Ogden Museum of Southern Art to Open Six Exhibitions

NEW ORLEANS, LA.- The Ogden Museum of Southern Art opens the new year with six exhibitions that explore the art of the South from different perspectives. Three exhibitions—Jorge Otero: Un-restored Miami, Mario Petrirena: Soul House and a special installation by José Bedia are part of Sí Cuba!, a presentation throughout New Orleans of arts, music and culture related to Cuba. Master North Carolina basketmaker Billie Ruth Sudduth’s exhibition showcases the art of basketry, and is complemented by a Center for Southern Craft and Design exhibition featuring three Southern basketmakers, which include Sudduth. New Southern Photography features recent acquisitions from the Museum’s Permanent Collection. These works are by established and emerging Southern photographers.

These exhibitions have a special opening night on Thursday, January 14 during Ogden After Hours featuring Pepe Coloma and Friends—a Cuban musician who is putting together an ensemble of musicians to bring Latin rhythms to the Museum. The exhibitions are on view until April 11, 2010.

José Bedia
Jorge Otero: Un-restored Miami
Mario Petrirena: Soul House
The Museum features works by three Cuban-born, Southern artists as part of Sí Cuba!: Mario Petrirena: Soul House is an exhibition of his sculptural clay pieces. These pieces have repeating motifs of the human head and the archetypical form of a pitched-roof house, addressing issues of abandonment and whether the home or body holds the soul. Jorge Otero: Un-restored Miami is an exhibition of color photographs of Miami in the early 1980s, when the city’s faded glamour retained a poignant beauty. The José Bedia exhibition, a collaboration with the Heriard-Cimino Gallery in New Orleans, will include a site-specific drawing done on a wall in the Museum. Bedia uses a personal, pan-humanist language informed by the religious, mythical and magical symbols of primitive cultures to explore concepts of identity and place in his large-scale drawings.

Billie Ruth Sudduth
A master basketmaker from North Carolina, Billie Ruth Sudduth’s baskets are made of reed splints, split oak, round reed, henna, and iron oxide, and inspired by Shaker and Appalachian baskets, as well as the Fibonacci sequence (in which the same proportions occur throughout nature, with the distance between the numbers in the proportion theory approximating the golden mean). The detail of her work makes her baskets sinuously sculptural, incorporating a sophisticated color palette.

New Southern Photography
A survey of recent acquisitions by the Museum. Artists include: Michael Meads, Will Steacy, Debbie Fleming Caffery, Sye Williams, Deborah Willis, Mary Tortorici, Leslie Addison and others. The photographs in this exhibition showcase the diversity and wealth of talent in Southern CTD. photography. Images of architecture, landscapes and portraits are graphic, dreamy or documentary—all imbued with a sense of place.

Center for Southern Craft and Design
The Museum’s Center for Southern Craft and Design presents Contemporary Baskets: Billie Ruth Sudduth, Emma Hughes & Cindy Kilgore. The Center showcases baskets by three Southern master craftspeople—Billy Ruth Sudduth (North Carolina), Emma Hughes (Louisiana) and Cindy Kilgore (Louisiana)—who show the intricacy and diversity of this craft. These baskets are also for sale. This showcase is funded in part by the Windgate Charitable Foundation.