Figure_Drawing

Justin L. Burns 04/16/2013 Figure Drawing Dr. Barnes Figure Drawing Willie Birch was born in 1942 in New Orleans.  He received a Bachelors of Arts from Southern University in New Orleans in 1969 and a Master of Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 1973.  After residing in New York for many years and traveling to Africa, he returned to New Orleans in the mid 90s to reside in the 7th Ward. The work of Willie Birch is found in museum collections as well as public and private collections across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.  Birch was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1984 and again in 1989. In 1993 he was the recipient of a John Guggenheim Fellowship in sculpture. In 2002 Birch received the Mayor's Arts Award in New Orleans. Birchs’ recent work captures the dignity and the intimacy of friends in his hometown of New Orleans. His large-scale paintings on paper not only reveal sensitivity for the subject, but his knowledge of the formal qualities of painting really standout. Ghada Amer is a contemporary artist living and working in New York City. She emigrated from her birth country at age 11 and was educated in Paris and Nice. Much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality, particularly the representation of female nudes in art history as ideal objects rather than human beings with a sexuality and eroticism of their own. While she describes herself as a painter and has won international recognition for her abstract canvases embroidered with erotic motifs, Ghada Amer is a multimedia artist whose entire body of work is infused with the same ideological and aesthetic concerns. Her oeuvre includes examples of painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation. Arturo Herrera was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1959, and lives and works in New York and Berlin, Germany. He received a BA from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Herrera’s work includes collage, works on paper, sculpture, relief, wall painting, photography, and felt wall hangings. His work taps into the viewer’s unconsciousness; often intertwining fragments of cartoon characters with abstract shapes and partially obscured images that evoke memory and recollection. Using techniques of fragmentation, splicing, and re-contextualization, Herrera’s work is provocative and open-ended. For his collages, he uses found images from cartoons, coloring books, and fairy tales, combining fragments of Disney-like characters with violent and sexual imagery to make work that borders between figuration and abstraction and subverts the innocence of cartoon referents with a darker psychology. In his felt works, he cuts shapes from a piece of felt and pins the felt to the wall so that it hangs as a tangled form, resembling the drips and splatters of a Jackson Pollock painting. Herrera’s wall paintings also are recognizable imagery with abstraction, but on an environmental scale that he compares to the qualities of dance and music. A self-taught artist, Ferdinand referred to his work as "urban realism," often mixing social criticism with the exaggerated, self-aggrandizing style of rap in his uncompromising views of life in the New Orleans ghetto. His work is in the permanent collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Louisiana State Museum and House of Blues, and was featured in the New Orleans Museum of Art's Triennial exhibition in 2001. "Ms. 380", one of the pieces currently available here, was one of the pieces exhibited in that show.