A moveable feast of art
The art district in New Orleans shifts like the swampy foundation beneath the city’s streets. For many years, the hub was Royal Street and to a lesser extent Chartres Street in the French Quarter. When the Arthur Roger Gallery moved to the Warehouse District in 1988, 12 galleries followed, giving Julia Street the moniker “Gallery Row.” For the more intrepid, St. Claude Avenue has become the post-Katrina center for cutting-edge galleries and unconventional artist-run spaces, collectively called SCAD (St. Claude Arts District). (One of the galleries—Barrister’s—claims to feature artists “so far removed from the mainstream that the term ‘outsider artist’ doesn’t even begin to describe their current location in space and time.”)
Among the gems of St. Claude, and leading the list for art lovers on the hunt for more than a painting that will match their living-room sofa, is the Antenna Gallery, founded by Press Street, a nonprofit dedicated to stimulating art and literature in NOLA. Its two-story building is used, in their words, to produce “an array of risk-taking solo and group exhibitions that engage and interact with the New Orleans community.”
Info
Address 3718 St. Claude Street, New Orleans, LA 70117, +1 504.298.3161, www.press-street.org | Hours Tue–Sun noon–5pm| Tip If you happen to be in New Orleans around Thanksgiving, each year Press Street produces the Draw-a-thon, a free 24-hour drawing extravaganza where more than 700 artists and non-artists of all ages make art based on a theme, often in inventive ways, like tracing shadows on walls. Press Street describes the event as “creating for the sake of creating, process over product.”
Since 2008, Antenna has hosted a variety of never-boring exhibitions, like My Mom Says My Work Has Really Improved, a group show that presented the artists’ childhood works next to their current works, and monu_MENTAL, in which the artists made imaginative revisions to existing local monuments. Another solo exhibition displayed a series of machines that had been repurposed into art-making gadgets, like a weed cutter rigged to draw grass, and a car with a retrofitted engine that was made to sketch a rudimentary self-portrait when visitors sat inside and turned the steering wheel.
A great time to do a gallery crawl through SCAD is on the second Saturday night of the month, when many venues hold openings for new exhibitions.
Back
To the online map