home
The St. Claude Collective represents the work of some of the best artists in New Orleans. This exhibition reaffirms their exalted spirit and their creative brilliance which has compelled them to wrench, out of the seemingly endless misery of our city, great bodies of work.
It is too much to say this is a curated exhibition; I merely took it upon myself to contact the artists and offer them an arbitrarily designated space to work with in the former Universal Furniture Building. Almost all the artists were friends of mine and most had shown at my gallery over the years. I knew them as consummate professionals and had confidence they would dedicate themselves to making The St. Claude Collective exhibition the best group show in the history of the city. The artists were drawn from all the major galleries in the city and all have agreed to donate half of their sales to the Healing Center which will occupy the site by next year.
I would not have had the luxury of organizing this exhibit without the support of my other friends in the Salon. We’ve met, dutifully, every Sunday, beginning immediately after Katrina, to devise ways of counteracting the adverse criticism, much of it undeserved, which threatened the cultural and economic stability of New Orleans. Beyond those efforts, and among other things, we helped draft and pass the most stringent sustainable building codes in the nation. Certainly, however, our most ambitious project is to convert the storm damaged and looted Universal Furniture Building into the New Orleans Healing Center (NOHC).
Pres Kabakoff, the convener of our Salon group, one of New Orleans’ most innovative and community minded developers, and the principle owner of Universal, understood my concern, expressed in November, 2007, for the many New Orleans artists who would not be represented during Prospect.1. He and my diverse group of colleagues in the Salon understood also that, in a way, with this exhibition in the raw space of the Universal Furniture building, our interest in providing a healing environment for our neighborhoods could begin even before the Healing Center came into being. I am grateful for all their generous support.
www.stclaudecollective.org
For purchase information: 504 710 4506
Above all else, we commend the great vision of Dan Cameron who invented Prospect. 1 to illuminate New Orleans.