Gallery

Director's Statement
 

I never thought at age 23 in 1977, after driving cross country in my VW bug, that years later, I would be looking back at what I've created with such pride. It's been fortyfive years on Royal Street in New Orleans. With the help of superbly talented artists, loyal, discerning collectors and an abundance of amazing people, we have created a stellar art experience. We are womanowned and run business welcoming all people.
We are just over the worst of one of the most challenging periods that we, the global family, have shared in most of our lives. It has given us a chance to step back, breathe, and do things a little differently. We never stopped working, nor did our artists and we continued to present art to you, our collectors. The team is smaller, and we changed our days open to Wednesday through Saturday and for the first time ever, we are closed one week in August and the week around Christmas.
We've lived through floods, hurricanes, economic downturns and a global pandemicall the while exhibiting over two hundred artists and hosting more than five hundred events. We currently show twenty-five accomplished artists, working in a wide variety of media — oil, acrylic, dry pigments, glass, bronze, steel, clay, fiberglass, resin, aluminum and photography. We continue to present a range of styles for our collectors: abstraction, realism, fantasy, surrealism, pop and expressionism. My goal is and has always been to seek out and make available for fellow art lovers excellent art and to provide a stimulating and enriching gallery for all to enjoy. Our gallery is a perfect setting for contemporary art with broad windows, fourteen-foot ceilings and 1860 Italian marble. The space resonates with light. The second floor of the gallery adds another space we call Evolve. We have held a few fantastic events there and look forward to welcoming you.In recent years we have lost several wonderful artists who we loved. Charlie Thysell died in April of 2020, Steve Taylor in 2021 and just recently Christian Vey died in 2022. We miss them.

I am thankful for all the artists and art lovers who have made this effort so completely fulfilling.

Much Love and gratitude,

Angela

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Time flies. Days can slip by, almost surreptitiously, until decades have passed. Angela King noticed that recently when she realized that her gallery is 30 years old. She has been its director for decades, starting when it was called Hanson Gallery and featured work that was to contemporary art what "easy listening" is to FM radio. After buying the gallery from its California-based owner 10 years ago, King included art that, while still accessible, has more psychological or spiritual depth. The current Marlene Rose expo of cast glass sculptures is decorous while resonating the timeless aura associated with African masks, Buddha heads, totems and ancient artifacts. Local art buffs will note some parallels with the cast glass concoctions of local maestro Mitchell Gaudet, whose surreal works often feature martyred saints whose suffering on behalf of others reflects traditional Roman Catholic notions of empathy. Both studied glass sculpture at Tulane University, but Rose's serene Buddha heads, such as Purple Lotus (pictured), evoke a meditative sort of empathy meant to transcend suffering itself. Royal Street's competitive distractions can be daunting, but King's humanistic focus makes her offerings personable.

Belgian artist Eddy Stevens' dreamlike portraits, painted in a magic realist style reminiscent of Jan van Eyck, Lucian Freud and our late local barfly genius Noel Rockmore, evoke characters from fantastical fiction while looking oddly at home in the French Quarter. Local artist Aaron Reichert's manically dynamic and sinewy gestural paintings of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein also hark to Rockmore — especially the eerie depth and otherworldly funk that characterized his jazz portraits. But Woodrow Nash's large "African Nouveau" clay sculptures are unlike anything else. With hints of Nubian statuary and traditional West African wood figures, some are rendered in ceramics so vividly hued that they seem almost psychedelic. Despite their prismatic charisma, his figures seem pensive, even reflective, like timeless witnesses to their own history who have been left in stunned silence by what they have seen.

Temples of Glass D. Eric Bookhardt Oct 5, 2015 - 2:27 pm