Open | Tu-Fr 9-5pm, Sat 12-5pm 
1400 S Grand St, Monroe, LA 71202 
318-329-2237 
Events
-
American Cowboy: Alternative Landscapes X
American Cowboy: Alternative Landscapes
May 22, 2025 - August 1, 2025
The cowboy, like the landscape, has always been a surface onto which America projects its desires. In the 19th-century, as railroads carved paths across the continent and Manifest Destiny reshaped the terrain, so too was identity rewritten—masculinity codified, indigeneity suppressed. This exhibition engages with this Western legacy not through realism, but through rupture: abstraction, iconography, and myth reconfigured.
The works on view span paintings, prints, and sculpture. Colorado-based artist Grace Kennison contorts the visual vocabulary of the West, fusing iconography, femininity, and surreal embodiment into new, parodic forms that explore the landscape as body and the body as a woman. In Twin Becoming & It Hurts, a mountainous, fleshy desert form is held by blue, cloud-like arms—both tender and monstrous figures both human and creature. Louisiana-based artist Jason Byron Nelson renders the cowboy as an anonymous interlude, faceless and confrontational in the dust.
From our permanent collection, Salvador Dalí’s Cabarello distances the Spanish rider from his landscape and reveals the near-mechanical anatomy of the horse, its musculature rendered as gears and panels, its movement more automaton than animal. Dalí exposes the machinery of myth itself: how power is performed, how conquest becomes choreography.
Other works in the display explore landscapes as places of memory and omission. Prints and paintings blur the boundary between ground and sky. Sculptural pieces recall the texture of parchment and bone through materials like clay and handmade paper. Kachina Doll, drawn from our collection, gestures to Pueblo cosmology not as artifact but as an enduring presence, bounded, buried, yet still resonant beneath the myths of the West.
In this exhibition, icon becomes relic, and relic becomes question. If modernity promised clarity, these works resist it.
Image Credit: Grace Kennison, Invisible Bodies, 32″ x 24″, acrylic on canvas
Upcoming Exhibitions
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.
Supported by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council, as administered by the Northeast Louisiana Arts Council. Funding has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Past Exhibitions
Angela Fraleigh: With Ready Eyes
May 23 - August 3, 2024
About the Exhibition:
Angela Fraleigh’s paintings explore the rich history of academic and avant-garde art, focusing on themes of gender, sexuality, femininity, and power dynamics. Her work intertwines realism and abstraction to create lush, complex pieces ranging from intimate portraits to monumental figure paintings that reimagine women’s roles in art history, literature, and contemporary media.
Fraleigh’s work challenges viewers to reconsider the passive roles of female characters in art history. “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 if affect women today and of the future?” – Angela Fraleigh
About the Artist:
Born in 1976 in Beaufort, SC, Fraleigh earned her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from Boston University. Her solo exhibitions have appeared in Hirschl & Adler Modern, PPOW Gallery in New York, Inman Gallery in Houston, Peters Projects in Santa Fe, and James Harris Gallery in Seattle. She has also created site-specific projects for the Edwards Hopper House Museum, the Vanderbilt Mansion Museum, and the Everson Museum of Art, among others. Fraleigh currently lives and works in New York, NY, and Allentown, PA, where she is a Professor at Moravian University.
On view May 23 – August 3, 2024
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
IMAGE:
He Stopped Loving Her Today (2013)
Acrylic on canvas
Collection Wendy Rodrigue
On view May 23 – October 19, 2024
61st Annual Juried Competition
Feb 21 - May 4, 2024
Sponsored by The Northeast Louisiana Arts Council
Juror: Kerry Inman, Inman Gallery of Houston, TX
Exhibition on view Feb 22 – May 4, 2024
Public Reception: March 21, 2024 from 5:30 – 7:30 PM
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.
Announcing this year’s guest juror: Kerry Inman
Kerry Inman is the owner and director of Inman Gallery in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1990, the gallery has hosted over 200 exhibitions in its 33-year history. The gallery represents emerging and established artists with a connection to Texas, as well as the estate of Texas modernist Dorothy Antoinette (Toni) LaSelle. Kerry also serves on the board of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.
Accepted 61st Juried Competition Artists
Image:
Edgar Cano-Lopez, Chrome Dance (Best in Show)
Discover more as a member
As a member you will enjoy many benefits while supporting one of Monroe’s important cultural landmarks.
Join Today