Robert and Julian Onderdonk

Julian Onderdonk, In the Hills of the Spanish Oaks, c. 1917
Collection of Susan and Claude Albritton

Julian Onderdonk (1882 – 1922), known as “the father of Texas painting,” is celebrated for his poetic renderings of the South Texas Landscape. Trained in his teenage years by his father, the realist painter Robert Onderdonk, Julian spent two formative years on Long Island in New York City, studying with William Merritt Chase, one of the most important painters and teachers of his generation. After an attempt to establish a studio in New York City, Julian returned to San Antonio in 1909, and painted the Texas landscape until his untimely death in 1922.

Robert Onderdonk, Portrait of Julian Onderdonk, 1892

Roger Houston Ogden Collection

While not the first or only painter to capture the shimmering blue Texas landscape with bluebonnets in blossom, Julian Onderdonk is by far the most popular. In 1901, ten years before Onderdonk painted his first bluebonnet landscape, the bluebonnet was named the official Texas flower. This series captures a popular subject with a strong regional identity, using the newly-developed style of American Impressionism.

Julian Onderdonk, Bluebonnet Scene with Girl, 1920

Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Gift of Roger H. Ogden Collection

Julian Onderdonk’s style was formed by his studies with William Merritt Chase in 1901 – 1902 in Southampton, New York. There, Chase and his students painted out-of-doors (en plein air), exploring the boundary between perceptual truth and the subjective impressionistic approach of capturing light as it strikes the eye. Lacking the theoretical base of French Impressionism, American Impressionism was rooted more deeply in felt response to the landscape, rendered in a traditional compositional scheme, with a clear foreground, middle ground and background. What Onderdonk shares with the French Impressionists is the love of painting out-of-doors, the exploration of the times of day, an interest in capturing the play of light on canvas, and the subjective filtering of the landscape through the eyes of the artist.

Julian Onderdonk, A Spring Morning, Bluebonnets, San Antonio, 1913

Private Collection

Julian Onderdonk’s bluebonnet paintings stand as important examples of a moment of transition in American art. They also represent a burgeoning concern with place and regional identity, subjects that became increasingly important within the context of American art in the decades after his death in 1922. ~DH

Paintings by Robert and Julian Onderdonk will fill three galleries of the Ogden's Goldring Hall through January 2, 2011.

Walker Evans' Louisiana: Photographs from the Collection of Jessica Lange

Walker Evans
[Greek Revival Townhouse with Men Seated in Dourway, New Orleans]
March 1935
Silver gelatin print

Walker Evans is recognized as the most important and influential American photographer of his generation. Working in what he called the “vernacular style,” Evans forged an approach that preferred the everyday to the precious and the factual over the artful. Although he often photographed inanimate objects, with architecture and signage being among his most lasting subjects, he also captured the harsh realities of American life in the grips of the Great Depression. John Szarkowski, long time curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, observed in Looking at Photographs (1973):

“Evans's work seemed at first almost the antithesis of art. It was puritanically economical, precisely measured, frontal, unemotional, dryly textured, insistently factual, qualities that seemed more appropriate to a bookkeeper's ledger than to art. But in time it became clear that Evans's pictures, however laconic in manner, were immensely rich in expressive content. His work constitutes a personal survey of the interior resources of the American tradition, a survey based on a sensibility that found poetry and complexity where most earlier travelers had found only drab statistics or fairy tales.”

The works in the Ogden Museum’s current exhibition were taken during two sequential trips to Louisiana in 1935 and 1936. The first, funded by Gifford Cochran, was to form the basis of a never-realized book on antebellum Southern architecture, and the second, just after Evans began working for the Farm Service Agency of Roosevelt’s New Deal, captured the architecture of New Orleans, the plantations of River Road, New Iberia, and the areas outside of Baton Rouge. His primary tool was an 8X10 view camera, supplemented by a 5x7 Speed Graphic and a Leica 35mm. Many of these vintage prints show variations from later prints, and some are examples of simple mistakes. Evans discussed these errors in a diary entry from this time, where he observed that most of the negatives were “… very successful, very exciting, some very good, some shocking errors. Tend to overexpose, tend to raise the lens board too much, leaving corner rings.” Some of these mistakes have become a part of the larger photographic language, and are sometimes purposefully emulated by subsequent photographers.

The photographs of the American South constitute a major body of work within Evans’ life work. He immediately began exhibiting his Louisiana photographs, and many of them have been regularly included in subsequent exhibitions and publications. Evans’ best known photographs of the South were made in Hale County, Alabama in July and August of 1936, and published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), with text by James Agee. Although the subject of the South waned in Evans’ output after his leaving the Farm Services Agency in 1938, his connection to New Orleans remained strong. During his first trip to New Orleans, he met Paul and Jane Ninas at the Arts and Crafts Club in the French Quarter. Jane, herself an artist, became Evans’ guide during his two trips in the mid-thirties, and in 1941, became the first wife of Walker Evans, until they divorced in 1955.

Walker Evans

[Woodlawn Plantation, Belle Chase, Louisiana]

March 1935

Silver gelatin print

The architectural photographs in this exhibition follow the same model as his architectural photographs shot in Cuba two years before in 1933. Objective, frontal and documentary in intent, these photographs are a testament to the ebb-and-flow of endurance and loss of the architectural fabric of Louisiana. ~ David Houston, 2010

Walker Evans’ Louisiana: Photographs from the Collection of Jessica Lange will be on display through January 2, 2011 on the third floor of the Ogden’s Goldring Hall. All works are generously on loan from Jessica Lange, who is not only a talented actress, but a skilled and accomplished photographer herself. Special thanks are also owed to Joshua Mann Pailet and A Gallery for Fine Photography, New Orleans.

Artist's Studio: Thornton Dial, Sr.

In March of 2007, the Ogden Museum opened Ogun Meets Vulcan: Iron Sculptors of Alabama in H. H. Richardson's Patrick F. Taylor Library. The exhibition was realized through a successful partnership with Georgia's Tinwood Alliance, and featured the work of Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Joe Minter, Ronald Lockett and Charlie Lucas.

Prior to the exhibition, Tinwood's founder and curator, Bill Arnett, took Rick Gruber and David Houston to several of the artists' studios, including Thornton Dial. Born in 1928, Dial did not start making art in earnest until after his retirement from a career welding for the Pullman Rail Company. Since then, his work has moved beyond the realm of the "visionary" and "outsider" labels. His three dimensional work pushes the boundaries of painting and sculpture, placing him firmly in the dialogue of contemporary fine art. As Dial says, "Art ain't about paint. It ain't about canvas. It's about ideas. I have found how to get my ideas out and I won't stop. I got ten thousand left."

These shots were taken by David Houston with a Leica M5 at Thornton's home, outside of Birmingham, Alabama in the spring of 2007.

Bill Arnett, Rick Gruber and Thornton Dial's brother.

Orcenith Lyle Bongé (1929 - 2009)

Photo by David Houston

The Ogden Museum is mourning the loss of a talented artist, great Southerner, friend to the Museum, and just a damn fine human being. Lyle Bongé passed away in his hometown of Biloxi on Monday, December 7, 2009.

Father Orcenith Lyle Bongé, a courtly citizen of Harrison County,
God-Hep-Us-Mississippi, is the signal representative of a wild eyed,
smooth-talking tribe who could charm the skin off a snake. -- Jonathan
Williams

Born in 1929, Lyle was the son of painters Archie and Dusti Bongé. Dusti was a native of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and that state's first true Modernist painter. Walter Anderson was the best man at their wedding. Lyle attended several schools including University of Southern Mississippi, University of Mexico, and the short-lived but highly influential Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He served two years in the Korean War, where he ran a darkroom. He began his career in photography after returning home to Biloxi in the early 50s. Over a span of thirty years beginning in 1955, Lyle amassed over forty-thousand negatives from shooting Mardi Gras in New Orleans. He is also known for his photo-abstractions. An accomplished sailor, he broke the world's record for single-handed cross-Gulf passage under sail in 1968. He wrote cookbooks, was a tree-topper, bank director and landlord. He also created metal sculpture.


In the foreword to The Photographs of Lyle Bongé (Jargon Society, 1982), A.D. Coleman said, "[T]here are many sides to Lyle Bongé, and a plethora of strange and curious tales to be told by and about him." No doubt the stories will continue to be told and told again about this rare gem of Zen-boho bodacity native to the Mississippi coast.


In the clipping below from a late-40s Black Mountain College's student newspaper, a young Lyle Bongé is described thusly:

He has red hair and sports a "French" mustache. He is noted for wearing a monocle on his left eye. This adds to his distinction greatly. Lyle possesses some strange but amusing hobbies. He collects skulls (from old graveyards) and animal skulls in the woods. To prove his statement that he loves "danger as a stimulant," he once lived in New York on $1.50 and a bottle of stimulant. He ate only one meal a day and that was with friends. Another hobby is sailing alone in a storm in his boat. Others include travelling, writing prose and poetry and he loves all modern art forms.

Black Mountain Student Paper
Circa 1948


A portfolio of four of Lyle's mescaline-influenced photographs titled "The Search for Vision" was included in Aperture 6:3, under the direction of Minor White. The Jargon Society published two books of his photographs, The Sleep of Reason: Lyle Bonge's Ultimate Ash-Hauling Mardi Gras Photographs (1974) and The Photographs of Lyle Bongé (1982). His photographic works are included in the permanent collections of the Mississippi Museum of Art, the George Eastman House, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Pensacola Art Museum, the Historic New Orleans Collection and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. His sculptures have been exhibited at Loyola University in New Orleans and the George Ohr Museum in Biloxi.

Lyle Bonge's Ultimate Ash Hauling Photographs

Copyright 1964 Lyle Bonge. Untitled gelatin silver print.

" If you can kill a snake with it, it aint art." -- Lyle Bonge

Photo by David Houston.

Lyle Bonge started taking photographs in his hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. In the late 1940s, Bonge studies at the short-lived but highly influential Black Mountain College, where he roomed with famed essayist/poet/publisher Jonathan Williams. Since 1955, Bonge has amassed over 40,000 negatives of Mardi Gras, some of which were published in Jargon Press' 1977 publication of his photographs, The Sleep of Reason: Lyle Bonge's Ultimate Ash Hauling Photographs. His works are contained in private and public collections, including the Mississippi Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Art, Pensacola Art Museum and, of course, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. He still lives in the Biloxi house built by his mother and father, artists Dusti and Archie Bonge. Dusti was Mississippi's first true Modernist, showing at Betty Parson's Gallery in the late 50s. Beyond his career as a photographer, Lyle has been a boat builder, bank director and tree topper.

On the Road with Benny Andrews

On the Road with Benny Andrews by Stanley Staniski

In the spring of 2004, Benny Andrews initiated a project in conjunction with the Ogden Museum of Southern Art to explore the migrant experience in America through a series of annual journeys culminating in three exhibitions in New Orleans and New York. These journeys would focus on three aspects of the American migrant experience: the 1930s Dust Bowl migration along Route 66, the forced march of native peoples along the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and the 20th century African-American exodus from the South to New York, Chicago and Detroit. Noted photographer and filmmaker, Stanley Staniski, was invited to document Benny's research for The Migrant Series, traveling the backroads and by-ways of America with this iconic Southern artist.


Benny Andrews and Stanley Staniski at the Grand Canyon
Photo by Ned Traver

Staniski had worked with the Ogden before, creating films about artists including William Christenberry, Will Henry Stevens and William Dunlap. During this time, he initiated his own series of photographs resulting from his journeys with Benny. Of the project, Staniski says:

On the highest level, we were trying to understand history and what migrants went through on their various treks. On the most basic level we were three guys in a car roaming around, following our noses, looking for whatever we could find, with Benny leading the way.

Benny Andrews and Rick Gruber
Photo by Stanley Staniski

Director J. Richard Gruber of the Ogden was involved at the inception of The Migrant Series, as well, and did some travelling with the team, himself. Writing about Benny and Stanley's journeys, Dr. Gruber recalls:

Traveling lightly and economically by car, in Andrews' Volvo station wagon, their extended journeys of exploration are reminiscent of earlier (and often mythic) American road trips, including those by 20th century artists and photographers such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Robert Rauschenberg and William Eggleston, and writers like Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck (whose book, The Grapes of Wrath, directly inspired Andrews' Route 66 trip).

After the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, in 2006 Benny expanded the initial parameters of The Migrant Series to include the diaspora of the residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He was never able to finish his vision, though. Benny Andrews died of cancer on November 10, 2006.

Staniski continued to be inspired by his journeys with Benny, expanding his photographic series in the spirit of those travels. When writing about his series, Staniski says:

Other photographic trips grew out of those with Benny, and while I made photographs along roads (Texas, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia) other than the specific migrant routes of Benny’s interest, for me they are all of the same series, perhaps they are part of his legacy.

July 4th, Avalon Theatre, McLean, Texas. Photo by Stanley Sataniski

On October 3, 2009, the Ogden Museum opened the exhibition Stanley Staniski: On the Road with Benny Andrews. The exhibition includes thirty-two images, chosen by Chief Curator David Houston from a larger body of work resulting from and inspired by Staniski's travels with Benny Andrews.

Stanley Staniski. Photo by Cheryl Gerber


Lea Barton, Rick Gruber, William Christenberry, Stanley Staniski and Ken Barton. Photo by Cheryl Gerber


Stanley Staniski, Richard Sexton and Richard McCabe. Photo by Cheryl Gerber.

Photo by Cheryl Gerber


Stanley Staniski and Massumeh Farhad, Associate Curator of Islamic Art at the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries

New Orleans Free People of Color & Their Legacy

On Saturday, October 3, 2009, Jose Torres-Tama and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans released New Orleans Free People of Color & Their Legacy: The Artwork of Jose Torres-Tama. This catalogue documents the exhibition of the same name shown at The Ogden Museum and Dillard University's Fine Art Gallery in 2008. Including an introduction by the Ogden's chief curator, David Houston, essays by Torres-Tama and creole historian, Keith Weldon Medley, the catalogue focuses on eighteen pastel drawings of fifteen historical figures belonging to the New Orleans community known as the gens de coleur libres.


Photo by Cheryl Gerber

During the Art for Art's Sake events on Saturday, Torres-Tama and Medley signed copies of the catalogue in a gallery filled with Torres-Tama's pastel portraits of these influential and relevant historical figures, including Marie Laveau, Basile Barres, Edmond Dede, Rose Nicaud and others.

Photo by Cheryl Gerber

Bradley Sumrall, J. Richard Gruber, Jose Torres-Tama and Keith Weldon Medley

Photo by Cheryl Gerber

Jose with wife, Dr. Claudia Copeland, and two sons, Darius and Diego

Photo by Cheryl Gerber.

New Orleans Free People of Color & Their Legacy is available at the Ogden's Museum Shop.

Stretching and Hanging Bo Bartlett

Richard McCabe adds hardware to a large-scale canvas.

In preparation for the current exhibition of large-scale paintings by Bo Bartlett at the Ogden Museum, Chris Polson, of Twin Brooks Stretchers, travelled to New Orleans to stretch the canvases and add finish frames. Chris manufactured the frames and stretchers for several of the works in his studios in Lincolnville, Maine. His daughter, May, was enlisted from Boston to help with the stretching and framing. A leader in his field, Chris uses only Maine aspen wood, sawn and dried at his facility in Lincolnville. Photos by David Houston.

Chris Polson setting a Bo Bartlett in the frame.

Richard McCabe, Bradley Sumrall, May and Chris Polson.

Chris Polson and Richard McCabe frame Bo's Resurgere e Renasci.

Kendall Shaw: Let There Be Light

Photo by David Houston


The Ogden Museum of Southern Art is proud to announce the publication of Kendall Shaw: Let There Be Light. This catalogue documents the exhibition of the same name, curated by David Houston and featured at the Ogden Museum from January through April of 2007. The exhibition was then travelled to the Ruskin Gallery at Cambridge School of Art in England in the fall of the same year. Including a foreward by J. Richard Gruber, Ph.D, and essays by David Houston, Martica Sawin, and Bruce Russell, this handsome hard-bound volume is a fine critical document and tribute to the work of New Orleans native, Kendall Shaw. With over thirty full-color plates of paintings from the 1950s to 2006, the catalogue also contains installation shots from both venues, showing not only content but context.


Circular Continuity, 1966, Kendall Shaw.
Acrylic on canvas 72" x 72".
Collection of the artist.

Kendall Shaw: Let There Be Light is available for purchase (while supplies last) in the museum store. Plans are in the works for an artist's talk and book signing.


Giorno installed at Ruskin Gallery.
Photo by Arlington Weithers.

New Arrival: Edward Rice

Dormer with Missing Sash, New Orleans 2004-2005

Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Edward Rice has donated this 2005 painting, Dormer with Missing Sash, New Orleans, to the Ogden Museum in memory of James R. "Jim" Gruber, father to our director, J. Richard Gruber. This is the third painting by Rice in the collection, and the second in this style. Based in Augusta, South Carolina, for the last three decades, Rice has used the vernacular architecture of the South as subject, not exclusively, but consistently. In Edward Rice: Recent Monotypes, David Houston writes of Rice's architectural paintings: "Rice's subtle illumination of his subjects made of them something that is both lyrical and literary. Painted on-site, these radient works resulted from a slow, precise, and complex process through which a sense of place, a season, and a time of day were captured in the accretion of telling detail. Viewed retrospectively, it seemed obvious that the element of time is critical to the success of these works from both the artist's and the viewer's separate perspectives. Rice's own understanding of time places his perceptions and the physicality of the canvas in a phenomenological stasis that represents meditation." This is a fine addition to the Ogden's permanent collection, and a fitting companion to Gable Window, 2000, Rice's earlier donation in honor of his mentor, Freeman Schoolcraft, and his wife, artist Cora Schoolcraft.

Gable Window, 1999-2000

Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Mario Petrirena

As part of our exhibition of works from the permenant collection on the fourth floor of Goldring Hall, Mario Petrirena's All Saints is currently on display. I first encountered Mario's work at the CAC during David Houston's temporary position as Curator at both the Ogden and the CAC. Immediately, I was intrigued by his intuitive assemblages, collages, installations and ceramics. The fascination has never left me.

Born in Cuba in 1953, Mario emigrated to America at 8, seperated from his his parents for months while they arranged to join him in the States. He now lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. Much of his work deals with that seperation and his bifurcated identity.

Mario cites many artists as influences on his work, from Picasso and Velazquez, from the inner driven works of Kahlo to the process driven works of Anna Mendieta. Regionally, it was the art pottery of George Ohr of which Mario has said "shook me to the core." Fittingly, a small collection of Ohr's pottery (the Mad Potter of Biloxi) is on view just steps away from Mario's unglazed white earthenware All Saints.

For more on Mario Petrirena and his work, visit: http://www.mariopetrirena.com/.

Also, the gift shop at the Ogden carries the catalogue, Mario Petrirena, Conversations: Past and Present (including the essay Speak(Again)Memory, by David Houston).

Black and white images of Mario Petrirena by David Houston.

All Saints 1997 by Mario Petrirena.

The Known World, 2005 from the cover of Mario Petrirena, Conversations: Past Present and Future.

Jose Torres Tama

Jose Torres Tama is multi-disciplinary artist based in New Orleans Louisiana. The Ogden is proud to have several of his works on paper in the permanent collection. Currently, a catalogue documenting his exhibition New Orleans' Free People of Color & Their Legacy is under construction through the Ogden for release this summer. It will include images of his pastel portraits of New Orleans' les gens de couleur libres, considered the first multiracial people in the United States, borne of a mixing between the African, French, Spanish, and native races of Louisiana. The text, written by Keith Weldon Medley, explains the accomplishments of the Free People of Color to the development of New Orleans and the nation.

Jose Torres Tama is currently touring the United Kingdom with two original performance works, The Cone of Uncertainty and Lower 9th Ward Ritual of Mourning. The Cone of Uncertainty debuted in London on Friday, May 8, as part of Tama's residency at Roehampton University. Jose and his work have found a rapt audience in London, and Jose has taken to signing his emails "El Juan Bond from her Majesty's Secret Salsa Service with a license to transport subversive performances across international waters."

For more details and a schedule of performances, visit http://www.torrestama.com/.

Top: Ode to Edmund Dede, 2002, Collection of Ogden Museum.

Bottom: Jose Performs in Goldring Hall, 2008. Photo by David Houston.

Ambassador Pierre Vimont

Chief Curator, David Houston, explains the relevance of Lulu King Saxon's 1890 painting, Uptown Street to French Ambassador Pierre Vimont (red tie) and French Consul General Olivier Brochenin (far left) during a visit to the Ogden Museum in March. A landscape painter, writer, poet, actress, singer and musician, Lulu Saxon King was born in Louisiana around 1855. She travelled and painted in Russia prior to the first World War, and died in New Orleans in 1927. Painted in 1890 and measuring almost eight feet high, Uptown Street is not only the oldest, but one of the largest paintings currently on display. The Uptown street depicted is most likely Magazine Street in New Orleans. The subject closely resembles roads entering rural villages of Europe popularized by French Impressionist painters of the 1870s and 1880s. It is rendered in an atmospheric mood reminiscent of French landscape painting. Painted in a style descended from Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, the Barbizon School and Impressionism, Uptown Street exemplifies the lasting influence of Europe on the art of the South.

Michael Meads

Alabama-born New Orleans artist, Michael Meads, is featured in a new exhibition at New York's ClampArt, aptly titled Kids Behaving Badly, where he shares the walls with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and Mark Morrisroe, among others. Michael is a great supporter of the Ogden and our mission. Due to a recent donation of Michael's paintings, drawings, and photographs, the Ogden now holds the complete Eastaboga series, as well as a sampling of every phase of his career from his very first snapshots to his large detailed drawings set in the French Quarter.

Check out Rafael Soldi's blog review of the ClampArt show at http://rafaelsoldi.blogspot.com/2009/04/kids-behaving-badly-at-clampart.html.

Top photo of Michael Meads at Rue de la Course in New Orleans by David Houston.

Below: Nicky at Salt Creek, 1993 by Michael Meads.

Tom Young: Painter, Teacher, Fighter Pilot

On August 4, 2008 (just before his 84th birthday), the Ogden Museum opened an exhibition of the works of Tom Young. That night, Tom and his wife, Caroline, were in attendance. Tom is a great storyteller with a wealth of experience to draw from. In WWII, Tom served as a fighter pilot for the Army Air Force. After the war, he became involved in the abstract expressionist movement of 1950's New York. As founding member of the important 10th Street artist's cooperative gallery, between 1953 and 1969 Tom was closely associated with artists such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Paul Georges, Roy Lichtenstein, and David Amram. As artist-in-residence at the University of Mississippi in 1960 and 1961, he met a young William Eggleston, becoming a great influence on the development of Eggleston's style. Tom has been department head at Auburn University, and developed the M.F.A. program at the University of New Orleans, of which his student, Margaret Evangeline, was the first graduate. Tom and his wife, Caroline, still live in the New Orleans area. The photo at the top, taken by Bradley Sumrall, shows him in front of his large untitled abstract painting from 1970 as featured in the Ogden exhibition. Below is an image of Tom in his Metairie home taken by David Houston.