the Exhibition
The Masur Museum of Art’s Annual Juried Competition showcases contemporary artists throughout the United States of America working in any medium. First started in 1964, the Annual Juried Competition is the Masur Museum’s longest-running tradition and one of its best-reviewed exhibitions each year. Annually, 700-1000 recent artworks are submitted by artists all over the nation, in all styles and media. The Masur Museum is proud to offer cash awards totaling $3,200.
Submissions open October 1, 2024
Swimming in the Sky: Cliff Tresner
August 21, 2025 – November 1, 2025
Clifford Tresner attended Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN, and earned a BFA in Sculpture/Woodworking in 1990. He received his MFA from The University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1994.
Mr. Tresner began his teaching career in earnest in 1997 as an assistant professor of art, tenure track at the University of Louisiana, Monroe, LA, where he taught all levels of sculpture and drawing. Mr. Tresner moved to teaching painting and drawing in 2013. He has held many positions over his career, most recently as the William D. Hammond Endowed Professor of Liberal Arts, 2017 – 2020 and the Art Program Coordinator at the University of Louisiana Monroe.
Past Exhibitions
The Unchosen Ones: RJ Kern
November 7 - December 22, 2023
The Unchosen Ones: Portraits of an American Pastoral, is an interdisciplinary installation of documentary photography showcasing relationships between agricultural youth and animals in the Midwest US. “The Unchosen Ones” project received international recognition, which reflects a universal appeal. The work debuted as a feature in National Geographic magazine (November 2017) and has been exhibited as solo exhibitions in the Plains Art Museum and the Griffin Museum of Photography.
The Unchosen Ones depicts the bloom of youth and the mettle of the kids who grow up on farms, reminding us how resilient children can be when confronted with life’s inevitable disappointments. The formal quality of the lighting and setting endow these young people with a gravitas beyond their years, revealing self-direction dedication in some, and in others, perhaps, the pressures of traditions imposed upon them. The portraits capture a particular America, a rural world, and a time in life when the layered emotions of youth are laid bare.
Christiane Drieling: Earth
August 24 – October 21, 2023
The Masur Museum of Art Presents:
Earth An exhibition of work by artist Christiane Drieling Exhibition on view in the Upper River Gallery of the Masur Museum August 24 – October 21, 2023
Public Reception: Thursday, September 21, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Talk by the Artist: 6:30 pm
Location: Upper River Gallery, Masur Museum of Art, 1400 South Grand Street *
FREE and Open to the Public
About the Artist:
Christiane Drieling is a collage artist based in Ruston, Louisiana. Born in Germany, she moved to the United States in 2001 and spent time living in Chicago, Illinois. With a master’s degree in Sociology, Psychology, and German Literature, Drieling initially focused on creating whimsical and playful handcrafted objects based on German storytelling themes. Her collections of hand puppets, marionettes, small ornaments, and toys gained recognition at juried art events in and around Chicago. In recent years, Drieling has shifted her focus to collage, exploring themes of individual dilemmas and interpersonal conflicts, including culture clashes, political issues, and societal visions. Her thought-provoking work has garnered attention and praise, establishing her as a successful and respected artist in the contemporary art scene.
About the Exhibition, from the Artist:
A few years ago, I received a nearly complete but outdated set of the “LIFE World Library” books from a close friend. She, being a teacher, had used them as supplementary material in her cultural lessons, and I know and love many of the students who had previously flipped through the yellowed pages. The “LIFE World Library” series was published in the 1960s and was composed of about thirty hardcover books, each painting a picture of a specific country or region, focusing on many angles of its economics and culture. All volumes have solid color backs in a variety of jewel tones, especially deep greens and blues, as well as rich red tones. A small simple line graphic of our globe, usually in white but sometimes black, is printed in the center of the back cover of each book.
Based on these hardcover backs, I have created a series of works focusing on different aspects of how we view our planet, how we feel about it, and how we treat it. The series consists of 24 pieces, one for each hour of the day. The day begins with an end and ends with a beginning. There really is no particular order to the pieces; each work begins and ends in itself. To create the images for the “Earth” series, I have worked with collage techniques, mainly using paper elements from various sources. My goal was to keep the majority of the images simple and the original surfaces as visible as possible.
Sometimes I added sewing thread, inherited from my beloved grandmother, who had sewn and mended my dresses when I was a child. I like to incorporate sewing thread in my work for the many beautiful memories I have of her, and also because of its purpose and the these it conveys: to create and to hold together. I began working on this series in February 2020, and I finished the last piece in April 2022. The two years in between are marked by a number of devastating hardness tests that our global society has not been able to pass yet. The 24 images are my response to what has been happening on the world stage and the effects the affairs have had on my emotional state of mind. I have responded with outrage and anxiety, with numbness and depression – but also with hope and the strong desire to find the goof in each new day.
*Please note the main building of the museum is closed for renovations until November 23. During this time the museum’s River Galleries will be open with this exhibition as well as highlights from the museum’s permanent collection, followed by an exhibition of work by RJ Kern opening November 7.
A. Hays Town and the Architectural Image of Louisiana
May 25 - August 5, 2023
A. Hays Town and the
Architectural Image of Louisiana
May 25 – August 5, 2023
On loan from the Hilliard University Art Museum
Public Reception: Thursday, June 22, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Talk by LouAnne Greenwald, Director of the Hilliard University Art Museum: 6:30 pm
Location: Masur Museum of Art, 1400 South Grand Street
FREE and Open to the Public
About the Exhibition:
A(lbert) Hays Town (1903-2005) is likely the most recognized and beloved of the twentieth-century Louisiana architects. Town practiced for more than 70 years and was remarkably prolific, designing educational, office, commercial, and public buildings, and hundreds of private residences. A. Hays Town and the Architectural Image of Louisiana focuses on his residential architecture, on which he concentrated after the mid-1960s. The exhibition explores the historic sources and popular success of Town’s residential designs, which created recognizable images of a shared homeland.
This exhibition includes architectural models, blueprints, photographs, architectural drawings, and artifacts from A. Hays Town’s homes.
Copies of the book A. Hays Town and the Architectural Image of Louisiana by Carol McMichael Reese will be for sale at the Masur Museum of Art at $45 each, with proceeds benefiting both the Hilliard University Art Museum and the Masur Museum of Art.
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