Art exhibit “A Bayou State of Mind” tells the story of the Louisiana experience through the eyes of artists from all corners of the community.
“A Bayou State of Mind” was curated by Michelle Schulte, the Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the LSU Museum of Art. The exhibit features 33 artists and comprises over 100 total contemporary art pieces—including paintings, sculptures, photographs and prints—that convey the artists’ own interpretations of Louisiana.
“The premise of this show is really to explore how artists interpret, react to and have impressions of Louisiana,” explained Schulte. “What is the spirit of Louisiana, and how artists translate that visually. So, it’s not a landscape show. It’s really about reaction and about memory and about inspiration.”
The exhibit is split into three different categories—Urban Experience, Water and Rural Memory—because it was difficult for Schulte to fully encapsulate the Louisiana experience under a single heading.
Urban Experience is the first room of the exhibit upon entering. This exhibit, set apart by its bright, warm colors and large-scale paintings, centers around the Black experience and city life in urban Louisiana.
This room features mixed-media collage painter Vitus Shell, photo-realist Shirley Rabe’ Masinter and more, as well as LSU professor of photography Johanna Warwick. Her series “The Yellow Book’s Road” calls attention to urban communities divided by highway and interstate systems.
“A lot of times, these highways would come through and cut these communities in half and lead to poverty and the disjointing of communities,” Schulte said. “So she’s been going back and finding these areas and taking photographs of them, and she travels throughout America along the roadway system to do these.”
The Water collection is another theme deeply rooted in Louisiana culture, and the artworks on display represent both its destructive capabilities and the potent memories that flow through it. For example, sculptor Gene Koss’ glass and steel sculptures in reaction to the disastrous Hurricane Katrina are a sharp contrast to ceramicist Steve Rucker’s brightly colored bass fish sculpture hanging high in the entryway.
“We wanted to focus on water, but we didn’t want it to be destruction and disaster,” Schulte said. “We wanted it to be more subtle to get the effect of water while having some really straight-up water imagery.”
However, the pièce de résistance of the entire exhibit is George Rodrigue’s “The Bayou Collection” that spans the entire back wall of Rural Memory. The Louisiana native completed the series of 40 oil paintings between 1981 and 1984 just in time for the 1984 World Fair held in New Orleans.
Each painting in the collection is based on different Cajun ghost stories from Chris Segura’s “Bayou.” “The Bayou Collection” is painted in Rodrigue’s iconic Cajun surrealist style, and the dark, gloomy color palette adds a mysterious quality to every painting. The collection is perhaps best known for the painting “Watchdog,” which is Rodrigue’s first-ever rendition of his Blue Dog.
Based on reference pictures of his studio dog Tiffany, Rodrigue’s Blue Dog in “Watchdog” is his unique take on the loup-garou, a werewolf in Cajun legend. However, this canine is anything but scary. Set against a haunting backdrop, the Blue Dog’s bright yellow eyes, big ears and unique color instantly endeared him to audiences, and he soon became Rodrigue’s signature character.
“He really kind of liked the dog,” Schulte said, “so he started putting the dog in different things. And then somebody at a gallery said, ‘what’s up with that blue dog?’ and he overheard them. And in his mind, he just kept thinking Blue Dog, Blue Dog, Blue Dog, and that’s sort of what started it.”
Overall, “A Bayou State of Mind” took Schulte two years of planning, researching, meeting with artists and borrowing artworks to organize. It all started with a moment of inspiration that the curator latched onto and ran with.
“I get an inspiration,” Schulte explained, “then I decide, ‘how am I going to put that together, and what am I going to do?’ So I sort of come up with a thesis. It’s like writing a paper, and so you come up with that thesis line: ‘in this exhibition, I want to…’ fill in the blank.”
To celebrate the opening of “A Bayou State of Mind,” the LSU Museum of Art will host a reception that is free to the public on September 11 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Guests will have the chance to browse the fascinating exhibit and also meet some of the artists involved in the collection. Schulte hopes that the exhibit prompts visitors to consider the diverse and nuanced culture ingrained in every aspect of the Louisiana experience.
“It’s not just about this antebellum fairytale that you sort of see in a lot of artwork about outsiders that come in and take photographs of the South and then leave,” said Schulte. “There’s so much more to a community that exists. And I’d like for them to come in here and see how these artists have interpreted their memories, interpreted their feelings visually.”
The LSU Museum of Art is located on the fifth floor of The Shaw Center for the Arts at 100 Lafayette St. The exhibit is open Tuesday-Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and is closed on Mondays. Admission is free to LSU students and faculty who present their student and faculty IDs.
